Here is what happens most of the time.
A maker in Lagos, Accra or Lomé produces a sample for an international brand. The brand is pleased with the sample and places a production order. The maker commits materials and labour. The goods are completed. The brand delays payment, contests the quality, reduces the agreed quantity, or simply goes quiet. The maker has produced goods they cannot sell to anyone else, incurred costs they cannot recover, and has no commercial relationship with anyone in the country where the brand is registered to escalate the dispute to.
This scenario is not unusual. It is a documented feature of the power asymmetry between small Global South producers and international fashion brands operating without local presence, local accountability, and, in most cases,t a written contract whose terms were established before production began.
The maker has three practical options: negotiate a resolution with the brand; escalate through formal channels; or write off the loss and walk away. For a well-capitalised brand with legal representation in a jurisdiction with functioning commercial courts, the escalation pathway is real. For most Global South makers, the escalation pathway exists in theory and is inaccessible in practice: the cost of cross-border legal action exceeds the value of most disputes, the documentation required to support a claim may not exist, and the time required to pursue any formal process is time the maker cannot afford to take from production.
The most effective dispute resolution in fashion is found not in courtrooms but in aligning technical specifications and establishing transparent production milestones before production begins. The contract before the sample, the payment schedule tied to verified milestones, the email record that constitutes a binding commitment: these instruments protect the maker. After the goods are made, the leverage has already moved to the brand.
The maker who has not been paid, credited, or received the delivery they were promised faces three options: negotiate, escalate, or walk away. For Global South makers, the escalation pathway is narrow, expensive and structurally inaccessible. This article documents what exists, what is missing and what makers can do before, during and after a commercial relationship to protect themselves.
The Structural Problem
The power asymmetry between an international fashion brand and a Global South maker is structural, not incidental. It is built into the geographic architecture of international fashion commerce: the brand is in the market where customers are, the maker is in the market where production is, and the legal systems that protect commercial parties sit primarily where the brand is.
As Foley & Lardner documented in its March 2026 analysis of supply chain disputes in beauty and fashion, very few disputes in the fashion supply chain space generate published legal decisions, even though persistent disruption has turned supply chain performance into a central litigation risk for fashion companies. Courts are now closely scrutinising whether placeholder purchase orders and email exchanges create binding commitments, particularly where minimum order quantity and capacity decisions are at stake. A binding contract may form from an email exchange where essential terms, including product, quantity, price and duration, are sufficiently definite, even without a formal written agreement.
The legal principle that an email exchange can constitute a binding contract is useful to makers who have email records of a buyer’s commitment. It is much less useful when the maker is in Nigeria, and the buyer is in the United Kingdom,, and enforcing that email-based contract would require cross-border legal proceedings in a jurisdiction the maker cannot access.
As documented in the analysis of the structural differences between manufacturing hubs in 2026, sourcing from regions with high legal accountability provides a layer of protection that simply does not exist in traditional sourcing hubs where legal recourse is nearly impossible for small brands. The analysis is written from a brand’s perspective. Still, the same dynamic applies from the maker’s position in reverse: a maker in a jurisdiction with limited legal infrastructure, whose buyer is in a jurisdiction with strong legal infrastructure, faces the same practical impossibility of cross-border enforcement that the brand faces when sourcing from the same location. Distance and language barriers work against enforcement for both parties, but they hit the smaller, less-resourced party harder.
What the Maker Can Do Before the Problem Arises
The most effective protection against non-payment, non-credit and non-delivery is not legal action after the fact. It is the documentation structure established before the production begins.
The Contract Before the Sample
As Omiren Styles has established, in its analysis of what a fair fashion contract should protect before the first sample is made, the contract established before production begins converts a commercial relationship from a goodwill arrangement into a legally supported commitment. Before requesting a sample, establish the terms: the payment schedule, the kill fee, intellectual property ownership, the quality standard, the lead time, the cancellation terms, and the revision-round limits. A maker who has produced goods under documented terms is in a substantially stronger position when a dispute arises than a maker who has produced goods on verbal or email agreement alone.
For makers who are new to international commercial relationships, the contract before the sample is also a screening mechanism: a buyer who refuses to sign a basic production agreement before a sample is made is a buyer whose commercial intentions deserve scrutiny before the maker commits any resources.
