Picking a supplier is the decision that quietly determines how your shop performs for the next twelve months. Get it right and you spend your time selling. Get it wrong and you spend it apologising to customers about a delayed reorder, or staring at forty units of something that looked good on a screen and looks cheap on a hanger. 

Most guides on this subject skip straight to a checklist. Before that, it's worth being honest about what you're actually choosing between, because the wholesale clothing market splits into a few very different kinds of business and they suit very different retailers. 

The four kinds of supplier you'll come across 

Importers and warehouses hold stock themselves and sell from it. You can usually see what you're buying, order small quantities, and get it quickly. This is what most of the wholesale districts around the UK are made of, Cheetham Hill in Manchester being the best known. 

Manufacturers make to order. Prices are lower per unit but minimums are high, lead times run to weeks or months, and you're committing before you've sold anything. This makes sense once you know exactly what sells for you. It rarely makes sense in year one. 

Marketplaces and platforms aggregate many suppliers under one login. Convenient, and the payment terms are often generous, but you're one of thousands of stockists buying identical stock, and the platform takes a cut that shows up in your margin somewhere. 

Dropshippers hold the stock and ship on your behalf. No inventory risk, but thin margins, no control over quality or delivery, and nothing exclusive about what you're selling. 

Which of these fits depends less on your budget than on your stage. A new boutique testing what its customers respond to needs flexibility above everything. An established shop with two years of sales data can afford to commit to volume and take the better price. 

What to actually look for when buying wholesale clothing 

Minimum order quantity, and what it really costs you 

MOQ is the smallest amount a supplier will sell you. It might be expressed per style, per size run, per colour, or as a total order value, and those are meaningfully different things. A supplier with a £500 minimum spend but no per-style minimum is far more useful to a small shop than one with a £200 minimum spend that forces you to take six of everything. 

The question isn't "what's a good MOQ." It's "how much of my money does this supplier require me to bet on a single style before I know whether it sells." 

For a small or new clothing business, that number should be low. If you have to buy twelve of a dress to stock it at all, you need to be fairly confident about that dress. Buy four styles that way and you've committed most of your opening budget to guesses. Suppliers who let you order in ones and twos let you test six or eight styles for the same outlay, find the two that move, and reorder those with real evidence behind you. 

Once you have that evidence, higher minimums stop being a problem and start being a way to improve your margin. Order small to learn, order bigger to profit. 

Quality, and how to check it without guessing 

You can't assess wholesale clothing quality from a product photo. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. 

Three ways to check it properly, in order of reliability: 

Handle the stock in person. This is the single best reason to buy from a supplier you can physically visit. You can feel the weight of a linen, check whether a knit is going to pill, look at how a seam is finished, and see whether the drape on a lagenlook piece actually falls the way the photo suggests. Ten minutes in a showroom tells you more than a week of browsing. 

Order samples first. If visiting isn't practical, buy one piece of anything you're considering seriously before committing to a run. Yes, it costs you the unit price and the delivery. It is dramatically cheaper than discovering the problem after you've bought thirty. Suppliers with no minimum order make this trivial. Suppliers with high minimums make it impossible, which is itself a useful signal. 

Look at the specifics, not the general impression. Check the composition label against what's advertised. Look at the inside of the garment, not the outside. Pull gently at a seam. Check that the same style in two different sizes is actually cut proportionally rather than just scaled up. 

What you're guarding against is the gap between how something photographs and how it feels in a customer's hand. That gap is where returns come from, and returns are where a good-looking margin quietly disappears. 

Sizing, and the mistake almost everyone makes first 

Two things go wrong with wholesale clothing sizes. 

The first is buying the size curve you think your customers are rather than the one they actually are. New retailers routinely over-buy small sizes because that's what looks best on the rail, then run out of 16s and 18s within a fortnight. Your till data, once you have any, is more reliable than your instinct here. 

The second is assuming sizing is consistent across suppliers or countries. It isn't, and Italian sizing in particular runs differently from UK high street sizing. A garment labelled one size might fit closer to another. If you're stocking a new supplier, get their actual measurements rather than trusting the label, and be prepared to explain the fit to customers rather than letting them find out at home. 

Suppliers who publish real measurements, and who'll answer a direct question about how a specific style runs, save you an enormous amount of grief. Ones who won't are telling you something. 

Price, and why the sticker price isn't the number 

Wholesale clothing prices are the easiest thing to compare and the most misleading. What matters is landed cost per unit, which means unit price plus delivery, plus VAT if applicable, divided across what you actually order. 

A supplier at £11 a piece with free delivery over £400 can easily work out cheaper than one at £9.50 a piece charging £25 carriage on a small order. And if the £9.50 supplier requires you to take six per style, your real comparison isn't per-unit at all, it's whether you can afford the commitment. 

Work out your retail price before you order, not after. If a piece costs you £12 landed and you need a 2.5x markup to run your shop sustainably, it has to sell at £30. Is that a realistic price for that garment in front of your particular customers? If you hesitate, don't buy it. 

Reliability, which is the one that bites later 

Most suppliers look reliable at the point of your first order. You find out otherwise around order three, when something you've built a window display around doesn't come back into stock. 

Signals worth weighing: 

Whether the stock actually suits your customers 

This is the part no checklist covers and it matters more than the rest combined. 

Good wholesale clothing that's wrong for your particular customer base is still dead stock. Before ordering, be specific with yourself about who you're buying for: their age range, what they're buying these clothes for, what they'll spend without thinking about it, and what they'll only buy on sale. 

Then buy against that, not against your own taste. A lot of first-year buying mistakes are boutique owners buying what they'd wear themselves. 

How to compare two suppliers properly 

Put them side by side on the things that actually differ: 

Fill that in honestly for your two shortlisted options and the decision usually makes itself. Where it doesn't, place a small test order with both and let the experience decide. 

How much should you buy to start? 

Less than you want to. Spread your opening budget across more styles in smaller quantities, accept that some of them won't work, and treat the first order as research you happen to be able to sell. 

A reasonable approach for a new stockist: pick six to eight styles rather than three, take small quantities of each, and hold back roughly a third of your budget for reordering whatever moves fastest. The retailers who struggle are almost always the ones who spent everything on the first order and had nothing left when they found out what their customers actually wanted.