Why there is no price list
Every month, someone publishes a table of “average garment manufacturing costs by country”. These tables are almost always unusable, for four reasons:
- They do not state a specification. “T-shirt” covers a range in which the fabric alone varies by a multiple.
- They do not state a quantity. Cost per unit at 500 pieces and at 50,000 are different numbers describing different economics.
- They do not state a basis. Factory gate, FOB, CMT or landed? These differ by enough to reverse a sourcing decision.
- They do not state a date. Material, energy and freight costs move. A cost table without a date is a cost table that will be trusted long after it stopped being true.
Publishing such a table would be easy and would attract traffic. It would also be the single fastest way to destroy this platform’s usefulness, because the number would be quoted without its assumptions and someone would place an order against it.
What this page gives instead is the structure — the components of garment cost, which ones move, how to build your own cost sheet, and how to tell whether a supplier’s quotation is credible. That is durable in a way a price list is not.
The five components
A garment’s factory price is the sum of five things. Understanding which dominates for your product is most of the analytic work.
1. Material
Fabric, trims, hardware, labels, packaging.
Fabric is measured by weight and bought per kilogram or per metre, so the cost is driven by three things: the price of the yarn, the weight of the fabric (GSM), and the consumption per garment — how much fabric a single unit uses after cutting waste. Consumption is where specifications are quietly changed: a garment cut with a tighter marker uses less fabric, and it is rarely visible in the finished product.
Trims are individually small and collectively significant: zips, buttons, rivets, thread, interlining, drawcords, elastic, labels, hangtags, polybags. A trims list that omits the last four is a quotation that will grow.
Consumption is the number to check. Asking a supplier for fabric consumption per garment, in the specified width, is one of the most revealing questions available — because it converts a lump-sum quotation into something that can be verified against a marker.
2. Cut, make, trim (CMT) labour
The cost of converting fabric into a garment: cutting, sewing, finishing operations, pressing and packing.
This is driven by operation count and cycle time, not by garment size or appearance. A garment with more panels, more seams, more topstitching or more attachments takes longer to make regardless of how simple it looks. Two T-shirts in the same fabric can differ substantially in CMT because one has a chest pocket, side vents and a taped neck, and the other does not.
This is also where minimum wage, productivity and factory efficiency enter. Two factories in the same city, paying the same wage, can have materially different CMT because one has better line balancing, supervision and machine uptime.
3. Finishing and washing
Garment dyeing, washing, distressing, coating, printing, embroidery, and any treatment applied after construction.
For some products this is a minor line. For others it is the defining cost:
- Denim — laundry treatments are the product. Multiple wash cycles, hand scraping, laser or ozone treatments and chemical finishing are each a cost.
- Garment-dyed knits — dyeing after construction changes the risk profile and the cost, and requires the dyehouse to see the actual fabric.
- Print and embroidery — priced by method, colours and positions. Screen printing has a setup cost per colour per position; digital has a lower setup and a higher running cost. Embroidery is priced largely by stitch count, which is why a detailed logo is more expensive than the size of it suggests.
4. Factory overhead and profit
Power, rent, machinery depreciation, supervision, quality control, compliance staff, and margin.
This is the component most opaque to buyers and the one where country differences concentrate. Energy is a real and often large part of it. In Pakistan, for instance, the sector’s own reporting identifies energy cost as its principal competitiveness problem relative to regional competitors, and identifies financing constraints for small and medium-sized manufacturers — both of which sit in overhead and therefore in the unit price.
Overhead is also where refund timing matters. Where a manufacturer waits months for a sales tax or income tax refund, that delay ties up working capital, and some of the cost of carrying it appears in the price. This is not something a buyer can negotiate away, because it is not a margin decision — it is a cash flow one.
5. Compliance and testing
Testing and certification: fibre composition, colourfastness, shrinkage, pilling, dimensional stability, restricted substances, and any buyer-specific or market-specific requirement.
Individually modest, collectively not, and frequently omitted from a cost sheet until the buyer asks for it. Two things to establish early:
- Who pays for testing, the factory or the buyer, and at which stages.
- Which tests are required, by the destination market and by your own quality standard, and what the failure rate implies for rework.
Compliance overhead is also where a supplier’s existing certification position matters commercially. A factory that already holds the certifications you need amortises that cost across all its customers. One that must obtain them for your order will charge you for the whole thing.
How to build your own cost sheet
The structure below is the minimum useful version. Building it takes an afternoon and it changes the quality of every quotation conversation that follows.
Step 1 — Fix the specification. Fabric composition, construction, weight with a test method, width, colour, finish. Trims listed individually. If the specification is loose, the cost sheet is fiction.
Step 2 — Get fabric consumption per garment. In the specified width and in the specified fabric. Not a guess: the number a factory would use for its marker.
Step 3 — Get the trims cost per garment. Itemised. Compare it against your own list to find what was omitted.
Step 4 — Establish the CMT charge, and ask what the operation count is. If the answer is “it’s a simple garment”, ask again — operation count is a number, and a factory that quotes CMT can produce it.
Step 5 — Add finishing, itemised by process, not as a single line.
Step 6 — Ask explicitly what is excluded. This is the most valuable question in the whole exercise. Exclusions typically include testing, certification, sample costs, freight, duty, and artwork or print setup.
Step 7 — Convert to landed cost. Add freight, insurance, duty and any non-recoverable taxes. Only now are two quotations comparable.
Step 8 — Date it and record the assumptions. A cost sheet without its date and assumptions is a number waiting to be misused — including by you, six months from now.
How to tell whether a quotation is credible
Five checks, in order of how often they reveal something:
1. Ask for fabric consumption. A supplier who cannot state it in metres or kilograms per garment, at the specified width, has not costed your product — they have estimated it. That may still be fine at the enquiry stage, but it is not a quotation.
2. Ask what is excluded. Then ask again. The list of exclusions is where the real price lives.
3. Ask for the trims list. Compare it against the tech pack. Missing labels, hangtags, polybags and packing materials are the most common omissions, and they are not trivial in aggregate.
4. Ask what changes at a different quantity. Request the same quotation at half and at double the volume. The shape of the curve tells you whether the first number is dominated by fixed setup or by variable cost — and therefore whether there is any saving available in volume.
5. Ask what happens if a test fails. A supplier who has not thought about the answer is a supplier who has not thought about the specification.
What a credible quotation looks like: a breakdown, not a lump sum; stated exclusions; a stated basis (FOB, CMT, landed); a stated validity period; and a willingness to discuss consumption and operation counts.
What an uncredible one looks like: a single number, a very low one relative to alternatives, and no breakdown. The attractive quotation with no structure behind it is the classic shape of a first order that becomes a dispute.
The comparison that actually matters
Buyers compare unit prices. They should compare landed cost, and the difference is regularly large enough to change which quotation is better.
| Layer | Included? |
|---|---|
| Material, labour, finishing, overhead, margin | Factory price |
| + Inland transport to port, export documentation | FOB |
| + Freight, insurance | CIF |
| + Duty, import VAT, customs clearance | Landed |
| + Any non-recoverable tax | Landed, and frequently forgotten |
| + Financing cost over the production and transit period | Often forgotten entirely |
The last two lines are where cross-country comparisons most often mislead. A non-recoverable tax in one country can erase a unit price advantage entirely, and financing cost over a long production and transit cycle is a real cost that does not appear on any quotation. A country with a lower unit price and a longer shipping time can be the more expensive choice once the money is accounted for.
This is also why cost and geography belong together rather than in separate analyses. The country comparison framework published at compare countries applies the same criteria to every country precisely so that cost can be compared on a consistent basis — including the components that a unit price leaves out.