Garments knitted as one piece — no side seams, no shoulder seams, no linking. Made on Shima Seiki WHOLEGARMENT machines in our own Gaziantep factory, and entering the UK at 0% duty under the UK–Türkiye FTA with a valid proof of origin. One caveat we put up front: this is flat-knit seamless, not circular seamless bodywear.
"Seamless knitwear manufacturer" means two quite different things in the UK, and the confusion wastes everybody's time. To a womenswear or premium menswear buyer it means a jumper knitted in one piece with no seams to rub — the flat-knit technique Shima Seiki brands as WHOLEGARMENT. To a bodywear, activewear or medical buyer it means tubular garments knitted on circular seamless machines: leggings, sports bras, base layers, compression hosiery. Same word, different factories, different machines.
We are firmly in the first camp. Kiwi Giyim is a flat-knit knitwear manufacturer in Gaziantep, founded in 2010, running 22 dedicated flat-knit machines — 15 Shima Seiki including WHOLEGARMENT, and 7 Stoll CMS — with a 50-plus in-house team and capacity for roughly 100,000 pieces a month. We knit seamless jumpers, cardigans, knit dresses, fine-gauge layers and knitted tops between 3 and 14 gauge. We do not run circular seamless machinery and we do not produce medical compression — knowing that in the first thirty seconds is the point of this page.
If your brief is bodywear, stop here — no amount of goodwill turns a flat-knit machine into a circular one. If your brief is a seamless jumper that feels expensive on the body, keep reading; our capabilities page sets out the full machine list.
No side seam, no shoulder seam, no linking ridge. For next-to-skin merino and cashmere-blend layers this is the difference between a jumper a customer wears weekly and one that lives in a drawer — and it is the single easiest thing to feel in a shop or on a returns desk.
Seamless bodies drape as one surface, so silhouettes read cleanly in flat-lay and on model — worth more to a DTC brand than an extra colourway.
Knit-to-shape produces almost no offcuts and no linking waste: a checkable production fact rather than a vague sustainability adjective, which matters when a retail buyer reads your claims closely.
Plenty of factories quote WHOLEGARMENT and place it elsewhere. Our Shima Seiki machines are on our own floor in Gaziantep, so the programming, timeline and QC are ours to answer for — see our work.
Since January 2021 the UK and Türkiye have traded under a bilateral Free Trade Agreement, not the EU–Türkiye Customs Union. For a UK knitwear importer the practical effect is that garments meeting the agreement's rules of origin enter at 0% duty, provided a valid preferential proof of origin is presented at import: a movement certificate EUR.1 or, where the conditions allow, an origin declaration on a commercial document. Without preference, the UK Global Tariff for your commodity code applies — typically around 8–12% for knitted garments.
Jumpers, cardigans, waistcoats and similar knitted articles normally fall in heading 6110, but the full commodity code depends on fibre and construction and the classification is your broker's call, not ours — look it up on the gov.uk Online Trade Tariff before building a landed-cost model. Two things worth knowing: the A.TR certificate has no role in UK imports (it belongs to the Customs Union, and a supplier offering one for a UK shipment has not shipped to the UK lately), and the preference removes customs duty but not import VAT, which is charged separately and normally recovered by VAT-registered businesses. The full walkthrough, including EORI and the document set, is on our importing knitwear from Turkey to the UK page.
Seamless has a useful side-effect here: knit-to-shape garments are knitted from yarn on our own machines in the exporting factory, which makes the origin position about as clean as textile origin gets. We prepare the proof of origin as standard on every UK shipment.
Every size is a separate machine programme, so the minimum applies to each colour-and-size combination — not to the style. This is the number brands most often mis-read, so we state it twice.
3 × 5 × 250. That is a serious commitment for a young DTC brand, and pretending otherwise helps nobody. The lever is not the floor — it is the width of the range.
The same style in two colours across four core sizes is 2,000 pieces. Launch tight, read the sell-through, then extend the curve on the reorder. Seamless bodies are especially forgiving here because the fit runs across a wider size band than a heavily panelled construction.
Protos are single units — 10–14 days, 80–180 USD depending on complexity. Nobody commits to a bulk programme off a screenshot. Our production process sets out each approval gate.
