What Is NovaSupplier? How It Works for Clothing Brands | NovaSupplier
What Is NovaSupplier? How Independent Clothing Brands Source Directly from Portuguese Manufacturers
Matias Santos, Founder·
NovaSupplier connects independent clothing brands directly with vetted Portuguese manufacturers. No agents, no directories, no middlemen taking a cut of every order. This post covers exactly what NovaSupplier is, how a brand goes from brief to factory match, what happens once a project is live, and what the platform replaces for founders who are tired of paying someone else to manage a relationship they could manage themselves.
Most independent brands spend their first year of production trapped in the same loop.
They find a list of Portuguese factories somewhere online. They send twelve emails. Three reply. One asks for more information. They send more information. Someone else replies two weeks later asking the same questions the first factory already asked. A spreadsheet appears. The spreadsheet becomes a second inbox. The second inbox becomes its own problem.
A quote arrives. They don't know if it's good or bad because they have nothing to compare it to. They ask a second factory for a quote. Different terminology. Different line items. Not actually the same thing.
Meanwhile, the first factory has gone quiet. They follow up. The person they were speaking to no longer handles new clients. They start again.
Six weeks in, they have partial information from four factories, files scattered across email, a WhatsApp thread, a shared Drive folder, and a Notion document nobody is maintaining. They have not placed an order.
This is not a story about a bad brand or bad factories. It is what sourcing looks like without infrastructure.
NovaSupplier is the infrastructure.
The gap it fills
Portugal has one of the strongest textile manufacturing ecosystems in Europe. The factories in the north, across Braga, Barcelos, Guimarães, and Famalicão, have been producing for major European brands for decades. The quality is real, the lead times from Portugal to any European warehouse are measured in days, and "Made in Portugal" carries genuine weight with the kind of customer independent brands are trying to build a relationship with.
Those factories are almost uniformly invisible online.
A factory with 90 employees, 30 years of production experience, and active relationships with established European labels often has a website last updated in 2017, lists three product categories in broken English, and has no useful information about what they actually make, at what volumes, for what kind of brand.
So independent brands can't find them. And when they do, they don't have the context to know if the fit is real. And when they start talking, the conversation fragments across four different tools with no record, no structure, and no way to compare what one factory is offering against what another is offering.
NovaSupplier is what exists now so that none of that has to happen.
What it actually is
NovaSupplier is a B2B sourcing infrastructure connecting independent European clothing brands directly with vetted Portuguese manufacturers.
Finding the right factory, getting quotes, comparing options, exchanging files, managing communication, processing payments, tracking production history, all of it happens in one place. No agents sitting in the middle. No directories handing you a list and leaving. No relationship someone else owns.
The brand and the factory connect directly. The infrastructure makes that connection work the way it should.
Supplier profiles that go deeper than anything else that exists
This is the part that surprises most brands when they first see it.
Every NovaSupplier manufacturer profile is built from direct knowledge of that factory. Not scraped from a website. Not self-reported in a signup form. Built from actually knowing the factory: what they produce and what they don't, what materials they work with, which processes run in-house versus what they subcontract, their realistic minimum order quantities by category, their certifications (OEKO-TEX, GOTS, ISO, and others), their standard lead times, the languages they operate in, what type of brands they have served, and the price tier they work in.
For most Portuguese factories, this profile is more detailed and more accurate than anything on their own website. It is the most honest picture of that factory that exists anywhere.
But that's the static layer. The profile doesn't stop there.
Everything a factory does inside NovaSupplier builds a live record of how they actually operate. Their response time to new briefs. The completeness and quality of the quotes they send. How often they win the projects they quote on. How they handle sample revision requests. What brands have said about working with them after the order is delivered.
A factory that responds to briefs within 24 hours, sends structured quotes, and has a consistent record of successful sample approvals sits at a different position than one that takes a week to respond and sends vague pricing. That difference is visible, verifiable, and built from what they actually do, not what they say about themselves.
No marketing budget changes this ranking. No agent pushing a name changes it. The factories that do the work well earn the position.
Matchmaking that screens before you waste time
When a brand creates a sourcing brief on NovaSupplier, they describe their project: product type, construction, fabric, quantities, timeline, certifications, price target, any technical requirements.
That brief is matched against a manufacturer network where every factory's actual capabilities are known in precise detail.
The match is not a keyword search surfacing everyone who has "knitwear" somewhere in their profile. It is a genuine assessment of fit: does this factory produce this category, at this volume, at this quality tier, with this certification, with bandwidth available in this production window?
