Fabric Price Calculator
How to Calculate The Price For Your Fabric
Our calculator is designed to be simple and easy to use. It covers:
- your base costs of time
- salary
- materials
It also allows you to input a desired profit margin on top.
We hope this calculator helps you make more money for your online fabric store.
Please input below:
Learn more about starting an online fabric store:
Where to start?
-> How to start an online fabric store?
-> How much does it cost to start an online fabric store?
-> Pros and cons of an online fabric store
Need inspiration?
-> Other online fabric store success stories
-> Examples of established online fabric store
-> Marketing ideas for an online fabric store
-> Online fabric store slogans
-> Online fabric store names
Other resources
More Tips On Pricing Your Fabric
How To Price Your Fabric
One of the most challenging aspects to starting an online fabric store is determining how much to charge for your fabric.
When businesses under-price their product, this can be extremely detrimental to their bottom line and reputation.
Often times, businesses under-price their products to drive demand and volume, but that last thing you want is for customers to view your product/service as "cheap." Additionally, this can have a big impact on the type of customer you attract, which can be difficult to recover from.
On the other hand, when businesses over-price, this tends to be just as damaging to the business.
When customers buy, it's likely that they will explore the internet and look at other competitors to ensure they're getting the best value + deal. This is why it's so important that you research your competition and understand where you land in the marketplace.
Here are some factors to consider when pricing your product:
Understand your customer
It's important that out of the gates, you identify the type of customer you want to attract and how much they're willing to pay for your service. One great way to do this is by surveying your customers. Here are some important items you'll want to takeaway:
- Customer demographic: Age, gender, location, etc.
- Buying habits of your customer: What they buy + when they buy
- Level of price sensitivity with your customer
All of these segments will help you identify the type of customer you're attracting and how to price your product accordingly.
Understand your costs
When pricing your fabric, it's critical that you first identify all of your costs and consequently mark up your fabric so you can factor in a profit.
The actual cost of your fabric may include things like:
- The actual cost to make the product (ie. raw materials, supplies, manufacturer).
- Shipping + overhead fees
- Rent
- Operating costs to run your business
You may want to consider creating a spreadsheet with every single expense involved in operating/owning your business. This will give you an idea as to what you need to generate in order to at the very least, break-even and will help you price your products to factor in a profit.
Create revenue goals
When determining the price of your fabric, you'll want to create goals for revenue + how much profit you want your online fabric store to make.
This process is simpler than you may think:
- Think about your breakeven cost (by completing the above step).
- Create a revenue goal based on your break-even cost
- Evaluate the # of items you plan to sell in a given period (make sure this is a realistic number)
- Divide your revenue goal by the number of items you plan to sell
This figure will help determine your estimated price per product in order to meet your revenue goals.
Evaluate your competition
The last piece in determining how to price your fabric is by simply looking at your competition.
The best way to do this is by finding like-minded businesses that offer product(s) with similar perceived value. Then, you can compare prices of the different businesses and determine where your fabric fits best in the marketplace.
All of these factors play an equal part in pricing your fabric, so it's important you evaluate each one individually to come up with an accurate price that will help optimize your business from the start.
Lauren Costanza, founder of Bluminary provides us with a detailed spreadsheet of all of her costs associated with running her business:
I knew this would be a self-funded adventure, and I set aside $3,000. During the first three months, I had a detailed spreadsheet where I tracked where the money was going and what was going toward products versus researching and developing new products.
The spreadsheets involved columns and rows of numbers to craft a budget and gain an understanding of how much would need to be invested at each stage of the process - from gathering supplies to building a website, and shipping materials.
Examples of a successful online fabric store:
. The Fabric Loft ($120K/year)
Chantelle Taylor & Brenda McArthur (from Okotoks, AB, Canada) started The Fabric Loft over 10 years ago.
Hi - my name is Alanna Banks and I’m the owner of Fridays Off Fabric Shop. Fridays Off is an online fabric store based in Toronto, Canada that supplies fabric enthusiasts, quilters and makers with beautifully curated modern fabrics.
In addition to that, we operate a monthly fabric subscription club where subscribers receive one-of-a-kind bundles of fabric every month.
. Puppet Pelts ($120K/year)
Laurie Nickerson (from Las Vegas, Nevada, USA) started Puppet Pelts over 10 years ago.
My name is Laurie Nickerson and I and the co-owner of Puppet Pelts. At Puppet Pelts, we manufacture and sell hand dyed fabric used for puppet skins to professional puppet builders around the world.
Our Pelts are made from a textile that is really only used for puppets. It is a wonderfully stretchy nylon fleece fabric that is milled in the United States. We buy the fabric in white and dye it a bunch of colors to sell to our customers.
Hey! 👋 I'm Pat Walls, the founder of Starter Story.
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