Bespoke pricing
Published 4 June 2026 ยท Updated 5 June 2026
Price from three things together: your labour hours, your materials, and the number of revisions a piece is likely to take, then add your margin on top.
Most studios that lose money price from materials alone and treat their own time as free. That single habit, charging for the cloth and forgetting the hours, is the most common reason a bespoke studio works flat out and still cannot pay itself properly.
The method, plainly
01
Work out how long the piece genuinely takes you: cutting, sewing, fittings, finishing. Multiply by an honest hourly rate for skilled work in your region. This is the number most studios leave out, and it is usually the largest real cost in a bespoke piece.
02
Fabric, lining, thread, fastenings, anything consumed by the piece. Use what you actually paid, including the offcuts you cannot reuse, not a rounded-down guess.
03
A bespoke piece is fitted, adjusted, sometimes remade in part. Build an honest allowance for that into the price at the start. Studios that price as if every garment goes right first time lose the difference every time one does not, which is most of the time.
04
Labour plus materials plus a revision allowance is your cost, not your price. Your price is that cost plus the margin that lets the studio grow, not just survive. A studio running on no margin is one slow month away from trouble.
05
Take enough up front to cover your materials and a meaningful share of your labour, so that if a client walks away mid-commission you are not left carrying the loss. A deposit is not a formality, it is the line between a quiet cancellation and a real one.
The studios that price well are not the ones charging the most. They are the ones who know their own numbers: their true hours, their real material cost, their honest revision rate, and price from them every time, rather than guessing from what feels reasonable or matching what the studio down the road charges.
Keeping those numbers in your head, or in a notebook that walks out of the studio, is where the method breaks. TexoIQ was built for exactly that, the pricing, the client, the measurements, and the invoice in one place, made for studios that take their craft seriously.
Common questions
Because they count the fabric and forget the hours. Labour is usually the largest real cost in a bespoke piece, and most studios losing money have never calculated what an honest hourly rate for their skill actually costs per garment.
The right price is one built from your actual inputs: your hours on that garment, the materials it consumes, an allowance for revisions, and the margin you need to keep the studio solvent. There is no single correct figure because it depends on your region, your rate, and the garment.
Yes. A fitting is skilled work and it is part of producing the garment. A bespoke piece that takes three fittings has three fittings worth of labour in it and the price should reflect that.
Because most bespoke garments need at least one adjustment. Studios that price as if everything goes right first time absorb the cost of every revision in silence. Building the allowance in at the start means the price is honest from the first quote.