3 ideas
A fashion product moves through planning, design, development, sourcing, production, and distribution, with each stage gated by a calendar deadline rather than completion of work. Because retail delivery dates are fixed in advance, delays in early stages compress later ones, meaning design decisions must be locked before they feel finished to protect downstream manufacturing and shipping windows.
The final retail price is built by stacking margins: the manufacturer's cost is marked up to wholesale, then wholesale is marked up again at retail, typically more than doubling the price at each handoff. This means a garment costing a few dollars to produce can retail for many times that, and brands must reverse-engineer target retail price down to a cost ceiling before design even begins.
Factories require a minimum number of units per style and per fabric color before they will run production, because setup costs and material orders are uneconomical at small scale. This forces small brands to either commit capital to inventory they may not sell or limit their range to fewer styles and colorways, making MOQ a structural constraint on creative variety, not just a financial one.