Lorenzo Manta
From sketch to boutique.
Over twenty years of design and production for high-end collections. Few have seen the whole chain from the inside — I have, and I work remotely.
I'm Lorenzo Manta. For over twenty years I've worked in the middle — between the person who designs a collection and the person who brings it into production, between craftsmanship and digital tools, between a moodboard and the first fit session.
I started in a family textile business as a teenager, learning from the ground up: every stage of production, from cutting to shipping, and all the documentation that comes with it — product sheets, bills of materials, price lists, catalogs, packing lists, accounting records. I've moved through the whole chain: 2D and 3D technical design, product development, third-party manufacturing, sample and collection management for high-end international brands — from the first grading to the salesman sample, all the way to the shelf.
I'm a designer and a technician at once: I design a collection, judge its fit and finish, and translate it into documentation a factory can actually produce. In 2022 I put into words what I'd been living for over twenty years, with a thesis on how the fourth industrial revolution is reshaping fashion. Along the way I found an idea from labor sociology — from W.F. Whyte and C.W. Mills — that fits me better than any other: the designer as "man in the middle," a point of balance between two worlds that rarely speak to each other directly. → Read more
Few people have seen the chain from the inside, from both sides — the craft side and the side of new digital tools. It's not a skill you build in a master's program — it's built over decades, on the ground. And it's the one that will keep mattering, as virtual sampling, AI and new supply chains reshape the industry over the next 40 years.
1. Design & prototyping
- Trend forecasting & research
- Moodboards, croquis, technical flats, colorways
- CLO3D — certified 2022 (drape, fit and fabric behavior on a virtual garment)
- Fit sessions, pattern correction, grading
- Technical validation of the prototype
2. Technical & cost documentation
- Tech packs & spec sheets
- Bill of materials / BOM, DIBA, trim sheets
- Raw material requirement calculations
- Costing, CMT, margins, price lists
3. Production & quality control
- Full production process, cutting to shipping
- Italian & Asian supply chains, critical path & timing
- Quality control on pre-production & bulk samples (AQL)
- Defect sheets & non-conformity management
4. Sales & commercial communication
- Line sheets, lookbooks, sales catalogs
- Materials for showrooms, sell-in/sell-out, trade fairs
Industry experience
- 20+ years in fashion, starting at age 14
- Sample & collection management for high-end international brands
- Degree in Fashion Culture and Techniques (2022), thesis "Fashion Industry 4.0"
From checking a single tech pack to end-to-end management of your production.
Unlike a pure CLO3D technician, every 2D→3D conversion I do also includes an industrialization check — if a construction isn't feasible, or too expensive to produce, I'll tell you before it becomes a problem on the factory floor. I don't sell one piece of the chain — I've worked across all of it, for over twenty years.
Weekly Service
- Drape & fabric behavior assessment (CLO3D or physical sample)
- Tech pack & spec sheet review
- BOM / DIBA & trim sheet check
- Costing, CMT & margin verification
- Second opinion on industrial feasibility & grading
- Quality control on pre-production or bulk samples (AQL)
- Prototype validation & defect sheet review
- Multilingual documentation consistency check
Long-Term — Single Projects
- Moodboard & style direction for capsule collections
- Colorway & material story development
- Complete tech packs & spec sheets
- 2D → 3D conversion (CLO3D)
- Physical-to-virtual sample digitization
- Production documentation built from scratch
- Line sheets, lookbooks, sales catalogs
- Supplier documentation, reorganized
- 1:1 training for small teams
Long-Term — Full Chain Management
- Concept-to-garment development, from moodboard to producible collection
- Dedicated CLO3D management for complete collections
- Supplier sourcing & matching
- Supplier and factory management & administration
- Production planning, timing & critical path
- Virtual showroom & digital samples for sell-in
Long-term services require an agreement on timeline and availability before starting — they aren't available on demand like the Weekly Service.
Got a tech pack to check, a BOM to fix, or need to know if a construction is actually feasible before you produce it? Get in touch.