Full Transparency

We mentioned a while ago that we might be doing this, and here you have it… the completely transparent costs involved in producing a Bento garment.

The t-shirt shown above will be available from Spring/Summer 2011 – 2012 onwards. It is produced in Australia from 100% cotton which is also made in Australia.

As a small clothing label that prides itself on using manufacturers that have all the right paperwork and pay employees fairly in appropriate working conditions, our manufacturing costs are a lot more than, say, a larger company that produces offshore.

Anyway, here are the development costs:

Pattern & toiling – $500.00
Sample fabrics – $50.00
Sampling in 2 colours – $80.00

Total for two samples: $630.00

The sample itself then needs to be photographed and so forth, but we’ll overlook those costs for the moment.

When the t-shirt goes into production, we need to ‘grade’ the original sample pattern to other sizes. Our samples are  a size 2 (8-10), which then needs to be translated into our full size range (1 – 6). The cost of this part varies on the number of pattern pieces for each garment – that is, how fiddly it is. Grading can cost a fortune if you have a large size range (one of the many reasons lots of designers don’t do an extensive size run).

For this t-shirt, it’s about $400.00

The fabric itself isn’t actually terribly expensive (approximately $3.50 per meter). Out of interest, most labels use fabric under $10.00 a meter… ours is usually more like $18.00 – $25.00 a meter. This t-shirt fabric is by FAR the cheapest we use! Average fabric allocation for the t-shirt is 1m.

Manufacturing costs are $25.00 per t-shirt.

Happily, there is no haberdashery on this t-shirt (buttons, zips, etc.) so we “save” money there, but it still has care labels and a swing tag, which account for another $1.50 per t-shirt.

So, each t-shirt costs a grand total of $30.00 to produce. We sell them to stockists for around $40.00 and they sell them to you for around $80.00.

To be clear, we’re making less than $10.00 per t-shirt. Given it cost $1030.00 to just sample and grade the t-shirts, we’d have to sell more than 100 of them to even cover just those costs alone, without paying our team a salary or covering those lookbook costs.

Sure, we could charge more for each t-shirt, but for every $1 we add to our cost, the retail price goes up $2. And really, $80.00 for a t-shirt (even though it’s amazing quality, ethically produced and entirely made in Australia) is really more than enough, don’t you think?

So there you have it. Next time you’re thinking clothing labels must be raking it in, think again.

 

Edited to add: Manufacturing costs do go down as our volumes increase, but it’s a bit of a catch 22 – if we were producing 500 t-shirts we can have them made for as little as $13 each, but we need to be able to fund the production and have orders for that number first.