There are more tech pack tools available now than ever. Lucky us!
But if you’re a freelance fashion designer or small brand owner, you’ve probably tried a few and felt something wasn’t quite right or that they were more trouble than they were worth. And you’re not wrong.
With the surging popularity of freelance fashion designers, you would think there would be more tools dedicated to how freelance designers work. Our specific workflows and needs. But most of the tools available simply weren’t built with you and me in mind.
The Tech Pack Tool Landscape
We’re not short on options out there, and they each solve something. Here’s a quick look at what’s available.
Techpacker
Built for teams and heavy on collaboration. Techpacker has reusable libraries to help create tech packs quicker and maintain consistency across styles, which is genuinely useful if you’re working across multiple clients with similar components. It’s cloud based, so you build your tech packs directly on their website rather than in a local file. It does have an Adobe Illustrator plugin, but your tech pack and your sketches still live in separate places, which means you’re still context switching between tools to get a finished document.
PLM Lite Options (Backbone, Centric SMB, WFX, Uphance)
PLM stands for Product Lifecycle Management. These systems manage the entire product development process from ideation to finished product. They’re cloud based with real-time updates for the whole team, reusable libraries that speed up time-to-market, and single source of truth version control so you always know which version is current and who changed what.
The trade-off is that all of that infrastructure comes with complexity. They’re built for teams, come with a significant learning curve, require app-switching between your design tools and the platform, and can add extra steps to processes that should feel straightforward. For a brand with a full product development team, that overhead makes sense. For a solo freelancer, it’s a lot of tool for a single person to manage.
CLO3D + CLO-SET Tech Pack Generator
CLO3D is a 3D design tool that can generate a tech pack via its cloud platform CLO-SET. It works for solo designers or teams and is genuinely impressive if 3D design is already part of your workflow. The catch is that it requires a basic understanding of patternmaking and 3D drafting to get clean results. BOM accuracy also depends on properly assigning fabric and trim details inside CLO3D, which requires some material data setup before your tech pack is truly factory-ready. If you’re primarily a flat sketch designer working in Adobe Illustrator, CLO3D adds a significant layer of new skills before you get anything useful out of it.
AI Tools
AI-powered tech pack tools are a newer addition to the landscape and the category is constantly evolving. The general premise is that AI can speed up the documentation process by generating spec sheets or tech pack content from image inputs or prompts, which sounds like exactly what a time-strapped freelancer needs.
It’s an interesting space to watch. But for now, most of these tools are early stage, and the output still requires significant manual checking and correction before anything is factory-ready. For a freelancer who needs reliable, accurate documentation every time, that’s worth factoring into your time calculations. It’s easier to miss something when checking than when you’re thinking through the whole garment from the start. A missed measurement or an incorrect seam allowance caught at the factory is a much more expensive problem than the time you saved generating the document.
The Enterprise Problem
PLM tools are built for large teams where each stage of the design and development process is split across a different role, a different employee. There are multiple people responsible for tech packs in an organization and this all needs to be accurately tracked.
As a solo designer, it’s just you. Maybe one other person. The bells and whistles might be appealing on paper, but they end up being cumbersome when there’s no team to use them.
The pricing is definitely not set with a freelancer in mind and the onboarding usually involves a steep learning curve and dedicated time that many contract workers don’t have allocated in their work day.
The learning curve tax
Even for those of us who grew up on computers, using new software means time spent learning how to use it. There’s no getting around that. It’s a new environment, a new way of navigating, new features. All of this takes time to adjust to before you ever earn anything back.
For a freelancer or solo designer, that cost falls entirely on you. It’s your workload you’re having to put off, your income you’re deferring.
The workaround most freelancers land on
All of this is why most of us landed on the tech pack workflow we have. Adobe Illustrator + Excel, Google Sheets, or some other time-sucking spreadsheet software.
It’s low cost, familiar, and masquerades as being flexible. You usually realize four hours deep into a tech pack that it maybe isn’t as flexible as you initially thought.
Excel was never built for tech packs. We collectively turned to it for the formula feature and easy text input, but it’s not made for designers and doesn’t play very nicely with images, which is a major part of any tech pack.
What freelancers actually need
The tools above aren’t bad. In fact, many of them do exactly what they were designed to do. The problem is that what they were designed to do wasn’t designed around you and your needs.
A freelancer needs something affordable enough to make sense with a contract-style income. Something fast enough to learn that the setup time doesn’t eat into your first few jobs. Something that fits into the workflow you already have rather than asking you to rebuild your entire process around a new platform.
And critically, something that doesn’t assume you have a team. No shared libraries you’ll never use or approval workflows with nobody to approve them. Just a streamlined workflow to help you do what you already do, quicker and smoother.
This Is the Gap Tech Pack Wizard Was Built to Fill
When I started freelancing, I pictured myself sketching beautiful ideas for clients at a local cafe, coffee in hand. What I didn’t picture was spending half my time fighting with Excel spreadsheets, trying to get screenshots to stay where I put them and watching measurements turn into dates.
I looked for a better solution and couldn’t find one that was built for the way freelancers actually work. So I built it.
Tech Pack Wizard is a plugin for Adobe Illustrator that lets you build production-ready tech packs without ever leaving your design file. No new platform to learn. No switching between apps. Just your existing Adobe Illustrator workflow, with the tech pack admin handled inside it.
If that sounds like what you’ve been looking for, you’re in the right place.