Brand

Brand is a standard ERPNext doctype, extended by GarmentFlow into one of the most powerful masters you'll set up. Wherever something belongs to a particular brand identity — a Tech Pack, a print format, a purchase order — the Brand field decides which logo, conventions and defaults apply.

Create one Brand per brand you produce for. Even if you only have one, create it — Tech Packs and reports expect it to be there. If you produce for external clients, the Brand record carries their logo and address, and you can configure brand-specific portal settings if you're inviting them in to follow their orders.

What makes Brand worth its own page is everything GarmentFlow layers on top of the standard record. A Brand doesn't just label a Tech Pack — it pre-loads it. Set a Brand up well and creating a Tech Pack becomes mostly review-and-adjust instead of build-from-scratch. There are three places that magic comes from: label designs, the Raw Material Template, and measurement defaults.

Labels: washcare, hangtag, carton

Under the Labels tab, a Brand holds three designs — Washcare Design, Hangtag Design and Carton Design. Each is stored as HTML and rendered directly when the label is produced, so a brand's labels stay consistent across every style without redrawing them each time.

A brand's labels are part of its identity, not a generic template — the typography, the spacing, the exact placement of care symbols and composition all carry the brand. These are worth designing deliberately: paste in the HTML your designer provides, or build it to match the brand's own artwork.

Tip: size the outer container in millimetres (mm) so the label prints at true scale, and run a test print to confirm the dimensions before you rely on it.

Raw Material Template — the heart of the Brand

This is the feature that pays for the whole record. Every brand has materials that are special to it — its own buttons, its own woven labels, its own hangtags, its own thread spec. Adding those by hand to every single Tech Pack is slow and error-prone: miss one and the costing is wrong.

Instead, under the Raw Material Template tab, you list all the raw materials a brand could ever need — each with a quantity and a cost — and then tell GarmentFlow when each one applies using a set of filters. When a designer later creates a Tech Pack for that brand, GarmentFlow reads these rules and places the right materials in automatically.

Adding the Item First

Each material row points to an Item, so the item has to exist before you can add it to the template. Creating one is quick. Say you want to add a button for a brand called Lucky:

1. Go to Stock > Items and create a new Item.
2. Give it a clear name and item code — e.g. Lucky Waistband Button.
3. Set its Item Group to the right classification — here, Buttons & Rivets — so it's grouped and filtered correctly.
4. Add an image if you have one. If not, you can always add it later.

Then come back to the Brand's Raw Material Template and select that item on the button row. For the full guide to items, see Items and Suppliers.

How the filters work

Each material line has five filters. Two are familiar from the rest of GarmentFlow:

• By Size — the material is multiplied or varied per size.
• By Variant — the material differs per colour/variant.

Three more let you target which garments the material belongs to:

• By Type — e.g. only bottoms, or only tops.
• By Style — e.g. only a particular style example Wide Pants.
• By Gender — e.g. only Menswear.

The rule is simple and worth understanding, because it's what makes the template both powerful and forgiving:

Leave a filter blank and it applies to everything. Set a filter and it narrows to just that value — while every filter you left blank still applies to all.

So the more filters you set on a line, the more specific its application becomes.

Example: the Lucky Waistband Button

Take the Lucky Waistband Button you just created. On its row you'd set:

• By Variant — checked.
• By Type — Bottoms.
• By Style — Pants.
• By Gender — left blank.

With those settings, GarmentFlow brings this button in only when the Tech Pack is for Lucky, a bottom, and specifically pants — so it lands on Lucky's pants but never on a shirt, a skirt, or a tee. And because By Gender is blank, it applies to both men's and women's pants.

The By Variant tick adds one more layer of flexibility: the button isn't locked for the whole style. When the Tech Pack is built, you can choose a different button per variant — blue denim takes a copper button, black denim a jet-black one — all driven from this single template row.

Set no filters at all, and the material lands on every Tech Pack for the brand. This lets you describe the brand's entire material vocabulary in one place — broad defaults plus the specific exceptions — and trust GarmentFlow to apply each line exactly where it belongs.

From template to Tech Pack

When a Tech Pack is created for the brand, GarmentFlow evaluates every template line against that style's type, gender, sizes and variants, and drops in the materials that match. From there the designer simply adjusts:

• Remove a material that doesn't apply to this particular style.
• Add one that's unique to it.
• Change a quantity — e.g. the brand's default is one waistband button, but this wider-waistband jean takes two.

The cost rolls up automatically as you adjust, so the Tech Pack's material cost stays correct without anyone recalculating it.

A note on cost and currency

Enter every cost on the template in your company's default currency — one consistent basis for all your brands. When these materials flow into a Tech Pack, GarmentFlow handles the conversion, expressing the price in the brand/customer's default currency so quotes and approvals read in the currency that brand actually works in. Keep your entry currency consistent and you avoid the classic mistake of mixed-currency figures sitting in one template.

Measurement defaults: Points of Measurement (POMs)

Different brands measure garments differently — different points, different tolerances, different growth allowances. Under the Pattern Defaults tab, a Brand carries its Default Points of Measurement: each POM with its tolerance and growth value, and a garment Type so the list stays relevant.

This front-loads work that would otherwise fall on the pattern maker. Because the brand's expected POMs, tolerances and growth are already on record, you know up front exactly what the brand looks at when approving a piece — no guessing, no back-and-forth after the sample.

As with materials, the Type filter keeps each measurement where it belongs: a pant has no armhole, a shirt has no front rise, so you tag POMs to the garment type they apply to and the irrelevant ones never clutter the list.

What to do next

Setting a Brand up fully is more work than the other masters — but it's the work that makes every later Tech Pack faster. Fill in the logo and address first, then build the Raw Material Template (start broad, add specifics), then the measurement defaults. When you're ready to use it all, see Sizes, variants, and the bill of materials.