A private label program built to hit the margin, every season.

The retailer had spread their private label across six factories chasing unit cost, and the quality band between them was wide enough to show up at the store shelf. Ship windows slipped by two to three weeks on most programs. Markdowns ate the margin the cheaper unit cost was supposed to protect.

The merchandising team wanted fewer factories, tighter tolerances, and a repeatable construction vocabulary across the program — without losing the cost discipline that made private label worth doing in the first place.

We rebuilt the tech pack library from the ground up — a single construction vocabulary across categories, with tolerances specified in a way the factory could actually hit. Fabric and trim were consolidated against a shortlist so the mills could run us without retooling per PO.

We consolidated production from six factories to two vetted mills with history in the category. Inline QC and pre-shipment inspection were built into the program as a line item, not an emergency intervention.

We rebuilt the lead-time calendar around a pre-production (PP) sample gate with a hard approval date — miss it, you miss the cut-in date, no exceptions. The retailer's planning team got a delivery window they could actually plan against.

Defect rate at the DC dropped below 1% across the program's first two seasons. On-time delivery hit 100% against the rebuilt calendar. Tech-pack-to-DC compressed from roughly 11 weeks to 9.

The retailer has since moved additional categories onto the program. The unit cost did not go up — the volume consolidation and fewer QA emergencies paid for the added discipline.