The start of the footwear production process comes after you either receive an order from your vendors, your retailers, or your customers. Once you receive an order or a projection, that’s when the production officially starts. Once you have the order in hand, you have the quantities or number of units you’re looking to go to production with and you can start to negotiate pricing.
When you have footwear pricing solidified with the factories and the customers, it then heads into the next stages of production confirmation. At that point in the footwear business, you have a sales sample you’ve been showing and selling to the customer. Next, you need to provide either a confirmation spec or a technical spec of exactly what will go forward to production.
This means, if anything changed from the sales sample, you would have to communicate that to the factory or the supplier prior to them starting production. If you need an outsole to be softer, if you need a lining to be a different color or a lacing to be a different quality, you would have to call that out. The confirmation sample should reflect every change that you have made along the way.
A call out is really something that either comes from the customer or comes from yourself as the designer, the sales team, or someone who has intimate knowledge of the product and footwear education. The call out is something about the sample that you’d like addressed and resolved before production begins. Whether that’s a color, simply a comment that the execution could be improved, if the outsole could be more flexible, or if the padding in the sock compresses too much. Anything that is called out to the factory or the supplier of the footwear should be discussed and confirmed prior to actual shoe production.
