Cost & Quoting

Apparel Cost Per Garment: How to Build a Defensible Cut and Sew Quote

A breakdown of what actually moves cost per garment, fabric, trims, CM labor, dyeing, and overhead, plus how to assemble a quote buyers cannot pick apart and the five places estimates blow up.

On a typical woven shirt, material is 55 to 65 percent of ex-factory cost, so it dominates the quote. Fabric cost per garment equals consumption times price plus wastage: 1.55 m of shell at 4.20 dollars per m is 6.51 dollars, and at 82 percent marker efficiency you are already paying for the 18 percent buffer inside that number. A single point of marker efficiency on a 100,000 unit order at these prices moves fabric cost about 8 cents per unit, or 8,000 dollars. Use the Fabric Yield Calculator and Marker Efficiency tool to lock consumption before you price anything else.

Trims and thread are small per unit but they are where quotes silently leak. Buttons, zippers, labels, interlining, and poly bags commonly total 0.60 to 1.40 dollars on a shirt, and thread adds 3 to 6 cents. Estimators who plug a flat trim percentage instead of a bill of materials miss 10 to 20 cents when a garment carries metal hardware or woven labels. Price each line from the actual BOM through the Trim Cost per Garment and Thread Consumption calculators, then add 3 to 5 percent for trim wastage and minimum-order overages that never fully consume.

Cut-make labor is priced from SAM times your loaded minute rate, not from a headcount guess. If the garment is 14.5 SAM and your fully loaded sewing minute costs 0.09 dollars (wages, benefits, supervision, and idle time built in), direct sewing labor is 1.31 dollars. But that assumes 100 percent efficiency; at a realistic 55 percent line efficiency the effective cost is 1.31 / 0.55 = 2.38 dollars. This single adjustment is the most common quoting miss. The Cut and Sew Labor and Sewing Line Balance tools convert SAM and efficiency into a defensible labor figure.

Dyeing and wet processing are batch costs, so cost per garment swings with lot size. A dye batch with fixed chemical, water, steam, and labor of 900 dollars spread over 1,200 kg of fabric is 0.75 dollars per kg; at 0.28 kg per garment that is 21 cents. Run the same recipe on a 300 kg sample lot and the fixed cost per kg quadruples to 3.00 dollars, pushing 84 cents per garment. Quote small color lots separately. The Dye Batch Cost and Dyehouse Capacity calculators expose this fixed-cost dilution so you do not average a sample lot against bulk.

Overhead and scrap are the layers estimators underweight. Factory overhead, rent, machinery depreciation, maintenance, QA, and management, typically adds 12 to 20 percent on top of direct material and labor. Scrap and rejects add more: at a 4 percent cutting-plus-sewing reject rate you must produce 104 to ship 100, so every good unit carries the cost of 0.04 defective units. On a 6.00 dollar direct cost that is 24 cents of hidden loss. Track it with the Apparel Rework Rate and Fabric Defect Density tools rather than burying it in a round-number contingency.

Assemble the quote in layers so a buyer can audit each one: material (shell plus lining plus trims plus thread), direct labor (SAM times minute rate divided by efficiency), wet processing per unit, then overhead percent, then scrap uplift, then margin. A shirt might read 7.90 material, 2.38 labor, 0.21 dye, 2.10 overhead at 16 percent, 0.42 scrap at 4 percent, subtotal 13.01, then margin. The Garment Margin calculator turns target margin into selling price and back-solves the markup, so you can show exactly how a 40 percent gross margin becomes a 21.68 dollar FOB price.

Five failures cause most bad quotes. First, using CAD marker efficiency of 88 percent when the floor runs 82, understating fabric 7 percent. Second, quoting labor at standard SAM without the efficiency divisor, a 45 percent understatement. Third, averaging sample dye lots into bulk pricing. Fourth, treating shrinkage-driven extra fabric as free. Fifth, omitting quantity breaks, where minimums, changeovers, and setup on a 500-unit run can double per-unit overhead versus a 10,000-unit run. Quote the order you actually have, at the efficiencies you actually run, and every line should survive the buyer's cost breakdown.

Published 2026-07-01.