Cycling Clothing Manufacturers: White Label vs. In-House Production (Complete Founder's Guide)

There is a moment in the life of most cycling brands when the arithmetic appears to turn. The first order lands, the second ships, and somewhere in between the founder starts running a different set of numbers: two industrial sewing machines, a flatlock, a small unit on the edge of town, one or two people who know how to run them. Set against a factory invoice, the machines look like they pay for themselves in a season.

That calculation is almost always wrong, and it is wrong in the same place every time. Not because the machines cost more than expected — although they do — but because the sewing is the cheapest and easiest part of a cycling garment, and it is the only part the machines actually solve.

We should be straightforward about where we sit. Honfit is a white-label cycling apparel manufacturer in Guangzhou. An article titled white label versus in-house production is not a neutral piece of writing for us, and the version of it that concludes "outsourcing wins" is the version that flatters our order book. So this guide does the opposite of the usual thing: it prices in-house production honestly and in detail, using current US equipment listings rather than round numbers, and it gives the genuine case for going it alone its own full section. The argument here is not that one route beats the other. It is that most founders price the wrong thing, and the correction is the same whether you end up sewing or buying.

What Is In-House Production for Cycling Apparel?

In-house production means the brand owns the means of production: it leases a unit, buys the equipment, employs or contracts a pattern maker and machinists, and runs the whole sequence itself — cutting, printing, sewing, finishing. Nothing is sent to a third party.

The phrase covers a much wider range of operations than most people picture. At one end is a two-machine workshop making a handful of club kits a month. At the other is a factory that takes on outside work. The gap between those two is where the budget lives, and it is where the estimates people carry around in their heads tend to come from the wrong end.

The sewing room: the machines you cannot do without

Every stretch-knit garment needs the same core set, and it is worth understanding what each machine does before comparing prices, because the reason a cycling brand cannot simply buy one sewing machine is that these machines are not interchangeable. Each solves a different problem, and the problems are set by the garment.

• Single-needle lockstitch — the straight seam. It joins panels where no stretch is required, attaches labels, and does the flat work. Around $1,200 to $2,500 for a complete new machine with table and servo motor, which is why it is the number people quote when they say the equipment is affordable. It is also the only machine in this list that is not particular to stretch fabric.
• Overlock (serger), 3–5 thread — trims the raw edge and wraps it in thread in a single pass. Stretch knits curl and fray where they are cut, and an overlocked edge stays clean while still stretching with the panel.
• 4-needle 6-thread flatlock — the seam that defines cycling kit. A flatlock joins two panels with the stitch lying flat against the skin rather than standing proud of it, so there is no ridge pressing into a shoulder or an inner thigh across a four-hour ride. It also stretches with the fabric instead of cracking when the panel is pulled. Roughly $5,500 to $9,000 new, or $2,000 to $4,000 used — and it is not a substitute for a lockstitch, nor the other way round.
• Coverstitch, cylinder bed — hems, sleeve cuffs, leg openings and bib straps. It folds and finishes an edge while keeping it elastic, and the cylinder bed lets it reach into a tubular hem. A jersey hem closed on a lockstitch pops open the moment the fabric stretches; done on a coverstitch it does not. This machine is missing from most start-up equipment lists and it is not optional.
• Bar tack — a short, dense cluster of stitches at the points that take repeated load: where bib straps meet the short, pocket corners, zip ends. Unreinforced, those are the first places a garment fails.

Laid out this way, the sewing room is not the expensive half of the decision. It is a five-figure sum at most, and several of these machines are routinely bought used. What matters is that each one exists because of a specific failure mode, and a brand that skips one does not end up with a cheaper garment — it ends up with one that chafes, frays or pops.

Cutting comes first: the straight knife

Before any of the above, the fabric has to be cut. The workhorse is a straight knife: the fabric is spread in a lay, a marker is nested on top, and an operator guides a vertical reciprocating blade through the whole stack — a hundred plies or more at once. Cycling tolerances run tighter than general apparel, in the region of one to two millimetres on body panels and less than that on the panels that set fit.

Laser cutting is common in cycling, more so than in most apparel categories, and for a good reason. On polyester and elastane a laser melts the fibre rather than slicing it, so the cut edge is sealed and cannot fray, which is what makes the clean bond-free hems and crisp panel edges on aero kit possible. It is a real capability, not a novelty.

