Sending a tech pack to a factory hands a complete set of instructions for making your product to a business that makes products. What you can prove you sent, and when, decides every dispute that follows.
A manufacturing handover is the largest single disclosure a design business makes. It is also the one most likely to be treated as routine.
The tech pack alone contains the specification, measurements, construction notes, materials, trims and finishing. Alongside it go pattern files, fit blocks, print artwork, colour references and, after the first round, corrected samples showing exactly where the design landed. Taken together, this is not a description of the product. It is the means of production.
The recipient is a business equipped to manufacture the item, with an existing customer base, and often with commercial relationships to competitors in the same category. None of that makes a factory dishonest. It describes the ordinary structure of the relationship, and the structure is what determines the exposure.
The asymmetry runs one way. The brand hands over everything required to make the product and receives units in return. The factory acquires permanent knowledge of how the product is made, which does not expire when the order ships or when the relationship ends. A brand can change manufacturer; it cannot recover what the previous manufacturer learned.
The scale of the surrounding problem is documented. The European Union Intellectual Property Office estimates that the legitimate clothing industry lost almost twelve billion euros of sales as an annual average across 2018 to 2021, representing 5.2 per cent of clothing sales in the EU, with the sector employing 160,000 fewer people each year as a consequence. That figure covers counterfeiting across the whole market rather than production leakage from contracted factories, which is one route among several. It indicates the size of the market that unauthorised production feeds.
The disputes that follow a handover fall into three recognisable shapes, and they call for different evidence.
The first is overproduction. A factory contracted to make five thousand units makes seven, and the surplus enters the market through channels the brand never authorised. The practice is common enough in the industry to have acquired its own vocabulary, described as third-shift or ghost-shift production. The goods are genuine in every respect except permission, which makes them harder to identify and harder to distinguish from authorised stock.
The market receiving that surplus is large and growing in value. European Union authorities detained approximately 112 million counterfeit items in 2024 with an estimated value of 3.8 billion euros, the highest recorded level in the series, according to the joint report published by the European Commission and the European Union Intellectual Property Office in October 2025. Those figures cover all counterfeit categories rather than factory surplus alone, and the number of items detained fell against 2023 while the value rose, which the report attributes to higher unit prices among the goods seized.
The second is undisclosed subcontracting. A factory takes an order and passes part of the work to a supplier the brand has never assessed and does not know exists. The tech pack travels with the work. A design the brand believed had gone to one carefully chosen manufacturer is now held by a second business under no direct obligation to the brand at all.
The frequency is documented rather than anecdotal. Research published in Management Science in 2021 by Caro, Lane and Sáez de Tejada Cuenca examined 32,477 apparel orders placed across 226 factories through a single global supply chain intermediary, and found that 36 per cent had been subcontracted without the buyer's authorisation. The dataset covers one intermediary's order book rather than the industry as a whole, and the study also found that factories which subcontract without authorisation tend to do so repeatedly, which makes the practice a property of particular suppliers rather than a uniform background risk.
The third is a competing claim to the design itself. A factory produces a similar product for another customer, or under its own label, and the position is not that it copied but that its own development team arrived there independently. That dispute turns on sequence, and sequence turns on what each side can date.
This third shape is the hardest to answer and the easiest to assert. Independent development is a complete defence where it is true, and a factory that has manufactured in a category for years has a plausible account of arriving at a similar solution. The brand's answer has to be that its own specification existed first, in a form that can be shown, on a date that can be established without relying on the brand's own word.
The contractual answer to all three is well developed, and any brand manufacturing overseas should have it in place before anything is sent.
An NNN agreement covers non-disclosure, non-use and non-circumvention, which is broader than a standard NDA covering disclosure alone. Non-use prevents the factory using the designs for any purpose other than producing for the buyer. Non-circumvention prevents it dealing directly with the buyer's customers. A production agreement should state that tech packs, patterns, fit blocks, samples and outputs developed during the relationship belong to the buyer, and should address whether any part of production may be subcontracted and on what terms. Specific enumeration works better than general language about designs remaining the property of the brand.
These instruments do the job their drafters intended. They allocate rights, define permitted use, and give the brand something to enforce.
What a contract cannot do is establish what was transferred under its terms. It says the tech pack belongs to the buyer. It does not identify which tech pack, in which revision, containing which specification, or record the date it left the studio. When a factory produces something similar and the argument is about whether it came from the buyer's material or the factory's own development, the agreement governs the consequences and the evidence decides the outcome.
That gap sits between two documents both parties usually have. The contract is signed and dated. The tech pack is sent and received. Nothing in the ordinary process binds one to the other in a form a third party can check.
