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The single most important idea in GarmentFlow is that the style is the center of everything. Understand this one concept and the rest of the platform falls into place.

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The style is the product record

A is a reusable product — a jacket, a polo, a pair of trousers — described once and kept in one place. The style owns the documents that define how it’s made and costed:
  • its (the fabrics and trims it’s built from),
  • its (how it’s priced and where the margin is),
  • its (the production documents),
  • and its packing, quality, and other specifications.
These belong to the style, not to any one order.

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Why this matters: build once, reuse everywhere

Because the BOM, cost sheet, and manufacturing orders live on the style, you build them once and reuse them every time that style is ordered. Consider a jacket style ordered across three seasons:
  • Spring order — you create the jacket style, build its BOM and cost sheet, and ship it.
  • Autumn order — the same buyer reorders the jacket. You reuse the existing style. Its BOM and cost sheet are already there; you adjust only what changed for this order.
  • Next spring — a third order runs the same jacket again, reusing the same style once more.
One style, three orders. You never rebuilt the jacket from scratch, and the product knowledge accumulated in one place instead of being scattered across three separate order records.

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Many orders share one style

A style can be linked to many orders. Each order points back to the style it runs, so you always know which product an order is making, and a style’s full order history sits in one place. This is the relationship the rest of GarmentFlow is built on:
  • One style → many orders.
  • Each order → its own production work for that style.
For the precise definitions and the rule of thumb on when to create each, see style vs. order vs. MO.

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Versions keep shared work safe

If many orders share one style, what stops a change made for one order from disrupting another? Versioning. Every style document is saved as a numbered . When you change a BOM or a cost sheet, you create a new version rather than overwriting the old one. Each order runs a specific version, so:
  • you can see exactly which version an order is using,
  • approving or revising a document for one order doesn’t silently change another, and
  • the history of every change is preserved.
This is what makes “share one style across many orders” safe in practice. To go deeper, see BOM, cost sheet, and artifact versions.

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Contrast: order-centric vs. style-centric

In a traditional order-centric system, the product lives inside the order. The same jacket ordered three times means three separate copies of the BOM and cost sheet, re-entered each time, with no shared record and no easy way to compare or reuse them. In GarmentFlow’s style-centric model, the product lives in the style, and orders draw on it. You enter the product once, reuse it across orders and seasons, and track every change through versions.