Pricing your product in the modern age is hard. Even the simplest of garments, following basic retail math (and without the luxury of being a corporation that buys in bulk) can very easily come out to more than the average consumer is willing to pay. How then does one convince said consumer to part with their hard earned money in the era of Shein and Amazon?

This is no rhetorical question that leads me to tell you the solution. I am not the consumer in question, dear reader, you are. And it is to you that I pose this question.

I have a pattern for a very cute cropped hoodie which takes roughly 2 yards of fabric to make, 1 very small specialty zipper, and can be sewn up rather quickly. An inexpensive but not overly cheap (i.e. crappy) fabric, some self-respect, throw in a little overhead percentage, do some proper markups and the math says to charge $223 for it. This covers the materials, the labor and my years of experience, a tiny percentage of the enormous amount of “other stuff”* and then what your wholesale should be, finally landing at your retail rate which probably made someone gasp at the audacity.

*Other stuff that goes into your overhead is literally ALL THE STUFF that has to be built in. The fee the credit card company charges, the cost of the website, internet costs, the electricity used, photography, packaging, hang tags and on and on…these are the costs of doing business and a teeny tiny portion (we’re talking a couple of bucks) of that gets built into the price of each product to help keep the business going.

Perhaps I could give you the absolute cheapest clearance fabric, charge nothing for my labor and calculate nothing for my overhead costs and present it to you for $55. Which is probably towards the top end of what someone would want to pay for a crop hoodie. And if I do that, while I do make something off of it, I’m cheating myself out of everything that I need for me and business to just make ends meet…not even grow. But once you start pricing it higher than the competition…you start losing potential customers.

So, how does one convince you to part with your hard earned money for a cropped hoodie? Does it interest you that it’s made in a smallish town in Texas? Are you a “support small business” kind of person? You enjoy the idea of fair wages and encourage people to follow their dreams? I guess I do have a solution to how to convince you…I have to find the right you.