Brand Raw Material Template

This is the feature that pays for the whole Brand record. Every brand has materials that are special to it — its own buttons, its own woven labels, its own hangtags, its own thread spec. Adding those by hand to every single Tech Pack is slow and error-prone: miss one and the costing is wrong.

Instead, under the Raw Material Template tab, you list all the raw materials a brand could ever need — each with a quantity and a cost — and then tell GarmentFlow when each one applies using a set of filters. When a designer later creates a Tech Pack for that brand, GarmentFlow reads these rules and places the right materials in automatically.

Adding the Item First

Each material row points to an Item, so the item has to exist before you can add it to the template. Creating one is quick. Say you want to add a button for a brand called Lucky:

1. Go to Stock > Items and create a new Item.
2. Give it a clear name and item code — e.g. Lucky Waistband Button.
3. Set its Item Group to the right classification — here, Buttons & Rivets — so it's grouped and filtered correctly.
4. Add an image if you have one. If not, you can always add it later.

Then come back to the Brand's Raw Material Template and select that item on the button row. For the full guide to items, see Items and Suppliers.

How the filters work

Each material line has five filters. Two are familiar from the rest of GarmentFlow:

• By Size — the material is multiplied or varied per size.
• By Variant — the material differs per colour/variant.

Three more let you target which garments the material belongs to:

• By Type — e.g. only bottoms, or only tops.
• By Style — e.g. only a particular style example Wide Pants.
• By Gender — e.g. only Menswear.

The rule is simple and worth understanding, because it's what makes the template both powerful and forgiving:

Leave a filter blank and it applies to everything. Set a filter and it narrows to just that value — while every filter you left blank still applies to all.

So the more filters you set on a line, the more specific its application becomes.

Example: the Lucky Waistband Button

Take the Lucky Waistband Button you just created. On its row you'd set:

• By Variant — checked.
• By Type — Bottoms.
• By Style — Pants.
• By Gender — left blank.

With those settings, GarmentFlow brings this button in only when the Tech Pack is for Lucky, a bottom, and specifically pants — so it lands on Lucky's pants but never on a shirt, a skirt, or a tee. And because By Gender is blank, it applies to both men's and women's pants.

The By Variant tick adds one more layer of flexibility: the button isn't locked for the whole style. When the Tech Pack is built, you can choose a different button per variant — blue denim takes a copper button, black denim a jet-black one — all driven from this single template row.

Set no filters at all, and the material lands on every Tech Pack for the brand. This lets you describe the brand's entire material vocabulary in one place — broad defaults plus the specific exceptions — and trust GarmentFlow to apply each line exactly where it belongs.

From template to Tech Pack

When a Tech Pack is created for the brand, GarmentFlow evaluates every template line against that style's type, gender, sizes and variants, and drops in the materials that match. From there the designer simply adjusts:

• Remove a material that doesn't apply to this particular style.
• Add one that's unique to it.
• Change a quantity — e.g. the brand's default is one waistband button, but this wider-waistband jean takes two.

The cost rolls up automatically as you adjust, so the Tech Pack's material cost stays correct without anyone recalculating it.

A note on cost and currency

Enter every cost on the template in your company's default currency — one consistent basis for all your brands. When these materials flow into a Tech Pack, GarmentFlow handles the conversion, expressing the price in the brand/customer's default currency so quotes and approvals read in the currency that brand actually works in. Keep your entry currency consistent and you avoid the classic mistake of mixed-currency figures sitting in one template.