Apparel Merchandising & Sourcing · Bangladesh RMG · 14+ years
About me
Apparel merchandising and sourcing: product development, supplier management, costing, capacity and order execution for European brands.
Merchandising · Product Development · Sourcing · Supplier Management · Supply Chain · Commercial
Professional profile
Fourteen years in Bangladesh’s ready-made garment industry, spent on both sides of the order. Three of those years inside a factory, and every year since in European buying and liaison offices. Today I lead a four-person merchandising team at LPP S.A.’s Dhaka Liaison Office, covering denim for Cropp, House and Mohito and accessories for all five LPP brands.
The work runs across merchandising, product development, sourcing, supplier management, costing and negotiation, capacity planning, production follow-up and shipment. Those are not separate jobs. A single order carries all of them, and a decision taken during costing tends to reappear at final inspection.
I started as an assistant merchandiser at Crystal Martin Apparel in 2011, on the Marks & Spencer account, chasing lab dips and preparing costings with the production floor right downstairs. That grounding set the rule I still work by: never quote a price I cannot trace back to yarn, and never promise a delivery date without knowing what the factory can actually run.
Most sourcing problems are visible well before they get expensive. A fabric booking that slips a week. A vendor accepting more than its capacity can hold. A trims approval sitting with the wrong person. Catching those early is most of the value, and it means holding two views at once: with a buyer the conversation is specification, margin and the delivery date; with a factory it is capacity, material readiness and what the line can actually run this week.
What I work on
The functions below belong to the same file. Each one constrains the others, which is why they are rarely worth managing in isolation.
Development from inquiry through to bulk: tech pack review, sampling, lab dips and strike-offs, fit and artwork approvals, and the specification work that decides whether a style is producible at the target price.
Supplier identification, capability and capacity assessment, onboarding, development and grading. Backup sources kept qualified so a single factory problem does not become a delivery problem.
FOB costing and pre-cost analysis, negotiation against target margin, yarn and fabric price tracking, claim handling. Prices built from material data rather than from last season’s number.
Allocation across vendors and brands, booking, critical path and T&A management, production follow-up through to shipment. Capacity treated as something planned, not assumed.
Inline and final inspection oversight, fabric and garment test reports, and supplier audit status across ACCORD, BSCI and OEKO-TEX requirements.
Daily work with brand buying and design teams, factory management, and internal planning, quality and commercial functions. Most delivery risk surfaces first as a communication gap.
Background and direction
The starting point was a B.Sc. in Textile Engineering, wet processing and dyeing, which is why a conversation about shade, shrinkage or fabric construction is not a black box to me. The industry taught the commercial half. In August 2026 I completed a Post Graduate Diploma in Garment Business at IBA, University of Dhaka, which set fourteen years of operating habit against formal business method.
Sustainability stopped being a side topic during my Celio years, where organic and recycled programmes and an OEKO-TEX STeP certification push sat inside my own accounts. It stays in the work at LPP through audit and certification status. EU due diligence, CSDDD and EUDR in particular, is the direction the whole sourcing base is being pulled in, and it is worth understanding before a buyer asks. AI I treat the same way, as a working tool rather than a topic: reporting, analysis and drafting, tested on live merchandising work.
Away from the desk, cricket. I played for the Celio Sourcing office team in the Inter Buying Office Cricket Tournament in 2022–2023 and came away with a Man of the Match trophy. The temperament it asks for is not far from the one a difficult shipment week asks for.
Sharing what the work teaches
A weekly newsletter and daily posts on costing, sourcing, compliance, sustainability and technology in apparel, written between factory visits rather than from a desk above the industry. The readership is mostly merchandisers, sourcing managers and brand-side buyers, which keeps it practical: nothing goes in that I have not had to use.
What I am after
The contribution I want to make is not more reporting. It is sourcing and merchandising decisions taken with better information and taken sooner: costs that hold, capacity that is real, suppliers that grow rather than get squeezed, and delivery dates that survive contact with the season. That is what makes a sourcing base worth keeping, and it is the only kind of growth that lasts at both ends of the order.