It is also the wrong machine for a start-up, on three counts. A production textile laser is a large capital item. The sealed edge has a documented downside further down the line — the melted bead is hard, so sewing needles meeting it bend, skip and break, and one reported case saw sewing throughput fall by roughly 15 per cent until the laser was retuned. The hardness does not wash out. And the cheap desktop CO2 lasers are single-ply, need fume extraction, and scorch pale fabric.

The method a start-up should not be looking at is a die press. Cutting dies are standard for small stable components — collars, hats, underwear — where the same shape is cut for years. Cycling panels are the opposite case: artwork, panel shape and size grading change every season, and a die has to be paid for each time. It is a method built on repetition, and jersey design is built on not repeating.

The print line: a separate trade, and a separate budget

Sublimation is the reason cycling kit looks the way it does. The design is printed onto transfer paper and then gasified under heat so that the dye bonds into the polyester fibre rather than sitting on top of it. A fully printed jersey therefore gains no weight, does not crack along the seams, and does not block the fabric's ability to move moisture. Almost every jersey and bib on the market is made this way.

The equipment is a wide-format dye-sublimation printer — around $8,000 to $32,000 depending on width and on whether it is an entry or a production machine — plus a heat press to make the transfer. The choice of press is where an in-house plan usually runs into trouble, in two ways.

The first is size. A jersey back panel runs to roughly 70 cm, and the press has to be bigger than the panel it is pressing, so a small 40 × 60 cm platen cannot take it. The press has to be a 60 × 80 or larger — a heavier and more expensive machine than most founders picture when they price this step.

The second is the order of operations. Pressing pre-cut panels means the heat and pressure land after the fabric has been cut, and polyester knits shrink by a percent or two under sublimation heat while the transfer paper shrinks as well. A print laid out for a cut blank then lands slightly off it. The industry answer is to print the roll first and cut afterwards, which is also the only way to run a design continuously across a seam — and it is why roll-to-roll printing through a rotary calender is the norm for jerseys. Flat-bed pressing stays defensible for samples and short runs where the artwork sits inside a single panel, but the practical consequence is worth stating plainly: the calender usually belongs to whoever does the printing.

The price of any of this is not the point. The point is that printing is a different trade from sewing, with different skills, different consumables and different failure modes — colour drift, banding and misfed transfer paper have nothing to do with how well a garment is stitched.

Which is why a large share of small workshops do not own this line at all. They cut and sew in-house and send the printing out. That is the first of the walls.

What is not a garment factory's machine: the pad

A chamois is not made by the brand that sews it in. Pads are produced by specialists — Elastic Interface, Cytech and TMF among them — and the machinery that thermoforms and laminates the foam and fabric layers into a finished pad belongs to them, not to the garment factory. A cycling brand buys finished pads and stitches them in: the pad arrives with skived, tapered edges precisely so it can be stitched in flush, and the attachment is a stitch — a flatlock, coverstitch or zigzag run around the perimeter on the same machines already in the sewing room. Pad patents in the category list sewing as the primary attachment method, with gluing and welding as alternatives rather than the norm.

There is therefore no pad-making machine to add to a start-up's equipment list, and the bonding and welding equipment that does exist sits upstream, at the pad supplier.

What that means in practice is that the pad is a purchase rather than a capability. It arrives with its own minimum order, its own production schedule and its own price, none of which the brand controls — and none of which becomes controllable by building a sewing room.

Put together, the sewing room and the print line are two very different sizes of commitment. The sewing machines are the affordable half, and the print line is where the money goes — and because the print line is precisely the part a small workshop tends to skip, the figure a founder has in mind and the figure a genuinely self-contained operation requires are usually far apart. That gap is not a pricing error on anyone's part. It is the difference between buying the sewing and buying the whole process.

The costs that do not appear on the equipment quote

Machine prices exclude freight, rigging, installation, electrical work and consumables. Those exclusions are not small. Taking one published example: input and exit conveyors for a rotary press run $11,000 to $11,550, crating $1,500 to $1,995, and installation $2,500 on the East Coast or $5,000 on the West — with a forklift and a licensed electrician required on site. The accessories can approach the price of a mid-range machine on their own.

