The full womenswear workflow · nine stages · click through to read the neighbouring stages
1. Four groups of small operations
- Buttonholing: straight-end buttonholes (shirt plackets, concealed plackets) and round-end buttonholes (outerwear, heavy fabrics) use different buttonhole machines; positions follow the locating marks on the pattern piece, and a 3 mm miss is obvious;
- Buttoning: machine buttoning is standard, while decorative buttons and fabric-covered buttons must be sewn by hand; buttons need a thread shank (a 0.5–1 mm stem) so the button "stands" off the fabric — critical on heavy materials;
- Bartacking: reinforcement stitches at stress points — pocket mouths, both ends of the placket, belt loops — cost so little they are negligible, yet without them the garment's life is cut in half;
- Trimming and nap tidying: cut loose threads, remove stains and interlining marks, and smooth the nap so the garment enters pressing in a pressing-ready state — good enough to go straight on the shelf.
2. Acceptance points
- No frayed edges or cut damage around the buttonholes; buttons secure (hand-twist test: still tight after 5 turns);
- All stress points bartacked — check every garment against the bartack location list in the tech pack;
- No leftover threads (check the inside too), no chalk marks, no stains;
- No rust spots or scratches on decorative buttons, zipper pulls and other metal parts.
3. Lead time and organisation
Finishing usually runs in parallel with the tail end of sewing and does not take a big block of time on its own. Its management challenge is its fiddliness: one style may have 6 kinds of buttons and 8 bartack points, all managed by checklists from the tech pack. That is why the quality of the tech pack directly decides the quality of finishing.
LIUYU's finishing management: before each style starts we hold a tech-pack briefing, walking the finishing leader line by line through the bartack location table and the trim list; bartack and buttonholing machines are all in-house and not outsourced; and every garment must pass a "flip inspection" on leaving finishing — both inside and outside fully checked — before it moves to pressing.
Finishing is the stage where "one yuan prevents a hundred yuan of loss": a single two-cent bartack can save you from reworking an entire batch of split pocket mouths.