How to price bespoke tailoring, from fabric cost to your margin

A bespoke price has five parts, and none of them should be a guess. There is the fabric, counted by the metre off the roll. There are the trims, the buttons, zip, lining and thread that go into that one garment. There is the labour, the time your tailor spends cutting and stitching it. There is a share of your overhead, the rent, power and wages that run whether or not this job comes in. And on top of all four sits the margin, the profit you actually want to make. Add the first four to know what the garment costs you, then add the margin to reach the price. Do it in that order and you will never sell below cost by accident.

Fabric is the easy part to cost and the easy part to under-count. You buy cloth on a roll and use it by the metre, so a garment's fabric cost is just the metres it takes times what the metre cost you. A kandura might take three and a half metres; at AED 20 a metre that is AED 70 of cloth before a stitch is sewn. Trims are the line most shops forget: buttons, a zip, collar stiffener, lining and thread come to little each, but leave them out of every quote and they add up to real money over a month. Give each garment type a standing trims figure and include it every time.

Labour is where pricing gets vague, because time is harder to see than cloth. There are two honest ways to cost it. The first is by the hour: track roughly how long a garment takes and multiply by an hourly rate that reflects what you pay your tailors. The second, and the one most shops find easier to hold to, is a flat stitching rate per garment type, so a kandura is always AED 90 of labour and an abaya always its own figure, no stopwatch needed. Whichever you pick, set it high enough to cover a tailor's time properly. Labour costed too cheap is the most common reason a busy shop still struggles to make money.

Rent, electricity, machine servicing and the wages of anyone not sewn into a single job still have to be paid, so a slice of them belongs in every price. A simple method: total your monthly running costs, divide by the number of garments you turn out in a typical month, and carry that as an overhead share on each job. Only once all four costs are in do you add the margin. Decide the profit you want the job to make, as a figure in dirhams or a percentage on top of cost, and add it last, never first.

A price that shifts with whoever is at the counter costs you twice: you lose money on the low quotes and goodwill on the high ones. The remedy is a written rate list, the standard price for each common garment worked out once from the costing above, so a new hire and the owner give a customer the same figure. Save your own judgement for the genuinely unusual job. Keep the list where the whole shop can see it, and revisit it when fabric prices move, because a rate list built on last year's cloth costs quietly eats into your margin.

Two kinds of job quietly eat profit. A rush order that jumps the queue disrupts everything behind it, so a rush surcharge is fair, a set percentage or flat amount added when a customer wants work faster than your normal turnaround. Extra fittings are the other. One fitting is part of the price; a customer who comes back three and four times for fresh changes is buying more of your tailor's time than the quote allowed. Decide up front how many fittings the price covers and what a further one costs, and say so when you take the order. And take a deposit on every bespoke job: it pays for the fabric you are about to cut for one person, and it commits them to collecting.

TailorSync will not price a job for you, and no honest system can, since only you know your own rates. What it does is hold the two numbers every price is built from on each thing you sell. Each fabric and each stitching service carries a cost, what it costs you, and a sell price, what you charge, and the app shows the margin between them, so you can see at a glance whether a line makes money. Fabric is costed by the metre, the way you buy it, and the worth of everything on your shelves is totalled at cost. Put your real labour cost on a stitching service with its charge beside it, and the margin on your labour stops being a guess. Then, when you write the order, record the deposit the customer pays: the balance rides on the order itself, marked Paid, Partial or Unpaid, so what is still owed is never kept in a separate book.