Consumables are the second hidden layer. A printing setup is not a printer; it is a printer plus transfer paper plus ink plus RIP software. Ink is priced by the litre and a 64" production machine can consume several litres in a single shift. List prices are also a poor budgeting basis in this category — manufacturer rebate programmes routinely take $4,000 to $8,000 off the sticker.

Then there is the space and the labour. A 1,000–2,000 sq ft industrial unit in a mid-size US metro runs roughly $1,000 to $3,400 per month, and quoted industrial rents are typically triple-net, so CAM charges, taxes and insurance add something like $5 to $8 per square foot on top. Experienced industrial sewing operators earn $15 to $27 an hour; the Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the national median for the occupation at $16.56, but a machinist who can run flatlock on high-stretch technical fabric sits at the upper end of that band, not the middle.

The skill problem

The equipment is the visible barrier. The skill is the one that ends projects. Cycling apparel is a high-stretch, high-precision category: a machinist who is perfectly competent on cotton shirting cannot simply be moved onto 3D pad attachment and silicone gripper leg bands. The seam has to stretch with the fabric without puckering, the pad has to sit flat against a curved surface, and the gripper has to hold without cutting in. Those are learned skills, and the people who have them are not looking for work in a two-machine workshop.

The genuine case for in-house

None of the above is an argument that in-house production is a mistake. It comes with advantages that outsourcing cannot replicate, and they are worth stating plainly.

The sampling loop collapses. A brand that owns its line can cut a revised panel in the morning and ride it in the afternoon — iterating on a chamois position or a cuff length in days rather than in shipping cycles. There is no minimum order quantity, which makes true one-off and small-run work possible: a single prototype for a fit session, three pieces for a sponsored rider, a twenty-unit run for a club that will never reorder. Limited editions and rapid drops become practical rather than theoretical. And there is a category of brand for which "made here" is the product itself — the value proposition is the local production, not the garment.

Those are real. They are also, as the rest of this guide sets out, narrower conditions than most founders assume they are in.

What Is White Label and Private Label Manufacturing?

Outsourcing means working with a manufacturer that already has the line, the pattern library and the material supply in place, and printing your identity onto what it makes. In cycling this is a mature market: established fits such as Aero Race Cut and Club Fit, established pad options, established fabric ranges. You are not commissioning a product from nothing; you are configuring an existing one.

Within outsourcing there are two levels, and the distinction matters more than the terminology suggests.

• White label — the manufacturer's existing pattern and construction, carrying your graphics and your branding. Nothing about the garment's shape is yours. This is the fastest and least expensive route and the standard way to test a design direction in the market.
• Private label — the same production base with a deeper layer of brand-specific customisation: woven hem labels, printed or debossed gripper tape, reflective safety detailing, custom zipper pulls, branded self-seal packaging. The garment reads as a retail product rather than a printed blank.

A word of honesty on the terminology, because the industry does not agree on it. One camp defines white label as unbranded goods the buyer labels themselves, and private label as the factory's existing product carrying the buyer's brand — which is close to the reverse of how the two words are used elsewhere. Another treats them as near-synonyms distinguished only by who owns the pattern. There is no authoritative ruling. What matters for a founder is the underlying question the words are pointing at: does the pattern belong to you, or to the factory? That is the decision with consequences, and it is the one to ask about directly.

The structural advantages of outsourcing are the mirror image of the in-house list. There is no equipment on the balance sheet and no depreciation against the brand. Material testing is the manufacturer's problem — stretch recovery, sublimation fastness, resistance to the white cracking that shows up when over-stretched prints go pale at the seams. And the scale effect is real: a factory buying Lycra and pad units across many customers pays less per unit than any single brand can, and that advantage is passed on in the price.

The cost of white label is differentiation. If the pattern is the factory's, it is also the pattern of everyone else buying from that factory. Cycling is a small, observant market; riders notice. For a first collection that is an acceptable trade. As a permanent position it means competing on graphics alone. The constructions available on a modern cycling line — jersey and bib cuts, pad options, and the trims that make a private label order read as retail rather than as a printed blank — are set out on our custom cycling apparel page.

Side-by-Side Comparison: White Label vs. In-House

The comparison that matters is not which column is better. It is which set of constraints matches the brand's stage.