Design businesses do keep records of what goes to a factory. The tech pack is exported and filed. The email carrying it sits in the sent folder. The file-sharing platform logs the upload and sometimes the download. Revisions are numbered and dated in the studio's own system.
Where a factory relationship is functioning, this material resolves most questions immediately. A dated revision history settles an argument about which specification was current, and a download log confirms that a file arrived.
The limitation appears in the situations that produce real disputes. Each of those records was produced by the brand, or by a platform the brand selected and funds. The tech pack's export date comes from the studio's workstation. The revision numbering is the studio's own convention. The sharing platform's log sits with a supplier the brand chose and pays.
A factory asserting independent development is under no obligation to accept any of that material. The response available to them is that the brand's records are the brand's records, dated by the brand's systems, and assembled by the side that requires them to say what they say. That response does not have to be true to be effective. It only has to be available.
What closes the gap is a record of the material as sent, dated by somebody with no stake in the outcome, made before the handover rather than assembled after a dispute.
When a file is deposited, it is hashed using SHA-256, the hash is timestamped by an accredited Trust Service Provider under RFC 3161, and the timestamped hash is anchored to the Bitcoin blockchain via OpenTimestamps. This is a single automated sequential process, each step depending on the output of the preceding one. The result is a portable certificate recording the file name, the cryptographic fingerprint, the timestamp, and the blockchain anchor.
A free RFC 3161 timestamp from an unaccredited service produces a technically valid record but carries no legal presumption, leaving the holder to argue for its accuracy in any proceeding. With optional eIDAS Article 41 qualification from an accredited Qualified Trust Service Provider, the timestamp carries a legal presumption of accuracy across EU member states. Under United Kingdom law the certificate holds strong evidential standing without that statutory presumption, and under United States Federal Rule of Evidence 901 a documented and reproducible process supports admissibility on ordinary evidentiary principles.
Applied to a manufacturing handover, the deposit happens at the moment of sending. The tech pack as issued, the pattern files as supplied, the artwork in the resolution the factory received: each deposited before transmission, each producing a certificate that fixes what left the studio and when.
The value shows in the three dispute shapes. Against a claim of independent development, the certificate establishes that the brand's specification existed in that form before the factory had it, which is the sequence on which the argument depends. Against undisclosed subcontracting, the deposited tech pack is the reference against which a third party's output can be compared. Against overproduction, the record supports the brand's account of what was authorised, in what quantity and to what specification.
Deposits also work across the revision cycle rather than once. A handover is rarely a single transmission. Corrections follow sampling, specifications tighten, and the version in production at the end may differ materially from the one sent at the start. Depositing each revision as it is issued produces a dated sequence showing how the specification developed, which answers the question of which version governed at any point in the relationship.
The returning direction matters as well. A factory sends back sampling corrections, adjusted patterns and production notes, and those materials shape the finished product. Depositing what arrives, alongside what was sent, records the full exchange rather than half of the traffic. Where a later argument concerns whether a change originated with the brand or the manufacturer, the sequence supplies the answer.
None of this replaces the contract. The agreement remains the instrument that allocates rights and provides the cause of action. The deposit supplies what the agreement assumes but does not contain: independent proof of what passed between the parties.
For a design business placing production overseas, the anchored record converts the handover from an act of trust into a documented transfer. The material sent is fixed at the moment of sending, by a party outside the relationship, before any question arises about the origin of a similar product.
For a brand managing several factories across a season, the same approach scales without adding process. Depositing at the point of transmission adds a step measured in seconds to a handover that already involves exporting, packaging and sending files.
For a factory, the same record cuts both ways and is worth having. A manufacturer accused of copying a customer's design can point to its own dated development materials, and a manufacturer that develops product independently has the same interest in being able to demonstrate that fact. The evidential problem is symmetrical even where the commercial power is not.
For a solicitor advising on a dispute with a manufacturer, the anchored record changes what can be established at the outset. The contents and date of the handover are supported by evidence the factory cannot attribute to the client's own systems, which moves the argument from whose records to believe onto the substantive question.
A tech pack is the most valuable thing most design businesses ever send, and it goes to the one recipient equipped to use it alone. The contract governs what happens next. The record of what was sent, and when, determines whether the contract can be enforced on the facts.
This post provides general information about the role of cryptographic evidence in manufacturing and design disputes. It is not legal advice. For advice on a specific matter, consult a qualified lawyer in the relevant jurisdiction.
Related Reading
Economic impact of counterfeiting in the clothing, cosmetics and toy sectors in the EU — EUIPO
Unregistered Design Right and the First Disclosure Date
James Snell is the founder of Provlyn, a platform providing cryptographic prior proof of IP ownership. provlyn.com