182 Colours, One Greige: What a Stock Shade Program Actually Costs

Double gauze is two layers of fine cotton gauze joined at interlocking tie-points — the crinkle comes from that structure, not from a finishing trick. Our M4011 is a single greige behind all of it: 100% cotton, 125 GSM, 135 cm wide. From that one base cloth we keep 182 solid colours in stock, 300 metres per colour, shipping in about 15 days after colour confirmation.

Buyers see the colour card first — shade 1 through shade 182, soft pastels through deep saturated hues — and assume the hard part is having the dyes. It isn't. Dyeing 182 shades is ordinary work. The hard part is what it costs to keep 182 shades standing still on a shelf, batch after batch, without the colour drifting. That cost is why most mills don't run a program like this, and it is the part buyers never see on the card.

Table of Contents

• One greige, 182 colours: why that's harder than it sounds
• What actually keeps the colour between batches
• The light in your room breaks more colours than the dyelot does
• What 182 stock colours mean for your order
• How to order a stock shade without surprises

One greige, 182 colours: why that's harder than it sounds

Start with the greige. Weaving one base cloth in volume does three things for us: the loom program stays simple, the greige inventory turns fast, and quality control has one fabric to know cold. Every metre dyed for us starts from cloth we already understand — same weave, same weight, same 135 cm width, every time.

Now the other end. Each of the 182 shades is a promise: if you order shade 63 today and shade 63 again in four months, both deliveries should sit in the same place on the card. That means for every shade, somebody is holding a reserved sample, tracking which dyelot the current stock came from, and knowing what a fresh batch has to match against. Multiply that by 182 and you begin to see why the colour card is the cheap-looking part of the program. The samples, the batch records and the discipline behind them are the actual product.

There is a real argument for the opposite approach — dye to order, keep no stock, promise nothing between batches. Some mills do exactly that and their pricing reflects it. The stock program trades inventory cost for your certainty: you can order 300 metres of a colour that already exists, get it in about 15 days, and put it into production without waiting on a dye cycle or a lab dip round.

That last point deserves a line of its own. On a dye-to-order colour, your first sample round is a lab dip: you approve a strike-off, the mill adjusts, you approve again, and only then does the bulk run — two weeks of emails before a metre of real cloth moves. On a stock shade, the lab dip round already happened before you arrived: the shade standard exists, the reserved sample is sitting in our library, and the batch you buy gets matched against it. You are not skipping quality control; you are skipping a round of it that your colour already passed. This is the unglamorous reason a stock program shortens your development calendar, and it is worth more to most buyers than the per-metre price difference.

What actually keeps the colour between batches

Batch-to-batch colour control in solid shades comes down to habits, not heroics. Ours look like this.

Reserved samples for every shade. When a batch ships, a cutting of that batch goes into our shade library against its report number. The next batch for that shade is matched against the physical sample, not against a formula in a spreadsheet. Formulas drift with water, dyes and temperature; the reserved sample does not.

Batch test reports that travel with the goods. Every batch is inspected against MTQS, our published in-house standard, before it leaves the factory — colour fastness to washing at Grade 4 shade change and Grade 3–4 staining under AATCC 61 / ISO 105-C06, among the other checks — and the report number traces to the production batch and test date. If a question comes up three months later, we can pull the record and the reserved cutting for the exact batch that left our floor.

Honest expectations on light shades. Here is the part most colour cards won't tell you: pale shades are the least forgiving. On a soft pastel, a small batch difference is visible where the same shift on a deep saturated shade would hide. We say this to buyers up front because it changes how you should order — not whether you order, but how you plan the batches.

None of this makes batch difference disappear. It is a physical reality of dyeing: two runs of the same recipe on different days will not be identical, and any supplier who promises you they will be is promising something no mill can deliver. What a stock program can deliver is controlled, documented, traceable difference — batches that sit within tolerance against a reserved sample you can both see.

The light in your room breaks more colours than the dyelot does

One last variable sits on your side of the table, and it is the one nobody budgets for: the light you judge colour under. A pastel that matches your seal sample under daylight can drift apart under shop lighting or under the warm LEDs in your design studio, because different light sources pull different shades in different directions. The industry name for this is metamerism — two samples that match under one illuminant and split apart under another — and it has ended more colour conversations between buyer and supplier than actual batch variance has.

So when your swatch card arrives, do the one thing that separates professional colour decisions from hopeful ones: look at the critical shades under at least two light sources before you lock a colour number. Daylight, then your shop light, then whatever your fitting room runs on. If a shade holds across all three, order it. If it doesn't, the problem is physics, not the mill — and no amount of batch control on our side will fix a colour that only agrees under one lamp.

What 182 stock colours mean for your order

For the buyer, the program converts into three practical rights.

You can start small and start now. 300 metres per colour, no dye cycle to wait through. For a capsule run or a first drop in a new colour, that is the difference between testing an idea this month and scheduling it next quarter.

You can hold your range without holding inventory risk on our side of the table. Because the shades are already standing, your replenishment order repeats what you bought before — same shade number, matched against the same reserved sample.

You get the price band without negotiation theatre. M4011 runs FOB $1.40–2.20 per metre depending on quantity, from Ningbo or Shanghai. The band is on the product page before you write to us.

And one honest obligation on your side: plan around batches. If an order needs 900 metres of one shade, tell us up front, and we will dye it as one batch where the schedule allows. If your production schedule spreads across months, ask which batch each delivery comes from and keep your own cuttings. Buyers who do this never have the batch-difference conversation, because they designed it out before the fabric shipped.

How to order a stock shade without surprises

The sequence that works, in the order that works:

Ask for the swatch card first. All 182 shades on physical cloth, mailed worldwide — judge colour on cotton, not on a screen. Screens add light and saturation that fabric will never match.

And match against the right cloth while you're at it. A white from our poplin program is not the white from the double gauze program, even though both mills start from 100% cotton — different base cloth, different finishing, different how the same recipe lands. Buyers who hold one program's card against another program's goods chase a difference that was never a defect. Keep the cards separate and compare cloth to cloth.

Lock the shade number and keep a cutting. When you place the order, the shade number plus a signed seal sample becomes the standard both sides match against. Without a seal sample, "same colour" means whatever the argument allows it to mean.

Read the batch report when the goods arrive. The MTQS report travels with the shipment and traces to your batch. Fastness grades, verified weight, usable width — everything your QC team needs is in there, matched to the lot you actually received.

That's the whole discipline. Card, seal sample, batch report. Buyers who run these three steps treat 182 stock colours as what they are — an inventory someone else holds so their production doesn't wait.

If this program fits what you're sourcing, start with the swatch card and a sample MTQS batch report. The card shows the range on real cloth; the report shows you what our batch documentation looks like before you commit a metre. Both ship worldwide.

Related: the M4011 double gauze product page lists all 182 stock colours and full specifications, the double gauze manufacturer page covers the solid and printed programs side by side, our cotton poplin program runs the same stock-shade logic at 154 shades, and the fabric weight guide explains how GSM shapes the way a colour reads on cloth.