Sleek Apparels: A Custom Apparel Manufacturer in Dhaka, in Full

Bringing a clothing brand concept to life

Sleek Apparels is a knitwear-led manufacturer on a floor in Uttara, in the north of Dhaka, working with independent labels, ecommerce brands, schools and corporate buyers — more than 50 brands across over 20 countries. The work is cut-and-sew: garments made to your specification, not your label applied to a stock blank.

A programme moves through four stages, and each has a gate that has to close before the next opens. You brief us, with a tech pack or the closest thing you have to one. We quote against that brief and develop a sample. You approve the sample physically, in your own hands, not on a screen. Then bulk runs, is inspected, and ships. Nothing jumps the queue — a bulk order has never started here off a photograph.

Arriving without a tech pack is not a blocker. Most first-time brands turn up with a reference garment, a sketch and a colour idea, and the merchandising team builds the specification from that. What we do need before quoting is five things: fabric and weight, fit intent, size run, decoration method, and quantity per style and colour. Those five move a price more than anything else you could tell us.

Low minimums, and what they really are per construction

The headline is 50 pieces per style, and it is why most small brands find us at all. It is a real number rather than a landing-page one — but it belongs to knitwear, and a founder who plans a woven shirt programme around it has been misled, even if nobody set out to mislead them. So here is the whole ladder in one place.

The economics underneath small runs — why a 50-piece order costs more per unit than a 500-piece one, and where the price breaks actually fall — are set out on our low-MOQ manufacturing page.

The complete sample development process

Sampling is where a programme is actually decided, and it is the stage brands most often try to skip. Sample development takes 7–10 days from an approved specification. Not from your first email — from the point where fabric, weight, fit, trims and decoration are all settled, because a specification that is still moving produces a sample that answers nothing.

There are two prices and they buy different things. A blank sample is USD 60 per style: your fabric, your fit, your colour, no branding on it. A branded sample is USD 85, with your labels, tags and print or embroidery applied. Shipping is USD 45 on top of either. The sample cost is credited against the bulk order of the same style, applied to your bulk invoice, so it behaves more like a deposit than a fee.

Take the blank when the open question is whether the fabric and the fit work. Take the branded one when you are signing off artwork placement, label position and packaging, or when you need a garment good enough to photograph. Most brands run one of each in that order, and that is the sequence we recommend.

Below both sits a swatch box at USD 75 — fabric qualities, weights and colour cards in your hands without commissioning a garment at all. It settles a fabric question for a fraction of a sample.

• Send a tech pack, or reference garments and a sketch we can build one from
• We confirm fabric, weight, fit, trims and decoration in writing, and quote
• Sample development runs 7–10 days from that confirmed specification
• You see photographs and video before it ships, then approve the physical garment
• The approved sample becomes the production standard every later inspection is judged against

If your specification is already settled and you would rather start than negotiate, you can order sample development directly by card.

High-quality factory infrastructure in Dhaka

Cutting and sewing are ours. Fabric is inspected, relaxed and laid before cutting, and the sewing floor is organised into lines by garment type rather than run as one general-purpose room — which is a large part of why a 50-piece run can be priced as a job rather than as a nuisance.

Garment dyeing and washing is where much of the streetwear work sits: acid, mineral and pigment finishes applied to the finished garment rather than to the fabric, so no two pieces come out identical and that variation is the product rather than a defect. Washing happens after sewing and adds 3–5 days to the clock, which is worth knowing before a launch date is promised to anyone.

Decoration is split between two roofs, and we say which is which because it changes lead time and accountability. Screen printing is in-house, which makes it our fastest and best-controlled method. Embroidery runs through a partner factory we work with regularly — good work, but one more handover in the chain, and you should hear that from us rather than discover it.

Rigorous quality control and AQL 2.5 inspection

A defect caught at the cutting table costs a metre of fabric. The same defect caught by your customer costs you the customer. So inspection is spread across production instead of being concentrated at the end, at five points:

1. 1Fabric, before cutting — weight, shade, shrinkage and visible faults, because one fault in a roll multiplies into every garment cut from it
2. 2Cutting and sewing — inline checks while the order is still on the line and still fixable
3. 3Decoration — print and embroidery checked against the approved sample for placement, colour and cure
4. 4Finishing and packing — measurements, trims, labels, folding and cartoning
5. 5Final random inspection to AQL 2.5, on the finished and packed goods

Each checkpoint, the defect checklist behind it, and what a failed lot triggers are documented on our quality control page.

