A stitch count tells you how much sewing is in a design. It does not tell you what it costs to buy the garment, prepare the artwork, hoop it, inspect it, or take payment. A defensible quote starts with those separate costs.
Start with a measured job
Take the stitch count from your digitized file. Use a measured effective sewing speed rather than the maximum speed on the machine. Record handling and setup time separately. These observations are more useful than importing another shop’s price per thousand stitches.
- Blanks: the landed cost of the garment or patch substrate.
- Production consumables: thread, bobbin, stabilizer, and other supplies consumed while making each piece.
- Labor: setup, hooping, finishing, and paid attention during sewing.
- Machine cost: an hourly allocation for ownership, maintenance, power, and related machine costs. Exclude labor already entered separately.
- Order costs: digitizing, outsourced work, shipping subsidy, or a specific expense not entered elsewhere.
Budget for rejects deliberately
For an order of 24 accepted pieces and a 3% reject allowance, the model budgets 24.74 production attempts. That is a cost allowance, not a prediction that a fraction of a garment will be made. The machine cycles are then rounded up to ensure enough capacity is budgeted.
Machine cycles = round up(expected attempts ÷ occupied heads)
Blanks and production consumables are charged against attempts. Packaging is charged only against the accepted pieces. Setup and digitizing are charged once for the order. If a reject repeats the artwork or requires a different garment replacement value, include that additional exposure in your own inputs.
A worked 24-polo example
Here is an illustrative order using the calculator’s sample values: 8,000 stitches, one head, 600 effective stitches per minute, 2 minutes of stops per cycle, 3 minutes of handling per attempt, and 20 minutes of setup. Labor is $20.00 per hour, paid sewing attention is 25%, and machine cost is $3.00 per hour. These are sample assumptions, not market rates.
| Cost | Order amount |
|---|---|
| Garment blanks | $148.45 |
| Thread, bobbin & backing | $11.13 |
| Packaging | $8.40 |
| Hands-on labor & attention | $63.35 |
| Machine running cost | $19.17 |
| Digitizing | $25.00 |
| Other order costs | $0.00 |
| Total modeled cost | $275.51 |
Solve for margin after payment fees
A 30% margin means retaining 30% of pre-tax sales as modeled profit after the costs and fees you entered. It is different from adding 30% to the cost.
[1 − percentage fee × (1 + tax rate) − target margin]
The sample uses a 3% payment fee, a $0.30 fixed fee, no tax, and a 30% target margin. Its unrounded target is $411.65. Rounding each item up to the next $0.50 makes the quoted unit price $17.50, the order price $420.00, and the modeled margin 31.3%.