Pricing Denim Jackets for Resale
By The Velocity Wear Team
Price a denim jacket for resale from landed cost, not from the from-price. Landed cost is the garment at $38 upward at fifty pieces, plus decoration, plus freight, plus the share of the £150 sample spread across the run. Work that figure out first, decide the margin you need, and only then look at what similar jackets sell for.
What is your landed cost per jacket?
Add the garment, the decoration, the freight and the sample, then divide by the number of jackets you will actually sell rather than the number you ordered. That last distinction is where most first drops go wrong. Fifty jackets ordered and forty sold is a different cost base from fifty sold, and the difference belongs in the price rather than in a surprise at the end of the season.
The garment side of that sum starts on our wholesale denim jackets page. Freight for outerwear is worth confirming rather than assuming, because denim weighs more than the same count of tees and the shipping line moves accordingly.
How do you set a retail price you can defend?
Pick the multiple your business needs rather than the one the internet suggests. A brand selling direct carries marketing, returns and platform fees; a brand selling through stockists is handing over a trade margin as well. Those are different businesses and they cannot run the same multiple on the same landed cost.
Then sanity-check the number against what the jacket looks like in the hand. A washed denim jacket with an embroidered chest mark and a woven neck label reads as a considered product. A rigid jacket with a single small print reads as a simpler one. Buyers price what they can see, so the spec you chose is part of the argument for your figure.
Does ordering deeper improve the margin?
It improves the unit cost. Tiers run from 50–99 through 100–249, 250–499, 500–999 and 1,000 upwards, with up to 35% off the fifty-piece price at the deepest end, and the pricing page lays that out. Whether it improves the margin depends on sell-through, because unsold stock carries its full cost and returns nothing.
The conservative route for a first drop is fifty, sold out, followed by a deeper reorder at a better tier. The aggressive route is a hundred at a lower unit cost with the second fifty carrying the risk. Neither is wrong; what matters is that you priced for the one you chose. Denim jackets for clothing brands: cost goes further into how the tiers read for a brand.
What eats the margin after the invoice?
Returns on outerwear are usually a sizing problem rather than a quality one, and denim is less forgiving than jersey because it does not stretch to cover a near miss. Publish measurements taken from your own sample rather than a generic size chart. Packaging, payment fees and the cost of photographing the drop are the other three that rarely appear in the plan and always appear in the accounts.
Set aside a handful of jackets from the run for replacements, press and your own team. They are not lost margin if you priced the run knowing they were coming out of it.
Once the drop has run, go back and rebuild the sum with real figures rather than the forecast ones. Count what sold at full price, what sold in a later promotion, what came back and what is still in the box. That final number is your actual margin per jacket, and it is the only honest input into the next order. Brands that skip this step repeat the same optimistic split and the same optimistic price twice more before they notice. Fifty jackets is a small enough run that the arithmetic takes an afternoon, and it is the least expensive market research a denim line will ever get.
