Always get your patterns. Always. No exceptions

By Kathleen Fasanella on May 15, 2013 at 5:39 pm

Lamentably, this bears iteration (albeit paraphrased a bit):

… every time you pay an invoice for pattern services, you should get the electronic file for it. If you’re having manual patterns made, request that the provider drop a tracing in the mail.* If you don’t get the file or the tracing, you don’t contract for more work until you get what you want. It doesn’t matter if you can’t sew or don’t have a CAD system, you save these as an insurance policy. If it all goes south, you’ll only have to worry about having your last pattern made because you have all the others.

It is important to have this expectation built in from day one because the relationship is just lovely in the beginning. A real honeymoon. Service providers who can do the most damage are the ones who slowly gain your confidence. If you limit your exposure by expecting pattern delivery after invoice payment from the beginning, you’ll be able to manage a mess if it comes to that. So what messes are these?

Red flag: Not being billed for pattern work.

If you’re working with a provider who is doing everything from patterns to production, examine your invoices carefully. If you’re not billed for pattern work, you do not own those patterns and won’t get copies of them. This means the provider has you over a barrel and you will find it very expensive to move to another provider should need be. Unfortunately, needing to move onto another service is more common than not because holding the customer hostage is a common problem associated with package services.

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