Contract Garment Manufacturing: CMT vs Full Package and How to Work With a Factory

Contract manufacturing models: sewing only, CMT and full package

Contract manufacturing is not one model; what separates the models is who takes on the materials and which production steps. According to a World Bank study (Gereffi and Frederick, 2010), in CMT (cut, make, trim) the manufacturer cuts and sews fabric supplied by the customer to the customer’s specification. It generally takes no part in design, charges for the process rather than the product, and the fabric belongs to the buyer. In full-package production (known in the trade as OEM, FOB or package contractor) the manufacturer sources and finances the fabric and trims and does all of the production, finishing and packing. A manufacturer that also takes on the design is called an ODM in the same study. The study uses “full package” for OEM in one place and for ODM in another. Because terms drift from source to source, read a quotation line by line rather than by its label.

The first four rows follow the definitions of Gereffi and Frederick, the VAT row follows the Turkish VAT General Implementation Communiqué, and the “your main burden” row is Tekstil Rehberi’s assessment. In the end, the agreement decides who holds which item. A note on terminology: FOB (Free On Board) is in fact an international trade delivery term. In Incoterms 2020 it is a rule specific to sea and inland waterway transport, and delivery takes place at the named port of loading. The trade also uses it to describe a contract full-package manufacturer (Gereffi and Frederick, 2010). When you see an “FOB price” on a quotation, ask both who owns the materials and where delivery takes place.

The distinction has a tax side too. Section I/C-2.1.3.2.7.2 of the Turkish VAT General Implementation Communiqué makes it a condition of contract work (“fason imalat”) that the raw materials, above all the main raw material, are supplied by the party who commissions the work. Where a full-package workshop supplies the materials, have an accountant assess the tax nature of the work and the invoicing; if you buy from outside Turkey, ask your supplier in writing how your order will be invoiced.

Which model suits which situation?

• CMT: suits you if you want to choose and inspect the fabric and trims yourself, work directly with your own fabric supplier, and can finance the materials. The price: fabric arriving on time and complete, wastage, and tracking of leftover fabric are your job.
• Full package: suits you if you have no team to manage the supply chain or prefer a single counterpart. The price: because material selection and supplier control sit with the manufacturer, part of your control goes with them. Give the fabric and trim specification in writing and write your approval right into the agreement.
• Sewing only: if you have the cutting done elsewhere or do it yourself, you send the workshop cut parts. The workshop then prices only sewing and finishing.

These are Tekstil Rehberi’s assessments; what decides is the complexity of your product, the size of your order and your team’s capacity to manage supply. Private label is not a production model but a concept describing whose brand the product is sold under: according to PLMA, products that carry the retailer’s name or its own private brands. Such products can also be made by CMT or full package, and the scope question stays the same.

Splitting production into stages

Contract work can cover the whole product or be split into stages: cutting, sewing and printing can be done in separate workshops, and washing and pressing-and-packing can be finished somewhere else again. The Turkish VAT General Implementation Communiqué states that a finished product may be made as contract work as a whole or partly, by production stage. The price of that flexibility is coordination: transport between workshops, wastage at every stage, the limit of each party’s responsibility, and the way a delay at one link passes down the whole chain are all yours to manage.

Turkish contract-manufacturing terms decoded

Quotations, emails and agreements from Turkish workshops use local trade words. This table maps the ones in this guide to the English terms you would use in a tech pack or an agreement.

The contract manufacturing process: eight steps from brief to close-out

The table below shows what output should be kept in writing at each step. We give no durations because they change with the product, the workshop and the season.

Quotes come side by side at step 3. How a quote’s figure is built, and how to equalise the scope, is covered in the article on contract T-shirt sewing prices. The details of step 4 are in the article on the manufacturing agreement and those of step 5 in the article on the sampling process; both are reachable from the relevant sections below.

