How to tell a real factory from a reseller

1. Count the unrelated categories in the catalogue

This is the fastest check and it costs nothing. Open the supplier's catalogue and count how many genuinely different trades it spans. Gloves, leather goods, footwear and knitwear are four different factories with four different machine sets, four different skill bases and four different supply chains. Nobody runs all of them in one building.

A real floor is narrow. It does one family of things — cut-and-sew knitwear, say — and goes deep. Breadth across unrelated trades is the signature of a company that buys from other factories and resells.

2. Ask for a live video call during working hours

Not photos. Not a pre-recorded tour. A live call, during their working day, where you say what to point the camera at.

Ask to see the cutting table, the stitching lines, the specific machine your seams would run on, and the people. A trading company cannot produce any of that on demand, because the floor is not theirs to walk into. This is the single highest-signal check available to you, it costs nothing, and it happens before any money moves.

If the answer is a scheduling problem, that is fair — factories are busy. If the answer is evasive, or the tour is always a recording, you have learned what you needed to know.

3. Check the government register yourself

Registration is public in most manufacturing countries, and you do not need the supplier's cooperation beyond getting the number.

For Pakistan: ask for the NTN and check it on the Federal Board of Revenue's Active Taxpayer List at iris.fbr.gov.pk. It is free, there is no login and no account needed. One thing worth knowing before you conclude anything: a sole proprietorship registers with the FBR, not with the SECP company register. Searching the wrong register returns nothing and looks like a red flag when it is not.

We publish that we are a registered Pakistani sole proprietorship and share our NTN on request, precisely so this check is available to you.

4. Ask a technical question and see if you get a number

Ask what GSM they would recommend for the fit you want, and what the seam allowance is, and what tolerance they hold on the size chart. A maker answers with numbers — 350–400 GSM, ±5% mill variance, measurements in centimetres.

A reseller answers with adjectives. Premium quality, best price, top material. Not because they are lying, necessarily, but because the numbers live in a building they do not work in.

The same test applies to bad news. A floor that tells you sublimation will not work on black, or that your target date is not achievable, is a floor that knows its own constraints. Universal agreement is a warning sign.

Two checks that come later

Before you pay a balance, any third-party inspector should be welcome on the floor. On a 30-piece run, an inspector checks all thirty against defect definitions agreed before anything was cut — not a sample of the sample. If you would rather not send anyone, photographs and a measurement sheet from the finished bulk are the alternative.

And structure the payment against proof rather than trust: staged payments tied to things you can see, with a written remedy if what arrives does not match the sample you approved.

One test we deliberately do not recommend

"Ask who owns the machines" circulates as sourcing advice. It is bluffable and you cannot verify the answer, so it gives false confidence. Every check above produces evidence you can inspect yourself. That is the difference worth caring about.