What is a Cost/Costing Sheet for Fashion Design?

A cost sheet for fashion is a detailed breakdown of all the expenses associated with producing a garment. This includes material costs, labor costs, overheads, and other miscellaneous expenses. Cost sheets help designers and fashion brands budget and figure out their pricing.

Fashion Design Cost Sheet Example

Here’s an example of a cost sheet for fashion design. It includes all material and labor costs associated with the garment, including fixed costs and variable costs.

A cost sheet allows you to estimate the total cost of producing a garment or item (a dress, handbag, shoe, or any other item) before going into production. Accurate costing means you can set realistic retail prices that will make a profit.

What Influences Garment Production Costs?

The main costs that affect garment production include fabric, labor, dyeing, and additional processing requirements.

• Fabric Cost: The type and quality of fabrics.
• Labor Costs: Cheap labor vs skilled workers.
• Dyeing Cost: Custom colors or patterns add to production costs.
• Additional Processing Requirements: Special treatments like embroidery or printing.

Tech Packs and Garment Cost Sheets

A cost sheet may be part of your tech pack, but it may also be created separately.

In my decade+ long career as a fashion designer, I always kept cost sheets separate. There were often too many costs that were spread across multiple styles (i.e., a mold charge for a custom zipper pull that was on 3 designs) that it didn’t make sense to calculate costs at the tech pack level.

Whether or not you include costing in the tech pack, your TP will help with accurate garment costing since it has all the data needed to calculate costs.

Here’s what to include in your tech packs:

• Technical Sketches: Detailed flat sketches that show accurate construction.
• Fabric Details: Type, weight, composition, and dyeing process.
• Trims and Accessories: Buttons, zippers, labels.
• BOM (Bill of Materials): List of all physical components required for production.
• POM (Points of Measure): Size chart with measurements for all POMs for each size.
• Finishing Processes: Washing, pressing, folding.
• Packing Requirements: Packaging materials, labeling instructions.

Tech Pack Example

Here’s an example of a tech pack for fashion design. It includes all the parts mentioned above, and like I mentioned, tech packs may or may not include the actual cost sheet.

If you’re not sure how to create a tech pack, I’ve got a free step-by-step guide you can follow.

Parts of a Cost Sheet for Fashion Design

A garment cost sheet usually has two main parts:

1. Material costs
2. Processing costs

Each of these parts can be broken down into specific categories.

Material Costs Breakdown

Raw materials for a finished garment will include every physical component required to create the finished design.

This includes the obvious such as fabric, trims, buttons, and zippers.

But it also includes packaging items like hangtags, tissue and cardboard inserts, a poly bag, or a hanger.

Basically, any physical item required to make the finished product must be included in your material costs.

Material expenses will vary depending on the quality and quantity needed for your production.

For example, if you buy 50 yards of fabric or 50 hangtags, the price per piece will be much higher than buying 500. And obviously, the higher quality the material, the higher the cost.

You’ll need to start sourcing suppliers for quotes based on your needs so that you can build that into your garment costing sheet. 

Here’s a quick checklist for materials costs:

• Fabric Cost: The price per yard or meter based on type (e.g., cotton), weight (GSM), and width (inches/cm).
• Dyeing & Printing Cost: Expenses associated with dyeing fabrics in desired colors or printing patterns / graphics.
• Trims & Accessories Cost: Expenses related to items like buttons, zippers, labels, etc.
• Packaging Cost: Expenses for packing materials like hangtags, poly bags, tissue, hangers, etc.

Processing Costs Breakdown

Processing costs are expenses for turning raw materials into finished products.

This includes labor such as cutting, sewing, pressing, finishing (attaching closures/buttons/labels/etc.), and packaging final garments. Sampling costs should also be considered here.

Here’s a quick checklist for processing costs:

1. Manufacturing Costs: Expenses in production including cutting/sewing/finishing a garment, shipping, etc.
2. Design Costs: Expenses incurred pre-production such as designer/patternmaker fees.
3. Development Costs: Expenses for things like prototypes, photo samples, mold fees, garment testing, etc.

The Challenge With Processing Costs 

It’s a little tricky to do accurate costing for parts of design and development that are fixed costs. 

Let’s say your patternmaking expense is $1000 for one design.

You (or your client) plan to manufacture 100 of those designs.

Your patternmaking expense per garment would be $10 (i.e., 1000 ÷ 100 = 10). 

But if you manufacture that design again (in new colors, or just order more inventory), your patternmaking expense would be cut down as it’s now spread across more units.

You can imagine how this gets tricky with all sorts of costs!

The safest way to do this is assume design and development costs need to be absorbed in the first round of production.

If you cannot cover that $10 patternmaking cost per design, then you need to get a lower-priced patternmaker (usually not a great idea!), increase your sell price, accept lower margins, or cut costs somewhere else.

And then, if you do manufacture that design again, margins will increase as you have no patternmaking costs (yay!).

Free Customizable Fashion Cost Sheet Template Download

The best garment costing sheet format is in Excel (or other spreadsheet software that can do math). But they’re a pain in the butt to make from scratch!

Which is why I created a free cost sheet template you can download. It’s compatible with Excel, Google Sheets, or Numbers. It’s got all the formulas you need to calculate costs.

Just input the details for your garment design, and it will show you what your costs will be, including suggested wholesale and retail pricing.