Before you hand over the job: the tech pack and brief package

For the workshop to quote correctly, and to avoid a later “we did not know that” dispute, the package must be complete from the start. This is the common practice in the sector; adapt it to your product:

1. Tech pack: product drawing, measurement chart and tolerances, stitch and operation types, positions of labels and care instructions, packing and folding details.
2. Bill of materials: fabric (composition, weight, width), trims, thread; and who will supply each.
3. Size, colour and quantity breakdown: the breakdown affects the workshop’s plan as much as the total quantity does.
4. Quality expectations: measurement tolerance, AQL level, acceptance and rejection criteria, defect classes.
5. Lead time: write the delivery date and the date the fabric must reach the workshop separately.
6. Approval authority: who will approve the sample and any later changes, and through which channel.

For help with the tech pack, patterns or sample preparation, you can turn to firms offering pattern making and sample room services. Changing the style after approval disrupts production. SOMO’s fact sheet on hidden subcontracting (2015) lists changes to design, quantity and schedule made after sample approval, without adjusting price and time, among the buyer-side causes that put pressure on a manufacturer and can trigger subcontracting.

Screening factories and checking capacity

The ten criteria for assessing a workshop are in the article on how to choose a contract workshop. Before you collect quotes, three questions do the first screening:

• Similar work experience: is there a reference sample, made with a similar product and fabric, that you can see?
• Capacity fit: do the machine park, the headcount and the other jobs the workshop has taken in the same period fit your order? Turkey’s Ministry of Trade says in its Ready-to-Wear Sector Report 2026 that most businesses in the sector are small and medium-sized. Capacity in workshops of that size may be limited, and according to SOMO, factories often work for many customers at the same time. SOMO also lists a headcount that does not match the production volume, seen when you visit a workshop, as a red flag.
• Subcontracting policy: does the workshop give part of the work to another workshop? If so, which stage, to whom, and with your permission?

You can find firms that do contract sewing on the CMT sewing workshops page; check these questions for each firm yourself.

Is the lead time realistic? A simple capacity check

To judge whether the lead time in a quote will hold, you can calculate the daily capacity of the sewing line. SMV (standard minute value) is the time needed to sew one product under standard conditions; in the ILO’s work-study reference, standard time is expressed as standard minutes per piece. Efficiency is the standard-minute equivalent of the work produced divided by the total operator minutes spent (number of operators × minutes worked); the ILO gives the same ratio as a performance measure. From these, the following formula for daily capacity is derived (the derivation is Tekstil Rehberi’s own):

Daily output = direct operators on the line × net working minutes per day × efficiency ÷ SMV

The figures below are entirely hypothetical, not market values; replace them with your own inputs.

In the base case, daily output is 15 × 450 × 0.60 ÷ 9.00 = 450 pieces, and the duration is 4,500 ÷ 450 = 10 working days. When the inputs change, the result moves like this:

This calculation covers the sewing line only. The time for fabric intake and cutting, sample approval, pressing-and-packing and shipping is added separately; your lead time is the sum of them. If you supply the fabric, the lead time depends on the date the fabric reaches the workshop: SOMO lists late arrival of inputs such as fabric among the reasons manufacturers pass work partly or wholly to subcontractors. Ask the workshop for its SMV and efficiency assumptions in writing. How SMV feeds into the price is explained in the article on contract T-shirt sewing prices, linked above.

Default legal rules: the contract for work under Turkish law

This section describes the default rules of Turkish contract law for readers whose agreement is with a Turkish workshop. Which law governs your agreement, and whether these rules apply to your case, are matters for the agreement itself and for your lawyer.

A contract in which the contractor undertakes to produce a work and the client to pay a price for it is regulated as a contract for work (“eser sözleşmesi”) in the Turkish Code of Obligations (TBK, Art. 470). A contract-sewing relationship in which you supply the material may fit this definition: the Court of Cassation (Yargıtay) has treated contract-sewing relationships in which the client supplied the fabric as contracts for work (for example 15th Civil Chamber, 2017/2037 E., 2018/3366 K., 24.09.2018; 2018/3517 E., 2019/1255 K., 20.03.2019). Even so, your legal adviser decides which contract type your relationship falls under and which provisions apply. The table summarises what the rules may mean in practice; article texts are based on Law No. 6098 as published on mevzuat.gov.tr on the date of this article (October 8, 2026).