Read down the in-house column and the pattern is consistent: every advantage is a form of control, and every cost is a form of commitment. Read down the outsourcing column and it is the reverse — less control, less exposure.

Which means the useful question is not how much volume do I expect but how certain is that volume. A brand producing the same club kit year after year, in predictable quantities, is a natural fit for in-house work; the fixed costs amortise and the iteration advantage compounds. A brand redesigning its range every season is doing the opposite — building a fixed-cost structure on top of demand it cannot forecast, and converting a flexible cost into a sunk one.

There is also a geography dimension worth naming, because it is how founders actually search for this. Someone leaning local searches for clothing manufacturers in usa — a term with real volume behind it. Someone leaning offshore searches apparel suppliers china. Both are general apparel phrases rather than cycling-specific ones, and neither is a term a cycling article can realistically rank for. They are useful here only as a reminder of what the choice looks like from the founder's side: it is usually framed as a question about where, when the underlying question is about how much commitment to take on.

Is Your "Manufacturer" Real — or a Middleman?

This is the part of the decision that catches people out, and it applies whichever route you take. A significant share of suppliers presenting themselves as white-label manufacturers own no production capacity at all. They are trading companies: they take your order, place it with an actual factory, add a margin, and pass the result back. Sometimes that works fine. Often it produces the three symptoms founders describe — dates that slip without explanation, prices that can't be itemised, and nobody who can answer a question about why a panel came out wrong.

The distinction is not about honesty. A competent trading company can be a useful partner, particularly for small buyers who would otherwise be below a factory's minimum. The problem is when the trading company is presented as the factory, because that removes your ability to assess what you are actually buying and who is accountable when something goes wrong.

Three checks separate the two, and all three are reasonable to ask for before placing an order:

1. Does the supplier own its production line? Ask what equipment is on the floor and how many of each machine. A factory knows this without checking. A trading company answers vaguely or deflects to a partner's facility.
2. Can you see the floor? Live video walkthrough of the cutting table, the printing department and the flatlock line — not a photo gallery. This is routine to request; a genuine factory will accommodate it.
3. Can they build private-label trims? Custom woven labels, gripper tape and branded packaging require real production and finishing capability. It is difficult to fake and easy to demonstrate.

There is a further question worth asking, and the answer is more informative than a yes or no: which steps do you outsource? Almost no manufacturer does everything — sublimation is frequently sent out, pads are bought in from specialist makers, laser cutting is sometimes contracted. A supplier who can tell you exactly which processes leave the building is demonstrating that they know their own operation. A supplier who claims complete vertical integration for a small order is usually telling you what they think you want to hear.

That question also has a second use. The list of steps a factory outsources is, almost exactly, the list of steps you would also have to outsource if you built your own line. A fuller version of this vetting process is set out in our guide to finding custom clothing manufacturers for private label.

Which Model Fits Your Brand Stage?

In-house production is the right answer in a narrower set of circumstances than most people expect. It fits when the work is genuinely one-off — a single prototype for a fit session, a handful of pieces for a sponsored rider, a small run for a club that will never reorder. It fits when local production is the brand, and the buyer is paying for provenance rather than performance. It fits where importing brings friction the brand would rather avoid — duties, freight, long capital lock-up. And it fits when the founder already has the skills, which changes the arithmetic more than any other single factor.

White label and private label fit the other stages. For a brand going from zero to first revenue, outsourcing keeps the capital where it does the most work: brand building, social media, rider sponsorship, the parts of the business that actually create demand. For a brand scaling past its first few seasons, a manufacturer's capacity is what makes multi-SKU, multi-market delivery possible at all.

The brands that have made in-house work tend to have something in common, and it is a sequencing point rather than a capability point. Kitsbow, the North Carolina mountain bike apparel maker, spent years with overseas production before building its own line — and its stated reasons were concrete: the lead times required committing capital and locking colours far in advance, and after six years the company cut ties with two US contractors over output that did not meet standard. LAMEDA, the Chinese cycling brand, moved in-house in 2015 after contract factories refused to adjust patterns and shipped mislabelled sizing; its first attempt failed on machinist retention, and it took a second build to reach the scale — two owned factories, 43,000 square metres — at which it could drop its own minimum order to 50 pieces.

