Apparel Manufacturing in China for London Brands

London is one of the hardest cities in the world to build an apparel brand in, and one of the most rewarding when you get it right. You are competing for shelf space at Selfridges, Liberty, and Browns. You are selling into Net-a-Porter and Matches's successor platforms. You are answering questions about microfibre shedding, PFAS, and Modern Slavery Act compliance from buyers who actually read the answers. The factory you choose has to keep up.

Why brands in London choose to source through Ohzehn

London founders tend to land in our inbox after the same journey. You started with a UK or Portugal sampling unit because the lead time felt comfortable. The unit cost made wholesale margin impossible. You tried a Turkish factory and got decent results on outerwear but nothing that worked for knits or intimates. Now you are looking at China and you want a real factory, not a sourcing office in Shoreditch wearing factory clothes.

Our base is in the Guangzhou and Dongguan corridor in southern China. Vertically integrated: knitting, dyeing, cutting, sewing, finishing, QC, all on one operational footprint. The in-house lab is PVH-accredited, which means the testing standards your CK and Tommy production used to pass through are the same ones your run will pass through. We hold OEKO-TEX 100, GRS, ZDHC, SAC, and BSCI. Those certifications are not vanity. They are what your buyer at Selfridges, John Lewis, or a UK ESG-focused retailer will ask for in the supplier questionnaire.

What London founders tend to pull out as the deciding factors:

• 72-hour turnaround on costed quotes from a tech pack
• Production history with Calvin Klein, Victoria's Secret, GAP, SKIMS, Abercrombie & Fitch, American Eagle, Hanes Brands, Lane Bryant, La Senza, Cacique, Soma, Third Love, Walmart, Target, and Fruit of the Loom
• 99.5% plastic-free fabric capability, which actually moves the needle on a UK sustainability story
• A bilingual US-raised lead based in China, working flexibly into the UK morning

The London-to-China lane: ports, transit times, customs

Standard ocean from Yantian to Felixstowe runs 28 to 34 days via Suez. Southampton and London Gateway are also options depending on your 3PL. Felixstowe handles the largest share of UK container traffic and tends to clear faster than the southern alternatives during peak.

A typical timeline for a London brand looks like this:

• Tech pack to costed quote: 72 hours
• Sample round one: 10 to 14 days
• Bulk production after PO and deposit: 40 to 60 days
• Yantian to Felixstowe ocean: 28 to 34 days
• UK customs clearance and 3PL intake: 3 to 7 days

Total programme from PO to UK warehouse: roughly 12 to 14 weeks for a clean run. Air freight from Guangzhou to Heathrow is 5 to 7 days door to door if you have a launch you cannot move.

Post-Brexit, the UK runs the UK Global Tariff schedule, which is its own beast and not the same as the EU schedule you may have used in a previous life. Most knit apparel from China sits in the 10 to 12% duty range, with VAT calculated on the duty-paid value at clearance. We can prepare commercial invoices and packing lists in the format your UK customs broker expects, with correct HS codes for each style.

What we make for London brands

The London apparel scene splits across a few clear archetypes. The luxury contemporary brand selling at Liberty. The streetwear label selling through END. and SSENSE. The premium intimates brand competing with the Savage X Fenty wave. The technical activewear brand riding the post-pandemic gym boom. Six categories we run, framed for that scene:

Activewear

Premium compression, sculpted seamless, bonded panels, recycled performance knits. The category where your competitors are Sweaty Betty, Adanola, TALA, and Gymshark. You need fabric handfeel and construction quality at a price that holds wholesale margin.

Intimates

The category where we are arguably strongest. Seamless, moulded cup, bonded, lace, microfibre. Whether you are a premium lingerie brand pitching Selfridges or a comfort-focused DTC label competing with Skims and Heist, this is core production for us.

Casual

Heavyweight tees, garment-dyed sweats, knit dresses, slip dresses, loungewear sets. Strong category for the London streetwear and elevated basics scene.

Yoga

Soft-hand knits, four-way stretch, opacity-tested. London's studio-led brands lean technical and sustainable; we build to that brief.

Swimwear

Recycled nylon, chlorine-resistant constructions, resort capsules. Smaller volume for UK brands typically, but a useful category for summer drops.

Sustainable and bio-based

GRS-certified recycled content, bio-based fibres, 99.5% plastic-free fabric. This is the category that has been growing fastest from our UK inbound enquiries.

Compliance and tariffs for UK brands

The UK regulatory picture is genuinely tighter than most of your sourcing alternatives realise. Worth getting right at the factory floor, not at the warehouse.

• UK textile labelling: fibre content, country of origin, washing instructions, all on a permanent label
• UK PFAS consultation is ongoing and likely to lead to restrictions on intentionally added PFAS in apparel; we already run PFAS-free DWR options for water repellent finishes
• Microfibre shedding regulation is being discussed both in the UK and at EU level; relevant for any brand selling into the EU as well
• Modern Slavery Act statements: our BSCI and SAC certifications support your statement directly
• EUDR adjacency: if your range includes natural fibres and you sell into the EU, you may need deforestation due diligence on cotton sourcing; we can support documentation
• REACH compliance for chemicals: our ZDHC accreditation aligns directly

"The thing that mattered for us was being able to send a buyer the lab reports, the BSCI audit, and the OEKO-TEX certificate in one PDF, without scrambling. That is genuinely the difference between a wholesale deal closing and falling over." Feedback from a London intimates founder.

Time zones, communication, and how it works from London

GMT or BST is 7 to 8 hours behind China. Your 8am London is 3pm or 4pm at our factory. Your morning is the productive overlap window. By the time you get to lunch, the factory floor is wrapping up, but our US-raised bilingual lead Kelvin Liu lives in China and works flexibly into your morning and afternoon.

What working from London looks like:

• Send a question at 8am, get a substantive reply before your 11am stand-up
• Sample updates and floor video walkthroughs in your morning, not your night
• WhatsApp, email, and WeChat all available; UK brands tend to default to email and WhatsApp
• Factory visits are straightforward: direct flights from Heathrow to Guangzhou via several carriers, around 12 hours

Categories of brands in London we are a fit for

• DTC intimates and shapewear brands building the next Skims-tier or Heist-tier label
• Premium activewear competing with Sweaty Betty, Adanola, TALA, Gymshark, lululemon
• Elevated streetwear brands selling through END., Browns, SSENSE
• Sustainable-led labels with a credible plastic-free or recycled-content story
• Luxury contemporary brands moving from Portuguese to Asian production for margin reasons
• Wholesale-focused labels pitching John Lewis, Selfridges, Liberty, Net-a-Porter successor platforms

The case for going direct

There is a layer of London-based sourcing agents who will quote you a Chinese factory's work with their margin added on. They will tell you they add value through quality control and translation. Some of them do. Most of them add 20 to 30% and a week of latency to every email, and the factory they are quoting is the kind of factory that wins agent business, not brand business.

Going direct to a vertically integrated, PVH-accredited factory with a US-raised bilingual lead changes the conversation. The quote is the real quote. The factory floor is the floor your production runs through. The person you WhatsApp is the person who can fix the seam issue today.

London is a market that rewards real production stories. The factory you choose becomes part of how your brand gets told.