Seamless construction sits at the top of our CMT bands: roughly 18–30 USD CMT for WHOLEGARMENT knit-to-shape, against 8–14 USD for a basic fully-fashioned crew and 14–22 USD for textured or patterned flat-knit. Yarn is separate and moves with the fibre market. The seamless premium is real — slower machine throughput per unit — but it comes with the linking labour removed, so the gap is narrower than the headline suggests.
On currency we would rather be plain: we quote and invoice in USD, occasionally EUR, as Turkish export factories generally do. Any pound figure is a conversion for orientation, not a locked price. Your live exposure is USD/GBP across the three to five months between quotation and payment — an ordinary 5% move on that pair shifts your landed cost more than most factory negotiations will. Our note on TRY, GBP and currency risk covers the practical options; full bands are on the pricing page.
Seamless is not automatically the better construction, and a factory that says otherwise is selling. Heavy intarsia colour blocking, sharply engineered shoulder lines and some chunky low-gauge silhouettes are better executed fully-fashioned — shaped panels linked together, still near-zero waste, with more control over structure. We say which route your style wants at the feasibility stage, before anyone has paid for a sample. The comparison sits in our explainers on fully-fashioned knitwear and flat-knit versus cut-and-sew; the technique deep dive is on our WHOLEGARMENT page.
Everything we knit is OEM — your design, your spec, your name on the label. We sell no house collection of our own and resell nobody's development. Labels, care labels, swing tags and polybagging are applied at the factory; see private label production.
In our factory, yes. WHOLEGARMENT is Shima Seiki's name for flat-knit seamless construction — body, sleeves and neck knitted as one continuous piece, with no side or shoulder seams to link afterwards. Other industries use the same word for circular-knit seamless bodywear, which is a different machine class entirely.
No. Seamless leggings, sports bras, shapewear and tubular base layers are made on circular seamless machines — the Santoni-type kit used by the bodywear industry. We neither run that machinery nor broker it. Our seamless capability is flat-knit knit-to-shape: jumpers, cardigans, knit dresses, fine-gauge layers and knitted tops. If your product is circular seamless bodywear, you will hear that on the first email rather than after a sample.
No. Medical and graduated compression garments are regulated products in the UK with their own conformity and claims requirements, knitted on specialist machinery with calibrated compression profiles. That is outside our scope — we make fashion and premium knitwear for apparel brands, not medical devices.
Knitwear meeting the rules of origin under the UK–Türkiye Free Trade Agreement enters at 0% duty when a valid preferential proof of origin — an EUR.1 movement certificate or, where permitted, an origin declaration — is presented at import. Without preference, the UK Global Tariff for your commodity code applies, typically around 8–12% for knitted garments. Jumpers and cardigans normally sit in heading 6110, but confirm the exact code on the gov.uk Online Trade Tariff with your broker. The A.TR certificate belongs to the EU–Türkiye Customs Union and has no role in UK imports.
250 pieces per colour, per size — the same floor as the rest of our flat-knit production, because each size is knitted from its own machine programme. One jumper in three colours across a five-size run is 3 × 5 × 250 = 3,750 pieces. Sampling has no minimum; protos are single units.
No — we quote and invoice in USD, occasionally EUR, like most Turkish export factories. Any pound figure is a conversion for orientation, not a fixed price. Your live exposure is therefore the USD/GBP rate across the three to five months between quotation and payment, which UK brands budgeting in sterling should plan or hedge for.
Sampling runs 10–14 days from an approved tech pack, at 80–180 USD per sample. Bulk production is 45–60 days from sample approval. Road freight reaches mainland Europe in 5–7 days; sea freight to Felixstowe, London Gateway or Southampton typically runs 10–14 days. Plan roughly four months from approved tech pack to goods-in at your UK warehouse.
More answers on minimums, yarns, compliance and shipping are collected on our FAQ page.
Send a tech pack, a sketch or a jumper you like. You will get a straight read within one business day: whether seamless is right for the style, an indicative CMT band, a sample timeline — and, if we are not the right factory for what you are describing, that answer instead.
Related UK Guides
Technique
What one-piece knitting is, what it costs and when it beats a linked construction.
Read guide →Duty
How the agreement works, what it replaced, and what your broker needs at import.
Read guide →Customs
Why knit-to-shape production makes the origin position straightforward for UK imports.
Read guide →Production
3gg to 14gg — how gauge changes the hand, the price and the seamless options.
Read guide →