The result is that a brand receives introductions to factories that are a real match for their project. Not twelve emails into the void. Three or four conversations where the fit is already established before the first message is sent.
And on the factory side: no more fielding cold enquiries from brands at the wrong volume, the wrong category, the wrong price tier. Briefs that reach a factory have already been screened for relevance. The inbox noise that makes commercial enquiries so exhausting disappears because everything that arrives has already been checked against what that factory is actually built to produce.
Both sides get more signal and less waste.
One place for everything
The average brand sourcing from a new factory manages that relationship across at minimum: email, WhatsApp, some form of file storage, a spreadsheet, and a separate payment flow. None of these talk to each other. The record of a decision made three months ago lives in the middle of an email thread that takes twenty minutes to find.
On NovaSupplier, the entire relationship lives in one place.
Communication is in a structured, searchable thread. Files, tech packs, sample photos, revision notes, production specs, and approvals are attached to the conversation they belong to. Quotes are structured documents, not free-form emails, so comparing what three factories are offering means reading three quotes in the same format rather than trying to reconcile three documents that use entirely different line items.
Payments run through the platform, tied to production milestones. Every order a brand places builds a production history that belongs to them, not to an agent, not to someone who left the business, not to a folder on a laptop that broke.
The practical effect of centralization is not convenience. It is control. A brand with a complete, organized record of a factory relationship can negotiate from knowledge, catch production problems early, and make decisions based on what actually happened rather than what someone remembers.
What changes for Portuguese factories
Portuguese manufacturers are exceptionally good at making clothes. They are not, structurally, built to manage their own international client acquisition.
The best factories are fully committed to their existing clients. New relationships come through agents who charge for the introduction and then stay in the relationship indefinitely, taking a commission on every order whether the factory needs them or not. Cold inbound from unknown brands wastes the time of whoever handles commercial enquiries. Trade show leads are hard to qualify and slow to convert.
A factory on NovaSupplier receives inbound briefs from brands that have already been screened for fit. The brief arrives with the product, the volume, the timeline, the certifications required, and the price target already defined. They can decide whether to quote in two minutes. If they quote and win, the relationship runs through infrastructure that makes the work easier, not harder.
The commission is 3.5% on completed transactions, paid by the manufacturer. No listing fee, no profile fee, no charge for receiving briefs or sending quotes. A factory that transacts pays a commission that replaces the cost of agent relationships, trade show attendance, or other client acquisition they were already doing.
More importantly: on NovaSupplier, a factory's position is determined entirely by how well they do their work. Not by their marketing. Not by which agent is pushing their name. Not by how recently their website was updated.
This is the place where Portuguese manufacturers thrive because of what they actually produce, not because of who they know.
How the cost model works
For brands: free. No subscription, no monthly fee, no commission on transactions of any kind.
For manufacturers: 3.5% commission on completed transactions processed through NovaSupplier. Nothing else. A factory that never transacts pays nothing.
One specific point worth stating clearly: if a brand already has an existing factory relationship and brings that factory onto the platform, the commission on that specific pairing is permanently zero. NovaSupplier charges for introductions it makes. It does not take a cut of relationships that existed before it did.
What it is not
It is not a sourcing agent. NovaSupplier does not own the relationship between a brand and a factory. It does not charge a commission on every order placed forever. It does not communicate or negotiate on a brand's behalf. The relationship is direct.
It is not a directory. A directory gives you a list and leaves you to figure out the rest. NovaSupplier gives you matched introductions backed by deep factory knowledge, and the infrastructure to manage everything that follows.
It is not a multi-country platform. NovaSupplier works exclusively with Portuguese manufacturers. A platform claiming to cover 40 countries is a directory with a wider net. NovaSupplier is infrastructure built on depth, not breadth.
The point of all of it
The best clothing factories in Portugal are largely unreachable to independent brands unless you know someone, pay someone, or get lucky. That is not a quality problem. It is an infrastructure problem.
NovaSupplier exists so that a brand founder in London or Sydney or Copenhagen can access the same Portuguese manufacturing ecosystem that established European labels have quietly relied on for years, with the same depth of information, the same direct relationship, and none of the intermediary that used to be the only way in.
And so that the factories doing the best work in northern Portugal can be found, evaluated, and chosen based on what they actually produce, not on what someone with an incentive to recommend them has to say about it.
That is what NovaSupplier is. That is what it was built to do.