How to Price Your Clothing Products (Without Guessing)
Pricing is where clothing brands quietly win or lose. Too low and you can't fund growth; too high and nothing moves. Here's a simple way to price that isn't a guess.
Start with your true landed cost
Your landed cost is everything it takes to get one finished unit to you — production, trims, and shipping/duties. A DDP (delivered duty paid) quote makes this easy, because customs and freight are already folded into one number. You can't price properly until you know this figure.
The markup rules brands use
A common starting point: wholesale at about 2× your landed cost, and retail at about 2–2.5× wholesale (often called "keystone" pricing). So a unit that lands at $10 might wholesale around $20 and retail around $45–50.
- Landed cost: $10
- Wholesale: ~$20
- Retail: ~$45–50
Don't price from your cost alone — price from your customer's perception. A strong brand earns the right to charge more than the maths suggests.
Price for your market, not just your spreadsheet
Cost-plus is the floor, not the answer. A premium, considered brand with a real story (organic fabrics, transparency, design) can and should charge more than a generic blank. Look at where you sit in the market and price to match the promise you're making.
A worked example
Numbers make this concrete. Take a mid-weight organic cotton tee at 300 pieces, and follow the money rather than the theory.
| Line | Per unit | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Manufacturing (DDP) | $9.00 | Fabric, cut & sew, trims, QC, duty and freight in one landed number |
| Labels, hangtag, polybag | $0.60 | Easy to forget at quoting stage; not optional |
| Amortised sampling | $0.40 | One sample round spread across 300 pieces |
| True landed cost | $10.00 | This is the number to price from — not the $9.00 |
| Wholesale (2x) | $20.00 | What a stockist pays you |
| Retail (2.2–2.5x wholesale) | $44–50 | What the customer pays in a shop |
The instructive part is the gap between $9.00 and $10.00. Brands that price off the manufacturing quote alone lose that dollar on every unit, and at direct-to-consumer margins it is the difference between a healthy product and one that funds nothing.
The costs most brands forget
Landed cost is only the beginning. These sit between your product and your actual profit, and none of them appear on a factory quote:
- Payment processing — roughly 2–3% of every direct sale.
- Returns — apparel runs high, and a returned garment is rarely resold at full price.
- Storage and fulfilment — per-order picking and packing, plus warehousing on stock that has not sold yet.
- Discounting — if you plan a sale, plan the margin that survives it rather than discovering it afterwards.
- The reorder — selling out is only good news if you kept the cash to make more.
Pricing a small first run without looking expensive
Short runs cost more per unit, which tempts new brands into one of two mistakes: pricing high enough to preserve the margin and stalling, or pricing at market and quietly losing money on every sale. Neither is necessary if you are honest about what the first run is for.
A first production run is research. Its job is to prove that people will buy the product, and to hand you a sealed sample and a pattern you can scale. Price it at the market rate you intend to hold, accept a thinner margin on the first hundred, and let the price break at 500 or 1,000 pieces restore it — that is exactly what those breaks exist for. What you must not do is set a launch price you cannot afford to keep, because raising a price later costs more goodwill than starting slightly higher ever would.
Leave room for reality
- Discounts and sales
- Returns and faulty units
- Marketing and platform/transaction fees
- A margin healthy enough to reorder and grow
Want an accurate landed cost to price from? Send us your product and we'll come back with an indicative DDP figure. Related: how much it costs to manufacture clothing.
Frequently asked questions
How do I price my clothing products?
Begin with landed cost per unit, not factory cost. Landed cost means manufacturing plus freight, import duty, customs clearance and inland delivery — the figure your goods actually cost sitting in your warehouse. Brands that price from the factory quote alone consistently discover their margin was smaller than they thought. From there, a common structure is roughly 2x landed cost to wholesale and 2 to 2.5x wholesale to retail, producing a 4 to 5x keystone from cost to retail. That multiple can look greedy until you subtract what it has to cover: returns, payment processing, marketing, discounting, sampling that never became a product, and the stock that does not sell. Price for the range, not for the single unit.
What is a good profit margin for a clothing brand?
A 50 to 70% gross margin at retail is the common working range, though the right figure depends heavily on how you sell. Direct-to-consumer brands can run at the higher end because they capture the full retail price, but they also carry the entire cost of acquiring each customer. Wholesale margins are thinner per unit and the volumes larger, with the retailer absorbing customer acquisition. The mistake worth avoiding is treating gross margin as profit. Between the two sit returns, discounting, marketing, sampling costs and unsold inventory — and discounting in particular is chronically underestimated, because almost every brand ends a season with stock it has to move. Model a realistic discount rate into your pricing before launch rather than after.
How much should I mark up clothing?
The conventional structure runs roughly 2x from landed cost to wholesale, then 2 to 2.5x from wholesale to retail, giving a 4 to 5x total from cost to shelf. Treat it as a starting frame rather than a rule. Two things push it around. Positioning: premium brands sustain higher multiples because the price itself signals quality, while value brands operate on thinner margins and higher volume. And channel: if you sell only direct, you technically capture the whole markup but pay for every customer yourself, which frequently costs more than a wholesale margin would have. If a multiple that low leaves you unprofitable, the problem is usually upstream in the product cost or the order size, not in the pricing formula.
Where this applies
The manufacturing pages this guide relates to, if you are costing a real run.
Free tools & guides for this
Sources & further reading
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