Claims and Replacements on Underwear Orders: The Timeline Buyers Must Work To (2026)

A claim on a custom OEM underwear order is decided by the notice window written into your own purchase order, not by any convention, and that window is almost always shorter than the buyer assumes. Underneath it sit three hard limits: three days to the sea carrier where the damage is not apparent, seven to fifteen days under the Chinese Maritime Code, and two years as the CISG outer bar. A claim that arrives inside its window is settled on documents. A claim that arrives outside it is settled on goodwill, which is a shorter conversation.

What follows is the day-by-day calendar that keeps all six clocks visible, the six documents that have to exist at the end of each stage, and the wording that makes the first notice survive contact with a seller who does not want to pay.

1. Which deadline actually decides your claim?

Six clocks run at once. The first thing to establish is which one binds your order, because the answer is almost never the convention — it is the purchase order you signed.

Two things follow from that table and both are routinely missed. The three-day carrier window is shorter than any commercial notice period, so the carrier decision has to be taken on the quay, before the container is devanned. And the contract window, not the convention, is what a seller will actually invoke, because it is the one both parties wrote and signed.

One citation detail: the notice provisions are Articles 88 and 89 of the Maritime Code, in force since 1 May 2026, with the same 7, 15 and 60 day periods formerly numbered 81 and 82.

The CISG applies by default between parties in contracting states: China has been a party since 1988, and most of its trading partners are too. Many purchase orders name a national law intending to exclude it, and whether that choice succeeds depends on the forum and on how the clause is drafted, so read it before you rely on the two-year figure.

2. What has to be fixed on day zero, before the first carton is opened?

Day zero is the day the container is available, not the day somebody gets round to it. Everything photographed after the pallets have been broken down is weaker evidence, because the link between the carton and the shipment has already been broken by handling.

• Photograph the container number, the seal and the seal number in one frame, before cutting the seal.
• Photograph the pallet pattern and the carton count as stacked, with the shipping marks readable.
• Record the number of cartons against the packing list and the bill of lading count, in writing, at that moment.
• Note the ambient condition, any water staining on the container floor, and any odour, before the goods are moved.
• Keep one unopened carton per size and colour aside as a reference carton for the whole claim.

A short shipment is the one claim where this stage decides the outcome by itself. A carton count taken after devanning proves very little; a count taken against the seal proves everything. If the count is short, the notice to the carrier has to go out inside three days — and the notice does not need to be a claim, only a written statement of the loss and its general nature. The arrival-stage errors that cost the most on a first order are collected in first order failure modes, which is worth reading before the container lands rather than after.

3. Why open by size and colour rather than by carton?

The instinct is to open cartons in order and check the first twenty. That answers the wrong question. A packing error in an underwear order is almost never random: it lives in one size, one colour or one cut, and opening by carton will show you a representative sample of the correct goods.

Open by attribute. Take every size in the ratio, take the darkest and the lightest colour in the range, and take one carton from the beginning, the middle and the end of the run. What you are looking for in that pass is not the defect rate — the AQL plan does that — but whether the defect is clustered, because clustering changes the remedy from a credit on a few pieces to a replacement of a size.

The inspection itself should follow the plan written into the purchase order. ISO 2859-1 is the standard behind almost every garment AQL clause, and it matters here for a reason that is easy to miss: the switching rules. A supplier on tightened inspection is a supplier whose recent lots failed, and the sample size and acceptance number change accordingly. An AQL of 2.5 for major defects and 4.0 for minor is common commercial practice rather than a rule of the standard, so the numbers have to come from your own document.

4. Which defects only appear after a wash or a wear?

Some defects cannot be seen on a table. Shrinkage, torque, colour bleeding, elastic recovery and pilling all need a wash cycle or a wear trial, and a claim built on them has to survive the obvious counter-argument: that the buyer washed the garment wrongly.

The way through is to run the test on the reference carton, in the condition the care label instructs, and to photograph the label first. A shrinkage result is only meaningful against a stated method — ISO 6330 for the domestic washing procedure and ISO 5077 for the dimensional change measurement — and the pass threshold has to be in the specification, because “it shrank” is not a specification.

• Wash the reference garment exactly as the care label directs, and record the programme, temperature and detergent.
• Measure before and after at the same points, with the same tape and the same operator, and keep the measurement sheet.
• Photograph the label, the garment and the tape in one frame, so the method is visible and not just the result.
• Test three pieces per size, and treat a single outlier as a question rather than a finding.
• Compare against the approved sealed sample that both sides hold, not against a memory of it.

5. What changes in the thirty to ninety day window?

Defects that appear in the trade rather than on arrival — seam failure after ten washes, elastic that loses recovery, a print that cracks at the fold — sit in an awkward place. They are outside any realistic arrival notice, and they are exactly what the end consumer will return.

Two things keep them claimable. First, the contract: a guarantee period stated in the purchase order displaces the two-year default, and it should be written as a period from delivery with a named defect list, not as a vague promise of quality. Second, the CISG knowledge rule. Under Article 40 a seller cannot rely on the notice provisions where the lack of conformity relates to facts it knew or could not have been unaware of and did not disclose — a substitution of a nominated yarn, for instance, or a change of dye house. That does not create a claim out of nothing; it removes the “you notified too late” defence from a seller who already knew.

