Hello community, I am new to  embroidery and I am getting a ton of information through the this community.  I am getting the hang of using the software and setting up my Brother PR 1000.  The only subject  I am stuck on right now is embroidery pricing.  I am in So. Carolina and I know pricing will vary from state to state.  Can anyone give me an idea on where to start regarding pricing?  Does anyone have a pricing list or a matrix I can get some ideas from?  Any help will be appreciated,

Thanks,

Hi

The best thing you can do is to figure out what your costs truly are.  Thread/backing/garments aren't your only costs.  The myth of $1.00 per thousand is just that - a myth.  Put pen to paper and figure out all the costs involved which included electricity, the building or if you are in your home/garage, cost of that area, insurance, software, machinery, in other words, every little thing that goes into each garment.  You must include your time, the digitizing, hooping, etc.  Are you charging by run time on the machine?  The cost of running a garment on a single head is going to cost more than if you were running a 6 head, or even a double head.  You can only do one at a time (obviously...) so if you have a 200 piece order, it's going to take considerably longer than someone who has more heads and can output more product in the same amount of time it's taking you to run those 200 pieces.  When you compare prices, you need to be sure you are comparing apples to apples.  You can't compete with a shop who has many heads so is charging 35 cents per thousand (this is only an example). 

You may want to figure out how much you want to make from your machine per hour then go from there.  Just be sure that you do look at all the numbers involved, not just the ones we first think of like the backing/thread, etc.  Don't forget to budget maintenance costs down the road. 

You will see a variance in price also, by what you are doing.  If you are doing specialty work (and not many others are doing the same thing) you will be charging more for your expertise and the specialty availability.  It's the law of supply and demand.  Be sure too, not to be the lowest charging person in your area.  If you "go there", you'll only be competing against yourself because you'll be working longer hours for the same amount of money you would earn if you charged a higher price and did less.  People who are the lowest-charging person usually go out of business before long because they burn out. 

Jimmy Lamb has a great seminar called "How to make money in the embroidery business" and it's free, sponsored by Hirsch.  You'd have to go to the Hirsch website, under the Events tab, to see when it would be in your area.  Jimmy gives out an Excel spreadsheet that you can plug numbers into to measure costs and you can see what the true cost per thousand is for you.  If you're good with a spreadsheet already, you can create your own. 

Hope this helps!

Hi Al,

We've got a similar problem, just starting but in the UK. We really have very little true idea of costs, it's all guesswork (or should I say estimating).

Our situation is more complicated because logo embroidery is an opportunist spin off. Our embroidery facility is primarily to support the main business of irish dance wear production and selling batches of sweats and hoodies with our own big designs to the local student / crafts / cruise ship markets.

But for jobbing logo work we have had to devise a pricing policy, so done it in 2 stages by considering first the market opportunity and then its worth to us.

First we've found most of the major local embroidery shops online, looked at their pricing and used that as a benchmark in conjunction with a comparison of our strengths and weaknesses vs theirs

• our strengths: we can digitize in house, and for simple work that time can to a large degree be "lost". We only have a single head so can do very small orders efficiently.
  
• our weaknesses: we cannot do big orders efficiently because only a single head
  
• their strengths: volume
  
• their weaknesses: high (contracted out) digitizing costs hit small orders, minimum order quantities
  

so we've decided we'll place ourselves in the local small business / club market of a dozen or less garments and lose most or all of the digitizing costs

Then we've considered the worth to us. We've decided how much an hour we are worth, yes its a guess/estimate and should be based on better data, but we already know the sort of rates you need to be charging per hour as a business to get a reasonable income and the rates we are aiming for in the main business activities. Then we've decided on the absolute minimum time to hoop and run any design,  ie. at the maximum rate /hr we could get the machine loaded and run  . . . which gave us a hooping charge and also a basic minimum number of stitches included with it. We then worked out a price at continuous running. All using a conservative stitch speed. So we now have a base charge per hooping including 4400 stitches, and a charge per 1000 stitches above that.

We've also looked at garment costs. Here, if there is any fault in the garment, unless you get it back to the wholesaler within a few days of delivery to you it is your problem, and any fault after embroidery is not returnable. So we looked at garment costing on a risk basis of at least having replacement value, plus a percentage lost through embroidery muck ups. If we have a good run the markup is profit, if it goes bad we cover costs. We then decided as its a local based business there was going to be a lot of "mates rates" so we built in an additional percentage for normal customers so we had space to discount / haggle.

And then we've compared our price structure back to the local established shops to verify our pricing has hit the market how we wanted, and it looks good.

We can also "take a view" on the final price depending on circumstances and how we judge it will sell, but we have a pricing structure behind it to make sure we are within the right ballpark and know our risks.

We are now working on the next phase of costing structure which is for lines of text, using a small selection of fonts in set sizes, and working on an average number of stitches per letter with them placed into a few price bands, so we can price jobs more simply based on the customer's requirements, rather than per 1000 stitches.

Not saying its perfect, but its how we've decided to price as a starter and at the moment it looks like it slots in nicely with the rest of our business model. We'll probably totally change the basis within a year's time, but it gets us a quick and mostly rational basis for pricing jobs up.

All we need now is to get out and sell, but we're holding off actively seeking logo customers as we are still setting up for the main dance wear and arty business so don't want to get flooded and distracted with the logo work.

hope that helps you

On 2014/2/2 at 0:46 AM, Berez said:

Hello community, I am new to  embroidery and I am getting a ton of information through the this community.  I am getting the hang of using the software and setting up my Brother PR 1000.  The only subject  I am stuck on right now is embroidery pricing.  I am in So. Carolina and I know pricing will vary from state to state.  Can anyone give me an idea on where to start regarding pricing?  Does anyone have a pricing list or a matrix I can get some ideas from?  Any help will be appreciated,

 

Thanks,

 

Hello Berez,

To start the business, have you bought the embroidery machine, please? If not, maybe we can help with it. Am sales manager of embroidery machine in China. All of the machines are suitable for cap, t-shirt and flat embroidery. Some other devices can also be added to meet the sequin, coring, boring, taping, beads, shoes and leather embroidery. Feel free to contact me anytime. Thanks and have a nice day!

Nicki Wang

whatsapp; +8618696118389

skype: wonyochina

 

Best Regards

Nicki