India, Bangladesh and Vietnam: an honest comparison for a mid-market brand

We are an Indian factory. You should discount what follows accordingly. We have written it anyway, because the sourcing managers we most want to work with have already been quoted by all three countries and can tell when a comparison has been arranged to reach a conclusion.

Where Bangladesh wins

Cost per piece at volume, and it is not close. For a basic knit programme — tees, hoodies, joggers, a stable shape in a stable fabric, tens of thousands of pieces — Bangladesh is the right answer for most brands. The scale of the vertical mills, the labour cost and the duty position into the EU and the UK combine into a number an Indian factory cannot reach honestly.

What you accept in return is high minimums, a longer lead time on a first order, and less appetite for a range that changes shape midway. That is not a criticism; a unit built to run 40,000 pieces of one style efficiently is not built to run 300 of twelve styles, and pretending otherwise serves nobody.

Where Vietnam wins

Technical execution and consistency, particularly on outerwear, performance fabric, structured tailoring and anything with a lot of engineering in it. Compliance documentation tends to be more mature. Delivery reliability is generally excellent.

It also costs more than Bangladesh, minimums are usually high, and much of the fabric is imported — which puts fabric lead time and a duty question back into your calendar. For a mid-market brand with a technical product and volume behind it, Vietnam is frequently the correct choice.

Where India wins

Four things, specifically.

Small quantities without being treated as a nuisance

Our minimum is 150 pieces per colour. A brand testing thirty colourways in a season, or chasing a repeat of the one style that sold, is doing something the Indian mid-size sector is structurally set up for and the volume countries are not. If your buy is 300 pieces a style, you will get more attention here than you will anywhere with a 1,000-piece floor.

Woven variety and surface work

Cotton, linen, viscose, rayon, blends, structured jacquards, denim — much of it domestic, which takes weeks out of the fabric calendar rather than adding them. And embroidery, hand detail, print and finishing sit within an hour of our floor in Gurgaon. If your product has decoration on it, the difference is not cost, it is how many times you can iterate before the range freezes.

Design origination, not just execution

This is the real difference for a brand without a large in-house design team. We design our own ranges, so we can present one for you to edit down rather than waiting for a finished tech pack. That ODM route removes months from a season and it is far more common in India than in either of the other two.

Time zone and travel

Gurgaon is IST, which overlaps a European working day almost entirely and a Gulf one completely. We are 20 minutes from Delhi airport, so a buyer flying in for a fit session is on the floor the same morning. Small thing, until the week a fit decision has to be made face to face.

The short version

• Large volumes of simple knits, cost is the deciding factor: Bangladesh.
• Technical product, outerwear, engineered fabric, volume behind it: Vietnam.
• 150 to 2,000 pieces a style, woven-led, surface work, a range that needs designing or is still moving: India.
• 40 pieces for a capsule: none of the three. Use a local sampling unit.

What actually decides it

In our experience the decision is rarely made on the quoted price, because the quoted price is the smallest of the numbers involved. It is made on the total cost of getting the season right: air freight because bulk slipped, markdown because the wrong style went deep, a repeat you could not chase, a fit that was signed off remotely and turned out wrong.

India is not the cheap option. It is the flexible one, and flexibility is worth paying for only when your range is genuinely uncertain.

If your range is settled and large, be honest with yourself and go where the cost is. If it is still moving, still being tested, still finding its customer, then the country that will run 150 pieces properly and repeat it in a fortnight is worth more to you than a lower per-piece price on a bet you were not ready to place.

Send us a programme and we will tell you plainly whether it belongs here — including when it does not.