Global shipping, customs, and who pays the duty

Three routes, chosen per shipment rather than per customer. Express courier — DHL, FedEx, UPS — runs 3–7 days door to door and suits samples and small orders. Air freight is 5–10 days airport to airport plus clearance, for launches with a fixed date. Sea is the cheapest per kilo and the sensible default for anything large. A common pattern for a launch is a small courier batch so the release date holds, with the bulk following by sea; we split shipments that way whenever it helps.

Now the part most suppliers blur. We ship door to door with freight included in the unit price. Import VAT and duty in the destination country are paid by the buyer, at clearance. That is not DDP, and we will not describe it as DDP — a buyer told that duty is covered and then handed a broker’s invoice has been sold a number that was never real. If a competing quote says DDP, ask what duty rate has been assumed on your behalf, because you are paying it either way.

End to end, plan on 25–35 days from order to shipment. Bulk production itself is 12–15 days for orders up to 2,000 pieces, counted from approved sample and confirmed deposit — but sampling, approval and booking all sit in front of that, which is precisely the difference between the production window and the date goods actually leave. A custom knit or dye run adds 7–10 days; garment washing adds 3–5. Payment is 50% before production and 50% before shipment.

To see what freight and duty add for your own market before committing to anything, run your quantities through our landed-cost calculator.

Sourcing knitwear, uniforms, and school lines

Knitwear is the core: jersey, interlock, French terry, brushed fleece and piqué. Our stock heavyweight fleece is 450 GSM and needs no custom knit, so it runs on the standard clock. A 500 GSM all-cotton body is a dedicated knit and dye run and adds 7–10 days. CVC interlock at 210–230 GSM is held in stock for faster turnarounds.

Sweater knitting is a different business inside the same building, and the minimum surprises people. Sweater-knit garments — cable knits, cardigans and fine-gauge pullovers made on flat-bed machines with linking and hand finishing rather than cut from jersey — start at 500 pieces per style, because the setup is amortised over a much larger run than a cut-and-sew garment.

Uniform and school work runs on the same floor but a different calendar. School programmes are term-timed: the delivery date is fixed by an academic year that will not move, sizing has to be graded across a full run from small child to adult rather than the middle of the curve, and reorders must match the original shade — because a parent buying a second polo in March will hold it against the one bought in September. Corporate and workwear programmes carry the same reorder-consistency problem without the immovable deadline.

Design directions, read from the production floor

Trend language is worth very little to a manufacturer until it is translated into fabric, weight, construction and finish. Three directions have genuinely changed what brands ask us to make, and each carries a production consequence worth pricing in before committing.

Washed and garment-dyed finishes. The lived-in look — acid wash, mineral wash, pigment dye — is applied to the finished garment rather than the fabric, so every piece emerges slightly different. That changes the schedule and the inspection brief together: washing adds 3–5 days after sewing, shade has to be agreed as an accepted range rather than a single target, and garments are cut oversized because washing pulls them in.

Heavier weights and boxier fits. A 320 GSM tee and a 450 GSM hoodie behave nothing like the 180 GSM blanks the market ran on a decade ago, and weight is the single largest lever on both cost and lead time — which is why the stock 450 GSM fleece and the custom 500 GSM cotton body sit ten days apart.

Quieter branding. Tonal embroidery, small woven labels, single-colour puff prints and printed neck labels instead of stitched ones cost less in ink and thread but are far less forgiving in execution: a tonal logo on a tonal garment shows every placement error that contrast used to hide. Minimal decoration is the brief we ask for the tightest tolerances on, not the loosest.

How to start

Two entry points, suiting different stages. If your specification is settled and you want a garment in your hands, order a sample — it is the fastest honest test of whether we are the right factory for you, and the cost comes back off the bulk invoice. If you are still comparing suppliers, or need pricing to build a plan around, send the brief and take an itemised quote instead; that usually comes back within a working day.

Either way, the more of those five inputs you can state up front — fabric and weight, fit intent, size run, decoration method, quantity per style and colour — the more useful the first reply will be. And if you have a reference garment you like, tell us what you would change about it. That one sentence is often worth more than a full tech pack.

When you have quantities and a specification in hand, you can request an itemised quote.