Tools
What will it cost to make?
Build up a cost-to-make and a landed cost from the garment, the fabric, the quantity and the market — with every input named and every assumption exposed.
What this does
This estimates a cost-to-make and a landed cost per piece for apparel manufactured in Pakistan, from garment type, fabric, fabric weight, quantity, trim level and destination. It returns a band, not a price, because no factory has seen your specification. Every input is either sourced or labelled an assumption.
Enter the product and the quantity. The model rebuilds the cost from first principles rather than from a lookup table, so the output moves when an input moves — and the table underneath it shows exactly which input moved the number. If you disagree with a figure, you can see which line to argue with.
Do not get burned on your first order.
The First Order Kit — Five working documents for a first production order: a sample approval form, a production timeline tracker, an inspection checklist, a fabric sourcing brief and a factory question sheet. Written from orders actually run, not from a template library. See what is inside.
The assumptions, in full
A calculator that does not publish its inputs is a random number generator with a nice interface. These are ours, and the output table repeats the relevant one beside each line.
Sourced inputs
- Labour floor. PKR 40,000 per month — the notified minimum wage for unskilled workers in Punjab and Sindh, effective 1 July 2025. At 26 days × 8 hours that is 3.21 PKR per minute.
- Cut-make rate. Direct labour is not the cost of making something — a factory charges for the machine, the supervisor, the building and its margin too. The rate used here is the wage multiplied by 4.5, giving $0.0515 per standard minute. The multiple is calibrated so that labour lands in the 12–18% share of FOB that the ILO and Better Work cost studies imply, and it is an assumption rather than a published figure.
Assumptions, stated as assumptions
- Fabric prices are modelled mill prices for each quality band, not quotations. They are the input most likely to be wrong for your order, and the one worth replacing first.
- Consumption per garment is a typical pattern at a stated fabric weight, plus cutting waste, and scales linearly with weight. Your marker efficiency will differ.
- Currency. Everything is converted at PKR 280 to the dollar. Change this one number and the whole output moves — a weaker rupee makes a Pakistani quote more competitive in dollars without anything improving inside the factory.
- Duty is a placeholder rate by destination. Duty is product-specific and, into the United States, has changed repeatedly since 2025. Check the current rate for your HS code before you use the landed figure.
- Freight is modelled as sea LCL at $1.10 per gross kilogram to Europe or North America. Air freight is not modelled, and rates move with fuel and season.
- Recoverable taxes are excluded. VAT or GST that a registered business reclaims is not a cost, and including it would inflate the landed figure for anyone who can recover it.
- The band is 12% either side. That is our judgement of how far an unquoted specification can move a price — not a statistical confidence interval, and not a tolerance anybody has agreed to.
What this cannot tell you
It cannot quote your order. It has not seen your specification, your trims, your packing, your tests, your delivery date or your factory. Two factories given the same brief frequently come back 20% apart, and the gap is usually in what each one assumed the brief left out. This tool narrows the range you should expect to see. It does not replace the quotations.
This is a model, not a quotation
Nothing here is a price from a factory, an offer, or a commitment. It is a documented estimate built from the inputs listed above, several of which are our assumptions rather than published rates. Use it to sanity-check a quotation and to see which line is driving a difference — not as the number you put in a business plan.
Where to take this next
If the figure came out where you expected, the next constraint is usually quantity, not price — see how MOQ is actually set and the MOQ estimator. If it came out higher than you hoped, the line to look at first is fabric: where a t-shirt's cost actually goes breaks the same structure down in prose. And if you would rather have someone run the order than model it, that is what this desk does.