Woven labels for clothing brands: what to order and where it goes

A clothing brand rarely needs one label. It needs a small set that works together — the one people see, the one that tells them the size, and the one that tells them how to wash it. Here’s how those pieces usually fit together.

The labels a brand usually orders

Most clothing brands end up with some combination of five things. You don’t need all of them, and you certainly don’t need all of them at once, but it helps to know what the full picture looks like.

Neck and brand labels

This is the label that does the most work. It’s what a customer sees when they pick the garment up, what they feel against the back of the neck, and what they look at again when they wonder where the piece came from.

It usually carries the logo and the brand name and nothing else. Centre fold is the common choice here — it hangs from the seam with a clean folded bottom edge — though end fold works well when the design fills the full width and you want it sitting flat.

Side-seam tabs

A small woven tab stitched into the outside seam or hem. It’s visible when the garment is worn, which makes it a quiet piece of external branding — the kind of detail people notice on a well-made piece without consciously registering it.

Because it’s small, keep the artwork simple. A monogram, a short wordmark or an icon reads far better at tab size than a full lock-up with a tagline.

Size and care labels

Size labels are short, functional and need to stay legible for the life of the garment — which is exactly what woven construction is good at. They’re often ordered as a set across your size range, so think about which sizes you’re producing and in what proportion before you order.

Care labels carry wash and care symbols, fabric composition and country of origin. They hold more information in less space than any other label on the garment, so they’re typically wider or set as a multi-line label. What exactly must appear on a care label depends on where you’re selling — worth checking your market’s requirements before you finalise the wording.

Hang tags

A hang tag is what does the selling on the rail. It’s read from further away than a neck label, so it can carry a larger version of your mark and a little more presence. Woven hang tags have a texture and weight that card tags don’t.

Ordering them as a set

The thing worth planning for: these labels look best when they share a visual language. The same thread palette, the same treatment of your mark, the same weight of type. A neck label in navy and gold followed by a care label in black and white reads as two different brands in the same garment.

It’s also usually simpler to decide the whole set once, even if you order the pieces at different times, so the second order matches the first.

If this is your first order

Start with the neck label. It carries the most brand weight and it’s the one customers actually associate with your name. Size and care labels can follow once you’ve seen how the first one turns out.

Minimum order quantities apply and depend on the label type, so tell us roughly what you’re producing and we’ll tell you what’s workable. Our complete guide walks through the full set of decisions, and the woven labels page covers every label type we make.