Sourcing Work Gloves and PPE From China: Cut Levels, Coating and the Numbers Buyers Get Wrong
Gloves look like the simplest thing on a purchase order. Cotton, a dipped palm, a size run, done. Then your crew starts cutting sheet metal and the first container of gloves wears through in a week, and you find out that "cut level 5" on the spec sheet was actually an old ANSI number that maps to roughly EN 388 level C — which is not the same thing at all.
I have bought gloves from Chinese factories for years, mostly for metal fabrication and glass handling clients, and the mistakes are always the same handful. Let me go through them.
EN 388 is six numbers, not one
Under the current EN 388:2016, a glove carries a string like 4X43C. That is abrasion, circular blade cut, tear, puncture, then the TDM cut result as a letter, and optionally an impact rating as P. Buyers read the fourth character and stop. That is the error.
The old circular blade test (coupe test) has been known to give misleading results on high-performance materials like HPPE and glass fibre, because the blade dulls as it passes through. That is precisely why the TDM test was added and reported as A through F. If you are buying for glass handling or handling sharp stainless sheet, you want the TDM letter, not the coupe number.
- Abrasion (1-4): how many cycles to hole the material. 4 is what you want for anything abrasive.
- Coupe cut (1-5): legacy test, still reported, less reliable on engineered fibres.
- Tear (1-4): resistance to tearing once nicked.
- Puncture (1-4): blunt object, think wire ends and nails.
- TDM cut (A-F): the one that actually matters for sharp edges.
- Impact (P or blank): back-of-hand impact protection, usually a TPR pad.
The coating decides more than the liner
Most Chinese glove factories are liner-plus-coating operations. The liner gives the cut rating, the coating gives the grip and the wear life. A 13-gauge HPPE liner with a nitrile micro-foam palm handles oily parts far better than a smooth nitrile or a cheap PU dip. Nitrile foam is the current default for handling oily metal; PU is fine for dry electronics and small parts but it dies fast against oil.
A common trick: the factory dips the palm thinner to save compound cost and the glove passes abrasion at level 3 instead of 4. Ask for the actual test report, and check whether the tested sample matches the production gauge. Gauge is the giveaway. A 13-gauge liner is thinner and more dexterous than 10-gauge; a 15-gauge or 18-gauge liner is what you see in the better cut-resistant work gloves now, and you can count the stitches per inch to confirm it.
Ask for the third-party test report with the lab name and report number, not a PDF the factory made in Word.
Where the factories actually are
Gloves are not one cluster. The big general glove production sits across Shandong (Gaomi), Jiangsu and Zhejiang, while the more technical HPPE and nitrile-dipped work glove capacity clusters in and around Shandong and Jiangsu. Cut-resistant liners, where the HPPE yarn is knitted, is a narrower world — China largely imports the raw HPPE yarn and knits locally, so yarn origin affects both price and performance more than most buyers realise.
Sizing is not universal
Chinese factories generally run to their own numbered sizing, often mapped to palm circumference in millimetres. A "9" from one factory is not the same fit as a "9" from another. Always order size samples across your full run before a bulk order, and check the length — a glove that is right in circumference but 1cm short at the fingertip is a glove nobody wears.
What to put on the spec
- Liner gauge and fibre content (e.g. 13-gauge HPPE + glass fibre + spandex).
- Coating type (nitrile micro-foam, PU, latex crinkle) and palm versus full dip.
- EN 388:2016 performance string, specifically stating the TDM letter.
- Cuff type (knit wrist, elasticated, gauntlet) and cuff length for cut protection.
- Test report requirement, with named lab.
- Size run and packaging (pair-packed or bulk).
- Washability, if reusable — some coatings degrade after a set number of washes.
None of this is exotic, but almost none of it ends up on the first PO. Fix the spec, request the sample sizes, and confirm the test report, and glove sourcing stops being a recurring headache.