Sewingplums

Dragon Lady at Stitchers Guild posted a link to a fascinating article on who gets what, out of what we pay for designer clothes.

The example is ‘designer’ pants costing $550.

Out of that, the manufacturer gets $110 (20%) – which pays for materials and wages (skilled hand processing) plus overheads and profit.
The designer gets $110 (20%).

And you’re giving $330 (60% – yes the mark-up in fashion is this big) to the store to pay for all the garments they bought in but didn’t manage to sell on.

You are paying for the ambience and the choice, but that still seems rather a lot !

Putting it another way :

Materials for the designer pants cost $54 (10%).
So, if you sew your own clothes using quality materials and quality methods, what you make is worth 10 times what it cost you !

People who aren’t interested in sewing would say we should factor in the cost of our time. But for us that’s fun time. An added value, not a cost.

Or the other way round, we could even make this into a reason to buy a new machine. Hmm, $550 (RTW price) – $54 (cost of materials) = c$500 saved. Some quite good sewing machines and sergers available for that 😀

And there’s another added value, of getting something that fits. Even a high end store with an alterations service can’t get garments to fit my hips that are 2 sizes larger than my top – the seam allowances just aren’t wide enough.

The cost of a few wadders pales into insignificance. . .

So Hurrah for Home Sewing 😀

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Links available May 2010

This entry was posted on May 2, 2010 at 8:39 am and is filed under sundry messages. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Both comments and pings are currently closed.