The Paper Trail
The email chain is the maker’s most accessible and most frequently underused legal asset. Courts have confirmed that binding contracts can form from email exchanges where essential terms are sufficiently definite. The maker who confirms every verbal agreement in a follow-up email, who copies all parties on material decisions, who creates a dated written record of the buyer’s commitments, the production milestones achieved and the buyer’s acknowledgement of completion, has a paper trail that is available in any jurisdiction whose courts will hear the dispute.
The specific emails that matter: the confirmation of sample approval by the buyer (a dated email saying ‘the sample is approved’ is evidence that the quality standard was met); the confirmation of the production order quantity, price and delivery date (preferably a signed purchase order, but an email from the buyer confirming these terms is also evidence); the buyer’s acknowledgement of delivery receipt; and any communication in which the buyer raised or failed to raise quality objections within the contractually or commercially established window.
The maker who discovers after a dispute begins that they have no documented record of the buyer’s approval, the agreed price, or delivery confirmation will negotiate from the weakest position. The documentation is not a formality. It is the evidence.
Staged Payments Tied to Milestones
A payment structure that ties each payment to a verifiable production milestone protects the maker at every stage of the relationship rather than leaving all the financial risk at the end. A deposit at sample approval (which confirms that the buyer has approved the quality and intends to place an order), a second payment at production start (which confirms the order is active and covers the maker’s raw material cost), and the balance on delivery against inspection (which ties the final payment to confirmation of delivery rather than to the buyer’s subsequent commercial decisions): this structure ensures that the maker’s exposure at any single moment is limited to the work done since the last milestone payment.
The maker who agrees to produce an entire order before receiving any payment has given the buyer the goods without receiving anything in return, and is then dependent entirely on the buyer’s commercial goodwill and financial position for payment. This is the most exposed commercial position a maker can be in, and it is more common in Global South production relationships than in developed-market relationships because power asymmetry allows buyers to insist on payment terms they would not achieve in higher-leverage markets.
What the Maker Can Do During the Problem
When payment delays, quality disputes, or cancellations arise during an active production relationship, the maker’s most important initial action is documentation: record every communication, every commitment, and every deadline that passes without fulfilment.
Written Communication Only
At the first sign of a commercial dispute, the maker should move all communication to written channels and confirm all phone conversations in follow-up emails: ‘Further to our call today, I understand that payment will be made by [date].’ This creates a dated record of the buyer’s commitments that can be used in any subsequent escalation.
Formal Notice
If payment has not been received by the contractually or commercially established date, the maker’s first step should be a formal written notice stating that payment is overdue, naming the amount, naming the original due date, and stating a reasonable further period within which payment is required. Send the notice by a method that provides delivery confirmation: email with read receipt, registered post, or both. The formal notice is not only a commercial communication. It is the first step in an escalation pathway that formally puts the buyer on notice that the obligation has not been met.
Withholding Future Deliveries or Production
A maker who is in the middle of a production run when a payment dispute arises has a specific form of commercial leverage: the ability to pause or withhold future deliveries until the outstanding payment is addressed. This leverage exists only while the maker still holds goods or production capacity that the buyer wants. The maker who completes a full production run and ships all goods before addressing a payment dispute has given up this leverage.
The decision to withhold future deliveries requires commercial judgement about the value of the ongoing relationship versus the risk of non-payment on the completed work. A buyer who is slow to pay but has consistently paid eventually is a different commercial situation from a buyer who has gone quiet, reduced their order size without agreement and stopped responding to formal notices. The maker who can distinguish these situations early has more options than the maker who waits for clarity until the leverage is gone.
What the Maker Can Do After the Problem
When negotiation has failed, the maker who wants to escalate formally has a set of options whose practical accessibility depends heavily on the jurisdiction of both parties, the existence of a written contract, the value of the dispute and the maker’s available resources.
Local Legal Action
In many Global South jurisdictions, the maker can pursue a claim against a foreign buyer in the maker’s own local courts. The claim may succeed in obtaining a judgment. Enforcing that judgment against a foreign company with no local assets is a separate and typically more difficult step. Local legal action is most useful when the buyer has local representation, local assets or a local commercial relationship that can be reached through local enforcement.
Small Claims and Mediation Where Available
For disputes of limited value, small claims procedures (where available in the maker’s jurisdiction) offer a lower-cost escalation route than full litigation. Mediation, where both parties agree to participate, offers a faster and cheaper resolution route than any court process. Some industry bodies and trade associations in both the maker’s and the buyer’s jurisdiction offer mediation services for commercial disputes.