Both sequences ran the same way: demand first, capacity second. The reverse order is the mistake that shows up most often, and it is expensive. A brand that builds a line before it has orders has converted working capital into depreciating equipment and taken on a monthly rent obligation against no revenue. The predictable end state is that the brand starts taking in outside work to keep the machines busy — at which point it has become a contract manufacturer, which is a different business from the one the founder set out to build.

The Bottom Line

The decision does not turn on which route is cheaper in the abstract, because the two routes are not the same purchase. In-house production buys control and pays for it in fixed cost and commitment. Outsourcing buys flexibility and pays for it in margin and differentiation.

What the equipment list does show is the size of the commitment on the in-house side, and where it actually lands. The machines a founder pictures — a printer, a flatlock, a lockstitch — are real, but they cover the one stage of the process that is genuinely tractable at small scale. The calender that makes sublimation work, the pad supply, the technical fabric minimums and the pattern development are all still bought in, whether the brand owns a workshop or not. That is the quiet reason so many small operations end up sending their printing out and doing only the sewing: the four walls around the sewing are higher than the sewing itself.

None of which makes in-house the wrong answer. It makes it an answer to a specific question — how much certainty do I have about volume, and how much commitment can I carry — and one worth answering with the whole cost in front of you rather than the equipment quote alone.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is white label the same as private label?

The industry does not agree, which is why the question keeps coming up. The clearest way to separate them is by who owns the pattern. In white label, you are buying the manufacturer's existing fit and construction and applying your graphics and branding to it. In private label, the brand owns the pattern and the factory produces to that specification. Some suppliers use the terms interchangeably, and some use them in the opposite sense to the one above, so it is worth confirming the definition in writing before an order rather than assuming.

Is it cheaper to make cycling kit in-house?

If you count only the sewing, yes — a lockstitch machine costs less than a season of factory invoices. But sewing is one stage of five. Sublimation printing requires a wide-format printer and a press, pads come from specialist makers with their own minimums, technical fabrics carry minimums of their own, and pattern development and grading have to be done before anything is cut. Most small workshops end up outsourcing printing and buying pads from specialist makers, which means the saving is confined to the sewing stage while the fixed costs apply to the whole operation.

What is the minimum order for custom cycling kit?

20 pieces per style, with sizes mixed within the style. Both the white label and private label routes are available from that quantity, so a club or a first-season brand can order at the same threshold as an established one.

Can I start with white label and move to in-house production later?

Yes, and it is the sequence with the better track record. Brands that have made in-house production work generally built the line after demand was established and reasonably predictable, not before. Starting with a manufacturer lets you validate the design and the market without committing capital to equipment, and it produces the sales history you need to judge whether a line would ever pay for itself. Moving the other way — building capacity first and finding the volume afterwards — usually ends with the brand taking on contract work to keep the machines running.

Can I use both at once?

Yes, and established brands often do. The common arrangement is to run core, repeatable styles through a manufacturer where the scale advantage applies, and keep in-house capacity for image pieces, limited runs and fast-turnaround sponsored kit. The complication is consistency: colour and sizing have to match across two production sources, which means colour references and size specifications need to be controlled by the brand rather than by either supplier. Colour management is covered in more detail in our guide to common apparel printing techniques, and fabric specification in apparel fabric compositions.

About Honfit

Honfit is a sportswear and streetwear manufacturer based in Guangzhou, China, with more than ten years on the production floor. We sit on both sides of the decision this guide sets out: we run our own cut-and-sew lines, and we take on OEM and ODM work for brands that own their patterns. Cycling is one of our core categories — jerseys, bib shorts, complete kits and the accessories around them — and the printing, cutting, flatlock seaming and pad attachment all happen in our own facility.

That is what allows a minimum order of 20 pieces per style, with sizes mixed within the style. The same threshold applies whether you are ordering from our existing constructions or having your own pattern built to spec, so a club, a race team or a first-season brand starts at the same quantity as an established one. We do not take single-piece or individual orders.

Weighing the two routes in this guide and want to know what the outsourcing side would actually look like for your range? Visit Honfitwear to see the custom sportswear and streetwear lines we manufacture, or send over your quantities, size breakdown, print requirements and pad preference and we will come back with a quote.