Sweater & Knitwear Manufacturer

A sweater is not a sweatshirt — and that is why the minimum jumps

These two words trip up more first-time knitwear buyers than any other pair in apparel sourcing, and the cost of confusing them is real. A sweatshirt is cut-and-sew: brushed fleece comes off a roll, a marker is laid, panels are cut and an overlock machine joins them. It runs on our standard knit floor and starts at 50 pieces per style. A sweater is knitted to shape on flat-bed machines — the front, back and sleeves are each knitted as finished panels, with the rib, the neckline and the shaping built in as the panel grows — then joined on a linking machine stitch by stitch, and finished by hand.

Sweater-knit garments — cable knits, cardigans and fine-gauge pullovers made on flat-bed machines rather than cut from jersey — start at 500 pieces per style. The gap is not margin. Setting up a flat-bed program means programming the machine for your exact measurements in every size, knitting and correcting swatches until the tension is right, and dedicating machine hours before a single sellable panel exists. On a jersey run that setup is a marker and a cut. Here it is the majority of the work, and it only amortises over a long run.

So if the garment you are picturing is a heavyweight brushed-fleece crewneck, you want our hoodies and sweatshirts line and a 50-piece minimum, not this page. If it is a cable knit, a ribbed cardigan or anything with a stitch pattern you can see from across a room, it is knitted, and this is the right floor.

What we knit

Cable knits and Aran-style textures, ribbed and button-through cardigans, fine-gauge pullovers and crewnecks, roll-necks and turtlenecks, quarter-zips, Fair Isle and jacquard colourwork, open-stitch and crochet-look pieces, knitted long-sleeve polos, and ribbed accessories including beanies and scarves. The gallery above is our own production, not a stock library.

Colourwork deserves a specific note, because it is where knitwear briefs most often go over budget without the buyer being told. A Fair Isle or jacquard pattern carries multiple yarns across the row, which slows the machine, raises yarn consumption and adds finishing where floats are secured. It is entirely producible — there is one in the gallery — but a four-colour jacquard and a plain rib are different garments commercially, and we will say so at quote rather than after.

Knitted accessories are the one part of this line that behaves differently. Beanies and scarves are small, fast pieces with far less shaping, so they do not carry the full sweater setup burden — if an accessory program is what you are costing, ask us for that minimum separately rather than assuming the sweater floor applies.

Gauge and yarn — and why there is no spec table on this page

Gauge is the needles-per-inch of the knitting bed, and it decides more about your garment than the yarn does: a chunky 3-gauge cable and a fine 12-gauge merino-look pullover are different machines, different setup times and different prices. Every other spec on this site is published as a table because the numbers are fixed and confirmed. Sweater gauge and yarn are not, and publishing a table of them would be inventing a specification rather than quoting one.

What we do instead is confirm gauge, yarn composition and yarn count against your reference garment or tech pack before quoting, and tell you plainly if what you want is outside what we can run or source. That is a slower answer than a spec sheet and a more accurate one. If a factory hands you a gauge range before it has seen your garment, it is describing its machines, not your product.

Bring a physical reference if you have one. Knitwear is the category where a sample garment in the post beats any amount of written specification — we can measure the gauge, read the stitch and match the hand-feel from the object far more reliably than from a photograph and a description.

Lead time: budget an extra 7–10 days over a jersey program

A custom knit and dye run adds 7–10 days on top of our standard 12–15 day production window, and that addition is not padding. It is swatching and tension correction, machine programming across the size curve, and the linking and hand-finishing that a cut-and-sew line does not have. Order to shipment for a straightforward jersey program is 25–35 days; plan a first sweater program above that, and plan the sampling round in front of it rather than in parallel.

The seasonal reality matters more here than anywhere else on this site. Sweaters are an autumn-winter product, which means every brand in the northern hemisphere briefs them in the same narrow window and factory knitting capacity is the constraint the whole industry hits at once. A sweater program confirmed in the first half of the year runs comfortably. The same program confirmed in late summer is competing for machine hours against everyone who planned earlier, and no amount of paying more creates a flat-bed machine that is already running.

How to make 500 pieces work

The minimum is per style, not per order and not per size, and that distinction is usually the difference between a program that works and one that gets abandoned. A style is one design in one construction. Your size curve sits inside it — a 500-piece run split across XS to XXL on whatever ratio your sell-through data supports is one style, not six.

Colour is the lever most brands underuse. Within a single knitted design you can generally run more than one colourway against the same setup, because the machine programming is shared and only the yarn changes. That turns a single minimum into a small range rather than one monolithic bet on one colour. The exact split depends on the yarn and the pattern, so it is confirmed at quote — but it is the first question to ask us, because it changes the shape of the commitment more than anything else on this page.

What does not help is splitting a sweater program across two similar designs to feel diversified. Two styles are two setups and two minimums. One well-chosen design in three colourways is almost always the better first knitwear order than three designs in one.

When we are the wrong factory for your knitwear

If you need 50 sweaters, we are not your manufacturer and we would rather say it here than three emails in. Small knitwear runs exist and they are a genuinely different business: hand-frame and domestic-scale knitters in Britain, Italy and Portugal will quote from tens of pieces, and sample-room studios will make one. You will pay several times our per-piece price, and for a first test of a design that can be exactly the right trade.

We are also the wrong choice if your claim depends on a certificate we do not hold. Our facility is BSCI certified for social compliance and we can source organic and recycled-content yarn, but we cannot hand you a GOTS, GRS or OEKO-TEX certificate chain for a knitwear program — a certified claim needs a certified mill behind it, and we will not imply otherwise to win the order.

Where we are the right factory: a brand that has validated a knitwear design and needs it produced properly at commercial volume, with one point of contact across knits, jersey and wovens, and a minimum stated before the quote rather than after.