Apparel defects and how they are graded

A critical defect makes the garment unsafe or unsalable outright: broken needles, harmful substances, missing mandatory labeling. A major defect would cause a customer to return the item or refuse to buy it: a seam failure, a visible stain, wrong measurements outside tolerance. A minor defect is visible to an inspector and unlikely to affect a sale.

Inspection standards accept no critical defects, a small number of major and a larger number of minor, which is the sampling logic explained in AQL inspections.

Shade variation between dye lots within the same style, measurement drift across production runs, label and care instruction errors, and packaging damage from handling rather than manufacturing. The last is the one buyers most often discover and most often cannot attribute, because it can arise anywhere between the factory floor and the receiving dock.

Attribution is why condition at a known date matters, and why an inspection report is worth keeping even when the lot passes.

Critical defects cannot be resold and should be removed from the count entirely. Major defects move goods into a repair or salvage grade. Minor defects generally still sell in off-price channels, where the customer expectation is different from a full-price floor. Grading a lot correctly is what makes the valuation arithmetic in valuing a returns load possible.