What an MOQ is made of.

No question comes up earlier in a first conversation than the minimum, and none is more often heard as a brush-off. It is not one. A minimum is an arithmetic result, and it helps to see the arithmetic.

Materials come in lots

Leather is bought by the hide and dyed in batches; soles are moulded per size; buckles, laces, thread and cartons all have supplier minimums of their own. Below a certain quantity a programme is buying material it cannot use, and that surplus has to sit in somebody’s price.

Colour is the sharpest version of this. A second colourway in the same style is often cheaper than a second style, but a colour outside the supplier’s standard range carries its own dye lot and its own minimum.

A minimum is mostly a question about materials, not about how busy the factory is.

A line has to be taught

Changing a line over to a new style costs hours: dies swapped, machines reset, an operator sequence rehearsed until the pace steadies. Those hours are the same whether the run is three hundred pairs or three thousand, so short runs carry them at a much higher rate per pair.

How buyers work with it

Split the minimum across sizes rather than styles. Keep the construction constant and vary the colour. Group two seasons into one production window. Every one of these is a normal conversation here, and the answer is usually more flexible than a number on a website suggests.

Bring the order you actually want, not the one you think we want to hear. There is nearly always a way to shape it.