Full Package vs CMT: Who Buys the Fabric?

The two models

CMT — cut, make, trim

You buy and deliver the fabric and trims. The factory cuts, sews and finishes, and charges you for labour. The quote is a labour price per garment.

FPP — full package production

The factory sources the fabric and trims as well, and quotes you a finished garment price. Sometimes called full package or, when quoted for export, FOB.

Why the difference matters more than the price

On a spreadsheet CMT always looks cheaper, because it is a smaller number. What the smaller number excludes is every risk attached to materials:

• Fabric arriving late — the line is booked and your goods are not being cut
• Fabric arriving short — markers do not yield what you assumed and you are buying more at spot prices
• Fabric arriving off-quality — wrong weight, wrong hand, shading between rolls
• Trims forgotten until the garments are otherwise finished
• Minimum purchase quantities you must meet on every colourway

Under CMT, all of that is yours. Under full package, it is the factory’s problem, and the premium you pay is largely the price of that transfer.

Comparing a CMT quote to a full-package quote

They are not comparable until you build the CMT one up to a landed cost. Add:

1. Fabric: price per yard x consumption x (1 + waste allowance)
2. All trims, labels, hangtags and packaging
3. Freight for materials into the factory
4. The cost of meeting fabric and dye-lot minimums you cannot use
5. Your own time managing the material supply chain
6. A realistic allowance for the delay risk above

Done honestly, a CMT quote frequently lands within a few percent of the full-package one — at which point the question is simply whether you want the job.

Which to choose

• First run, no sourcing experience, no time: full package.
• You have a fabric that is genuinely part of the product and a mill relationship: CMT.
• You are chasing the last few percent of cost at real volume: CMT, with someone managing materials properly.
• You are paying someone to manage materials anyway: compare that cost honestly against the FPP premium.

The hybrid nobody mentions

Plenty of factories will run full package but let you nominate the mill — you choose and approve the fabric, they buy it and carry the risk. If your fabric matters but your bandwidth does not stretch to managing it, ask for this explicitly. It is rarely offered unprompted.