How Do you Know if the Grading Worked?
As I’ve worked with clients brand new to garment production the question often comes up on what happens after grading. They have to make up a sample in all of the sizes to confirm it works, right?
Whoa! No! Please do not count that as part of your quality assurance check for every single style.
If you are working with myself for your grading project or a well established service, we know what’s up and have formulas that are kinda/sorta standard that ensure a decent fit for all the sizes. We are not going to provide you with something that would not fit the average person in the sizes you are requesting.
How do I know this? Well, these formulas and procedures are standard-ish, like I mentioned. It’s what industry professionals follow and it is what is taught in schools for grading 101. We are also looking at your size chart, so if you have any doubt in your head about the info you are providing, just ask your patternmaker/grader for their opinion on the size jumps.
It’s a leap of faith to say a formula = good fit. I get it, but I’ll give you a little more proof. I work with a lot of home sewing pattern companies. Part of the process of developing home sewing patterns is to enlist the help of testers across the size ranges for review of the sewing directions and fit. This allows everyone to see how the proportions and fit work across all the sizes and different body shapes. I’m not sure how this became the norm, but probably because someone graded their own patterns and didn’t feel too confident. Either way, it’s been a good exercise in proofing grading methods. In the many, many, many years that I have been grading home sewing patterns, I think I had to change the grading maybe once or twice after testing. Even then it was more for proportions than general fit that arose from an error.
For a large retailer, the only time they would review a full size range is if the order was huge. For instance, they were going to spend a few million dollars towards the production of an item and put it in every single store, it’s worthwhile to ensure that the fit is good and looks the same for all the sizes. There should be no reason to return it. After going through many of these types of reviews, rarely was there ever found anything of significance that had to be changed dramatically. Usually it was a workmanship call out. The additional sizes are usually an after thought because grade rules have been standardized to ensure consistency.
Listen, if you are still uncertain I wouldn’t judge you if you wanted to test a couple of sizes. If you go this route, test only your smallest and your largest size. These will have the biggest variance from the base pattern and will represent worst case scenario.
Please do not feel that you need to get feedback from all the sizes. Even if you were to hand out sizes for your friends to try on, are they able to communicate their feedback in a quantified way so your grader knows what to do? Probably not. Most people would be like “Yep, looks good to me” or “I have a lines at my waist” (what does this even mean???…). I’m not sure that type of feedback is worth the effort and expense. As a grader, if there is an error, I’m only going to look at the smallest size and/or the largest size to try to reverse engineer any issue.
Another option is to have your manufacturer do a pre-production test run for all the sizes. This could be a good way for them to time test and get a sharper cost to you. It’s also a double check that everything sews together properly (as it should if it was graded well). But be prepared that this is not free and will cost you.
It’s all about what you feel comfortable with, but I hope I’ve put aside some of your fears and put this ginormous expense on your “maybe” list instead of “have to”.