A Typical Production Run – Part 1

We love giving our customers a glimpse behind the scenes here at Linton Tweeds. So, we thought we would break down the process of a typical production run.

A typical production run is split into two parts. The first is the process of designing a new collection and showcasing it to potential buyers while the second highlights how we produce an order for an international retailer.

Each season we start by sourcing new yarns . The yarns used in our tweeds are sourced in two different ways.

Firstly, we scour the world for the finest, most creative and unusual yarns. Many of these yarns come from spinners mostly in Italy, but we also have suppliers in France, Germany and even Japan. You can see a small selection of these unique yarns for sale on our website.

Secondly, we buy ordinary simple yarns from suppliers in the UK. We then use our twisting machinery to create exciting yarns including ‘slubs’, ‘gimps’ and ‘spots’.

Once we have the yarns, we use our dye house facility to create a palette of colours. We normally stick to around 40 standard colours, however we have the ability to choose from more than 100 colours. As every yarn is made from different fibers, the take up of dye varies from yarn type to yarn type resulting in the myriad of colours you see in our fabrics.

This selection of yarns is then available to our design team who use them to create ranges for our collections. A range would consist of several different tweeds with slight colour or yarn variations, while a collection is all new ranges together. We typically produce two collections a year, a Spring/Summer Collection and an Autumn/Winter collection. Each collection normally has around 300 different new tweeds.

We then produce a few meters of each tweed which we cut up into swatches to showcase at trade shows and send to our regular clients. We work closely with our top clients who often have their own idea or a colour variation needed for a new fashion collection. In instances such as this, we would reweave a sample in our hand looms for the client’s final approval.

Once a customer has decided on a fabric, they normally order 10-30m for sample garments. They then use these garments for their photoshoots and fashion shows. Because we keep a small running stock of yarns, these 10-30-meter orders normally take about six weeks to produce (or sooner if urgent).

Once this customer has their fashion show, they will monitor the general reaction of different pieces and start ordering fabric for mass production of these garments. The amount of fabric ordered can be anywhere from 300 to 3000 meters depending on the number of items they are looking to produce.

On the other hand, Linton Tweeds Direct would be given the collection and order the fabrics they feel would have the best appeal to our website audience, while making sure they don’t sell the same fabrics chosen by major fashion houses for large scale production. A typical tweed normally take about twelve weeks to be woven, quality checked and become available for purchase on our website.

Click here to view part two of our production run, where we highlight the process of completing an order from our collection for a design house.