How to Cost a Garment: A Beginner's Pricing Playbook

To cost a garment, you add up everything it takes to make one unit — fabric and trims, the factory’s labor, a share of your overhead, and freight to get it to you — then apply a markup to set your wholesale and retail prices. That all-in number is your cost of goods, and getting it right is what separates a brand that makes money from one that sells out and still goes broke. If you’re pricing your first style, this guide walks through how to cost a garment without missing the hidden numbers that quietly eat your margin.

What goes into the cost of a garment?

Garment cost is built from four buckets. Miss any one and your price will be wrong.

Materials are everything physical in the piece: your main fabric, plus all the trims and labels. This comes straight off your bill of materials — fabric by the meter or yard, zippers, drawcords, buttons, thread, woven labels, care labels, and hangtags. A complete BOM is the foundation of an accurate cost, because anything you forget to list is a cost you forget to count.

Labor is what the factory charges to actually make the garment, often quoted as a CMT figure — Cut, Make, Trim. CMT covers cutting the fabric, sewing the garment, and attaching the trims. Some factories instead quote FOB (Free On Board), which bundles materials and labor into one per-unit price at the point the goods leave their country. Either way, you need a clear per-unit make cost.

Overhead is your business cost spread across each unit: pattern-making, sampling, tech packs, shipping samples back and forth, and a slice of your fixed costs. These are easy to ignore because they happen before production, but they’re real money and they belong in your number.

Freight and duties get the finished goods to you. Shipping, customs duties, taxes, and broker fees turn the factory’s quote into your true landed cost — the full cost of one unit in your hands. Price from landed cost, never from the factory quote alone.

A simple step-by-step costing method

Here’s the order I’d work in for a first style:

1. Total your materials. List every line on the BOM with its unit price and the amount used per garment (fabric consumption, trim counts). Add them up for a per-unit materials cost.
2. Add the make cost. Take the factory’s CMT or labor quote per unit and add it to materials. This is your base cost of goods before extras.
3. Add overhead per unit. Take your one-off costs — patterns, sampling, tech pack — and divide them across the run size you’re producing. Add freight and duties per unit on top.
4. Set your wholesale price. Apply a markup to your landed cost. A common starting point is roughly 2x landed cost for wholesale, though it varies by category.
5. Set your retail price. Retail is typically 2 to 2.5x your wholesale, landing many brands around 4 to 5x their landed cost — enough to survive discounts, returns, and marketing.

These multipliers are rules of thumb, not laws. Use them as a sanity check, then pressure-test against what customers in your market will actually pay.

Why does my cost per unit change with quantity?

Because fixed costs don’t move, but the number of units they’re spread across does. Your pattern, your samples, and the factory’s setup cost roughly the same whether you make 50 pieces or 500. At a low minimum order quantity, those fixed costs land on a handful of units, so each one carries more. Make more units and the per-unit overhead shrinks, but your total cash outlay and inventory risk grow. There’s no free lunch — just a trade-off between unit cost and how much stock you’re willing to sit on.

This is also why your very first run almost always has an uncomfortably high cost per unit. That’s normal. Cost it honestly anyway, rather than pretending you’ll hit big-factory pricing on a 100-piece order.

A quick costing checklist

Before you lock a price, confirm you’ve counted:

• Main fabric, at real consumption including waste
• Every trim and label on the BOM, down to thread
• CMT or labor cost per unit
• Pattern, sampling, and tech-pack costs spread across the run
• Freight, duties, taxes, and customs fees
• Payment and currency-conversion fees
• Your margin — wholesale and retail both

If a line is missing, your price is optimistic. The most common beginner mistake is costing only fabric and labor, then watching freight and trims erase the profit.

How a tech pack makes costing easier

A factory can only quote what it can see. A vague spec gets you a vague, often inflated quote, because the factory pads for uncertainty. A complete tech pack — accurate BOM, clear points of measure, and construction notes — lets a factory cost precisely and quote tighter. That’s the practical link between speccing and pricing: the better your document, the more accurate every number downstream.

This is exactly what techpacks.app is built to produce. If you’re an independent designer pricing a first line, start by getting the spec right — you can preview your first pack on screen to see the BOM and details a factory needs to quote you accurately. From there, the costing math above turns that spec into a price you can actually build a business on.

FAQ

How do you cost a garment step by step?

Add up your materials (fabric, trims, labels), add the factory’s labor or cut-make charge, add a share of overhead and freight, then apply your markup to reach a wholesale and retail price. The materials and labor together form your base cost of goods.

What is the difference between cost price and retail price?

Cost price is what it costs you to make one unit — materials plus labor plus overhead. Retail price is what the customer pays. The gap between them has to cover your margin, wholesale discounts, returns, and marketing, which is why a common rule of thumb is to retail at four to five times your cost.

Why is my cost per unit higher at low quantities?

Fixed costs like sampling, patterns, and factory setup are spread across however many units you make. At a low minimum order quantity those fixed costs land on fewer pieces, so each one carries more, which is why small first runs cost more per unit.

What is landed cost?

Landed cost is the full cost of getting one finished unit into your hands — the factory price plus shipping, duties, taxes, and customs fees. Always price from landed cost, not the factory quote alone, or import charges will quietly erase your margin.