Reputational Escalation
In the age of social media and creator economy accountability, a well-documented, publicly shared account of a brand’s non-payment or non-credit of a maker’s work can have commercial consequences for the brand that formal legal escalation cannot achieve at the same cost. A maker who has an email trail confirming a buyer’s commitment, a record of goods delivered, and a record of non-payment or non-credit, and who shares that documentation publicly, is doing what the heritage content caption accountability framework this series has argued for does in the cultural sphere: making the extraction visible at the point where the brand’s commercial reputation is most sensitive.
Reputational escalation carries its own risks: the brand may contest the account, the maker may face retaliatory commercial pressure, and the documentation must be sufficient to support the account made. It should not be a first step. But it is a real option for makers whose formal legal options are inaccessible and whose documented evidence is strong.
Industry Body and Platform Reporting
Brands that operate through fashion trade platforms, stockist networks and industry bodies may be subject to those bodies’ codes of conduct, which may include provisions for dispute resolution or sanctions against members for commercial misconduct. A maker with evidence of non-payment by a brand that is a member of an industry association, or a supplier on a platform with a code of conduct, can escalate through those channels, which may be more practically accessible than cross-border legal action.
What Is Missing
The current landscape of maker protection in Global South fashion commerce has specific gaps whose closure would substantially improve makers’ practical position in commercial disputes.
The first gap is the contract infrastructure gap. Most Global South fashion production relationships begin without written contracts, and most makers lack access to standard-form production agreements with terms fair to both parties and proven enforceable. Industry bodies, trade associations and development organisations that support African fashion could close this gap by developing and distributing standard-form contracts designed specifically for use by African and Global South makers in relationships with international buyers.
As Omiren Styles has established in its analysis of the documentation gap in fashion supply chains, the things the fashion supply chain fails to record are precisely the things whose documentation would make extraction harder to disguise and exploitation harder to sustain. The maker’s payment record, the delivery confirmation, the approval email: these are the specific documents whose existence changes the maker’s position in any dispute. The infrastructure that would make these documents standard practice rather than the exception in African fashion production relationships is a training, tooling and standard-setting investment rather than a legal reform.
The second gap is the arbitration infrastructure gap. Cross-border commercial disputes between parties of significantly different commercial size are poorly served by both domestic court systems and international arbitration, because domestic courts may not reach foreign assets and international arbitration is expensive relative to the value of most maker disputes. A regional arbitration mechanism specifically designed for fashion supply chain disputes in African markets, modelled on existing sector-specific arbitration mechanisms in other industries, would provide a lower-cost escalation pathway than is currently available.
The third gap is collective representation. Individual makers pursuing individual disputes against individual brands are in the weakest commercial position available. Makers collectively represented through cooperative structures, trade associations, or community organisations have access to shared legal resources, shared reputation leverage, and the ability to present a pattern of brand behaviour rather than a single disputed transaction. The investment in collective maker representation is the investment that would change the structural power asymmetry this series has been documenting throughout.
The Omiren Argument
The maker in Lagos who has produced goods that a brand has not paid for has a legitimate claim whose practical enforceability depends on documents they may not have, jurisdictions they cannot access and commercial leverage that evaporated the moment the goods left their hands.
The argument for what should change is the same argument that runs through every article in this series: the current commercial architecture of African fashion is built to serve the party at the end of the supply chain rather than the party at the beginning. The brand that can order, approve, delay, contest and cancel from a position of legal and commercial protection in its own jurisdiction is not more commercially sophisticated than the maker. The institutional architecture around it more commercially protects it.
Changing those terms requires three investments simultaneously: the documentation culture that makes the paper trail standard before production begins; the contract infrastructure that converts informal relationships into enforceable commitments before the goods are made; and the collective representation structures that give individual makers the institutional standing that individual action does not provide.
As Omiren Styles has argued throughout this series, the Global South made fashion and never got credit. The maker’s recourse question is the most immediate and most personal expression of that argument: where can a specific person go when a specific brand has taken what they made and not paid for it, not credited it, not delivered what they promised in return? The answer is not yet adequate. Building toward an adequate answer requires documentation infrastructure, contract standards and collective representation that are investments the African fashion ecosystem needs its institutions to make. Until those investments have been made, the most useful thing this series can do is name the problem, name what exists, and name the gap between them.