The law says “a suitable period” for notifying defects and gives no number of days, so what that means in a specific case can be disputed. Set the inspection and notification periods explicitly in the agreement. This table is not legal advice; have a lawyer prepare or review your agreement. The clauses an agreement should contain are covered in the article on the contract manufacturing agreement.

VAT and invoicing

As of the date of this article (October 8, 2026), section I/C-2.1.3.2.7 of the Turkish VAT General Implementation Communiqué places contract textile and clothing work under partial withholding; the withholding is applied by the buyer groups listed in the Communiqué. Auxiliary materials used by the workshop, such as thread, zips, buttons, interlining and lining, are included in the contract-work fee and are not invoiced separately. For the rate and a worked example, see the article on VAT withholding on contract sewing. Legislation can change; always clarify the invoicing method with your accountant. This section is not tax advice.

Control points during production and on delivery

Material intake and fabric accounting

With CMT, if you send the fabric, the process begins with the fabric shipment. Our recommendation as Tekstil Rehberi: write the number of rolls and the metres or kilograms on the dispatch note; ask the workshop to count and check the fabric on receipt (width, weight, shade variation and fabric defects) and to report findings immediately. The law also puts a duty of immediate notification on the contractor if the material turns out to be defective (Art. 472/3). After cutting, produce a fabric account: fabric received, fabric cut, wastage and leftover fabric should reconcile, and the return of leftover fabric also depends on this account (Art. 472/2).

Pre-production approval and in-line checks

Bulk production should not start without an approved sample and a pre-production (PP) approval; for the sample stages see the article on the sampling process. Once production starts, in-line checks do two things: defects are caught before they spread across thousands of cut pieces, and a dated record is created. If you notice that defective production is continuing, reporting it in writing also keeps open the notice route described in the table above.

Acceptance and handling defects on delivery

Carry out a sampling-based final inspection on delivery: measurements, sewing, appearance, labels and packing. The usual sampling method in garments is AQL (acceptable quality limit); see quality control and AQL sampling for how it works. Tie the findings to a written acceptance or rejection, and do not sign for acceptance before inspecting (see Arts. 474 and 477). If a defect is found, the procedure you wrote into the agreement applies: rework, sorting, price reduction. If you want to buy in quality control as a service, see the quality control firms page.

Common mistakes in contract manufacturing

1. Leaving the scope verbal. The word “fason” does not say who supplies what; the TDK definition and the VAT Communiqué also turn on who holds the materials. Write every item into the quote and the agreement.
2. Not recording sample approval, and changing the style after approval. Changes made after approval without adjusting price and time put pressure on the manufacturer (SOMO, 2015).
3. Delivering fabric without a count and not asking for a fabric account. Disputes over wastage and leftover fabric can only be settled with records.
4. Not asking about capacity. A lead time given without knowing the jobs the workshop has taken at the same time, or its headcount, can remain a wish.
5. Not giving subcontracting permission, or never discussing it. Without a written rule you may not know where the work is done; according to SOMO (2015), your social compliance audits also do not reach those workshops, and your quality follow-up becomes just as hard.
6. Accepting delivery without inspecting. After acceptance the contractor is released from liability, except for defects that were deliberately concealed and could not be noticed (Art. 477).

Questions to settle before you accept a quote

For a buyer placing an order with a Turkish workshop, the sections above reduce to seven questions:

1. Which model is this quote — CMT, full package or sewing only — and who supplies each item?
2. If the price says “FOB”, does it mean full-package production, and which delivery point and port does it assume?
3. Do you subcontract any stage? If so, which one, to whom, and only with my written permission?
4. What SMV and efficiency does the lead time assume, and how many direct operators will run my order?
5. Does the lead time include fabric intake, cutting, pressing-and-packing and shipping, or only sewing?
6. Who approves the sample and any later changes, and through which channel?
7. How will the order be invoiced, and which inspection and notification periods apply on delivery?

Next steps

Once you have chosen your model, the next step is selecting a workshop and comparing quotes: screen candidate workshops with the criteria in the article on choosing a contract workshop, and put the quotes side by side using the method in the article on contract T-shirt sewing prices (both are linked in the sections above). You can browse firms that do contract sewing on the CMT sewing workshops page. The production models and cost framework here are general information; take advice on your agreement, invoicing and tax decisions.