What You Are Actually Paying For in a Garment Price
By The Velocity Wear Team
Buyers negotiate unit price as though it were a single number with margin hidden inside it. It is an assembly of components with very different characteristics, and knowing which is which tells you where cost can genuinely move and where pushing achieves nothing.
The components
- 1**Fabric.** Usually the largest single element. Driven by weight, composition, construction and how much is consumed per garment — including waste from cutting.
- 2**Cut, make and trim.** The labour of cutting panels and sewing them. Driven by garment complexity: seam count, panels, finishing operations.
- 3**Trims.** Labels, zips, drawcords, tapes. Individually small, collectively meaningful, and each carries its own minimum.
- 4**Decoration.** Print or embroidery, including setup amortised across the run. The component most sensitive to quantity.
- 5**Finishing and packing.** Pressing, folding, bagging, labelling.
- 6**Overhead and margin.** The factory’s costs and profit.
How the proportions shift with quantity
Setup-driven components — decoration setup, pattern and marker preparation, first articles — are fixed per run. At 20 pieces they are a large share of the unit price; at 1,000 they are almost invisible.
Fabric and sewing are per-garment and fall much more slowly, mostly through better buying and line efficiency. This is why volume discounts are steep at first and flatten out: our tiers run from base at 20–49 to up to 40% off at 1,000+, and most of that movement happens in the early tiers as setup is absorbed.
Where cost can actually be reduced
- **Fabric weight.** The most direct lever. A lighter fabric is meaningfully cheaper — and also a different, less durable product, so this is a specification decision rather than a saving.
- **Colour count in decoration.** Each screen is setup and press time. Three colours instead of six is a real reduction.
- **Garment complexity.** Fewer panels, simpler finishing, fewer operations.
- **Trims.** A printed neck label rather than a woven one, a simpler drawcord. Small individually, and they add up.
- **Quantity,** which moves the setup share more than anything else available.
Where pushing achieves little
Negotiating a manufacturer’s margin down on a small run rarely produces much, because the margin is not the large component — setup and fabric are. A supplier who cuts price without any specification change is either taking a loss they will recover elsewhere or was overcharging, and neither is a good basis for a relationship.
The more productive conversation is "here is my target price, what would you change to reach it". That produces options — a different fabric weight, a simpler decoration, a higher quantity — and you choose which trade you are willing to make.
The comparison that matters
Compare quotes on the same specification. Two prices for "a hoodie" are not comparable if one is 280 GSM and the other 400 GSM, one has a woven label and the other does not. Most apparent price differences between suppliers turn out to be specification differences once you look.