ALSO READ
- What a Fair Fashion Contract Should Protect Before the First Sample Is Made
- The Documentation Gap: What Fashion Supply Chains Still Fail to Record
- The Price of Craft: How Fashion Brands Can Cost Handmade Work Without Erasing Labour
- What Makes a Fashion Manufacturer ‘Verified’? A Practical Framework for Emerging Brands
- The Global South Made Fashion. It Just Never Got Credit.
Frequently Asked Questions
What can a maker do when a brand does not pay after goods have been delivered?
The immediate steps are: send a formal written notice stating that payment is overdue, naming the amount, the original due date and a reasonable further payment period, by a method that produces delivery confirmation; compile all written evidence of the commercial relationship, including order confirmation, production approval, delivery confirmation and any payment commitments made in writing; and consider whether the goods remaining in the production pipeline, if any, can be withheld pending payment. If these steps do not produce payment, the practical escalation options for Global South makers include: pursuing a claim in the maker’s own jurisdiction (which may obtain a judgment but has limited cross-border enforcement); reporting to industry bodies or platforms that operate a code of conduct covering the brand; escalating reputationally with documented evidence; and, where a written contract with a dispute resolution clause exists, initiating the specified dispute resolution process.
Can an email exchange between a maker and a brand create a legally binding contract?
Courts in 2025 and 2026 have confirmed that email exchanges can constitute binding contracts when essential commercial terms,, including product, quantity, price, and duration,, are sufficiently definite in the exchange. A buyer’s email confirming an order quantity, a delivery date and a price, followed by the maker’s performance with the buyer’s knowledge, may create a binding commitment even without a formal written agreement. The practical implication for makers is that email records are legal evidence of commercial commitments, and every email confirming an order detail, a quality approval or a delivery receipt should be retained as potential evidence. Enforcing such a commitment against a foreign buyer in a cross-border dispute remains a practical challenge separate from the legal question of whether the contract exists.
What is the most effective way to prevent payment disputes as a maker?
As documented in analysis of overseas supplier dispute resolution, the most effective dispute resolution is not found in courtrooms but in aligning technical specifications and establishing transparent production milestones before production begins. A written contract before the sample is the single most effective step a maker can take: it establishes the payment schedule, the kill fee, the quality standard, the revision terms and the cancellation provisions before any resources are committed. A payment schedule tied to verifiable milestones protects the maker at each stage rather than leaving all financial risk at the end. A complete email trail confirming each commitment and each milestone creates the evidence base that any subsequent dispute requires.
Can a maker withhold production or delivery if a brand does not pay?
A maker who holds goods or production capacity that the buyer wants has commercial leverage that disappears once those goods are delivered. If an agreed milestone has not received payment and the maker holds remaining production or completed but unshipped goods, the maker can withhold and/or delay delivery pending payment, subject to the terms of any written contract. This leverage must be exercised while the maker still holds the goods: the maker who completes and ships a full production run before addressing a payment dispute has given up all commercial leverage over the outstanding payment. The decision requires commercial judgement about whether the payment dispute reflects a temporary delay or a systematic problem and about the value of the ongoing relationship against the risk of non-payment.
What structural protections are missing for Global South makers in fashion commerce?
Three specific gaps affect makers’ practical position in commercial disputes. The contract infrastructure gap: most Global South fashion production relationships begin without written contracts, and standard-form production agreements designed for use by African and Global South makers in relationships with international buyers are not yet widely available. The arbitration infrastructure gap: existing mechanisms poorly serve cross-border commercial disputes between parties of significantly different commercial size, because domestic courts may not reach foreign assets, and international arbitration is expensive relative to the value of most maker disputes. The collective representation gap: individual makers pursuing individual disputes are in the weakest available commercial position; collective representation through cooperative structures, trade associations or community organisations provides access to shared legal resources, shared reputation leverage and the ability to present patterns of brand behaviour rather than isolated transactions.
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Read the full Industry and Production and Manufacturing sections at Omiren Styles for ongoing analysis of maker rights, production contract standards and the institutional investments that would change the structural power asymmetry between Global South makers and international fashion brands. Discover travel and heritage intelligence across Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America at Rex Clarke Adventures.
