Garment costing: the ten categories behind a CM price

Most garment factories can quote a CM figure quickly and very few can say what is inside it. That is fine right up until a buyer pushes on price, and then the negotiation happens entirely on instinct because nobody can point at which part of the number is real.

This guide takes the cost apart in the order the garment is made, so the number has parts you can defend individually.

First, agree what CM includes

CM means different things at different factories, and that alone accounts for a lot of apparently large price differences between suppliers.

The ten categories, in production order

1. Fabric — from the marker, not from memory

Fabric consumption per garment comes from the marker, including the loss the marker cannot avoid. It is normally the largest line in an FOB cost, which is why it has its own guide.

Use fabric **issued to the cutting room**, not the area of the pattern pieces. End bits, ply loss and roll ends were bought.

2. Trims and accessories

Thread, interlining, labels, buttons, zips, elastic, hangtags, polybags. Count them on one sample garment and multiply — this is tedious once and then it is done for the whole style.

Thread is the one people skip because it is cheap per meter. It is not zero per garment, and on a heavily topstitched style it is not small either.

3. Cutting

Spreading, cutting, bundling, numbering. Costed per garment by dividing the cutting room's time for a lay by the pieces it yielded.

4. Sewing — where the minutes live

This is the block CM is really about, and it is costed as **standard minutes times cost per minute, divided by line efficiency**. That calculation is the subject of its own guide because it is where most of the errors are.

5. Finishing

Thread trimming, pressing, folding, inspection. Often costed as part of sewing, which hides it — keep it separate if you can, because it scales with garment count rather than with sewing complexity.

6. Rejects and seconds

Garments that fail final inspection. Value them at the point they failed: a garment rejected after finishing has consumed fabric, trims, sewing and finishing.

7. Rework

Unpicking and resewing. Usually recorded as a percentage of output; if your factory genuinely reworks nothing, enter zero rather than leaving it blank.

8. Outside processing

Printing, embroidery, washing, dyeing, laser finishing. Vendor price for the lot divided by pieces, plus transport both ways, plus the pieces the vendor damages if you carry that.

9. Packing and freight

Polybags, cartons, tape, desiccant, plus the freight arrangement your incoterm actually obliges you to pay. Cartons are costed per garment as a fraction — a carton holding many pieces contributes a share.

10. Factory overhead

Building, power, supervision, quality staff, compliance and audit costs. Allocate on total sewing minutes and use the same basis every time; compliance in particular is a real and growing cost that has nowhere else to go.

Three checks before quoting

1. The sheet says whether it is CM, CMT or FOB.
2. Fabric is issued quantity, not pattern area.
3. Sewing cost has line efficiency applied — see the next guide, this is the most common single error.