Article 44 is the other half of the same idea, and it is the clause most buyers have never read. Where the buyer has a reasonable excuse for not giving the required notice, it does not keep the full remedy — but it does keep the right to reduce the price under Article 50 and to claim damages other than loss of profit. A late notice is therefore expensive rather than fatal, which is worth knowing before you decide a claim is dead.

6. What does the master calendar freeze on each day?

The calendar below is the one to put into the buying file. The day numbers in the first column are the working assumption for a sea shipment; the numbers in the third column are the ones that come from a document and cannot be argued with.

The calendar shifts with the window in your order, and that shift is the part buyers get wrong. If the purchase order fixes a three-day notice, the D7 row moves to D3 and the inspection request has to be issued the same day as the notice, not a week later. If it fixes thirty days, D7 becomes D30, but the carrier’s three days do not move with it — which is why the carrier notice is written on the quay even when the seller notice has a month to run.

7. Which six documents carry the claim, and what must each one contain?

Each stage freezes one document. A stage with no document is a stage that did not happen, and the gap is what a seller will point at six weeks later. The fields below are the minimum; each is short enough to be a one-page template kept in the buying folder.

8. How should the first notice be worded?

The notice has one job: to name the defect with enough precision that a remedy can attach to it. A letter that says the shipment was disappointing does not do that, and a letter that says everything at once makes the serious defect look like an opinion.

Six lines are enough. Reference the order, the invoice and the container. Name the defect type, in the vocabulary of the specification rather than in adjectives. State the quantity affected, by size and colour. State the method used to establish it, with the standard number if there is one. State the remedy requested and the date you want a response. Reserve your rights on the rest of the lot, so that a second defect found in week six is not a new claim but part of the same one.

Send it to the seller and, where the loss engages the carrier, to the carrier separately. A notice copied to a freight forwarder is not a notice to the carrier, and this is the single most common way a cargo claim is lost before anyone discusses the garment. Send it to a named person rather than a general inbox, and keep the transmission record: where a convention allows notice by any appropriate means, the record is what proves the date, and the date is the whole claim.

What the notice is later measured against is the evidence set, and that set is assembled at the sampling stage rather than after arrival — the four pieces described in what a quality claim actually needs. A notice that references documents nobody holds is a notice that will be answered with a request for documents.

9. What voids a claim that was otherwise valid?

These are not legal technicalities. Each one is a decision taken in the first week that cannot be undone later.

• Devanned before the seal was photographed. Once the cartons are on the floor, the count is the buyer’s word against the packing list.
• Notice sent only to the forwarder. The carrier’s clock runs from removal, and the forwarder has no obligation to pass it on in time.
• Goods distributed to stores before the inspection. A claim on goods that have left the warehouse and been sold cannot be re-inspected, and re-inspection is what a seller will ask for.
• Claim closed with a credit note and no corrective action. The credit settles the money and leaves the process untouched, so the same defect returns on the next order with a smaller claim and a weaker argument.

10. What do we do on our side, and what do we not claim?

Unitex is a sourcing and trading company based in Xiamen, working with partner factories rather than owning them. That shape matters for a claim, and it is worth being explicit about how it works.

One commercial counterparty handles the order, the specification and the claim. The factories in the partner network hold amfori BSCI and OEKO-TEX Standard 100 certification, and the test reports and audit documents are held by those factories. When a claim is raised, the inspection record, the sealed sample and the production records sit with the same partner that ran the order, which is what makes a comparison possible at day fourteen rather than day forty.

What we do not claim is equally relevant. We do not claim to own production facilities, we do not claim certifications the partner factories do not hold, and we do not offer a remedy that the specification does not support. A claim on a tolerance that was never written down is a conversation, not a claim, and the fix belongs in the next specification.

In practice the timeline is easier to hold when the documents exist before the order does. That is also the point at which a buyer can still choose the counterparty rather than negotiate with the one already holding the goods, which is why the twelve-point supplier verification checklist matters more than any clause written afterwards.

11. Next step

If you are placing a custom OEM order and want the claim timetable agreed before the purchase order is signed, send the specification and the proposed notice clause. We will return the calendar above filled in with your dates, plus the six templates in editable form, so that the first notice — if there ever is one — is a form to complete rather than a letter to compose under pressure.

Two further checks before the order goes out: the sequence for verifying a supplier before a first order, and the payment terms on the same orders, since a claim and a balance payment frequently fall due in the same month and the documents are the same documents.

Published: 2026-10-29 · Xiamen Unitex Trade Co., Ltd. — OEM & ODM underwear sourcing partner

Unitex Underwear (Xiamen Unitex Trade Co., Ltd.) — OEM/ODM underwear sourcing and supply-chain partner in Xiamen, China; in the trade since 2009, incorporated in 2013. Based in the Xiamen–Quanzhou–Jinjiang knitwear cluster, Fujian Province, south-east China.