Take the tech pack's measurements, fabric and trim list, give them to an AI tool with your fabric price, factory quote and overheads, and ask it to build a line-by-line cost sheet: fabric consumption, trims, CMT (the factory's cut-make-trim charge), extras, landed cost, overhead, then price from your target margin. Check consumption against your pattern maker's marker.
The AI is a good arithmetic and structure assistant here, and a weak source of facts about your fabric or factory. It will produce a tidy sheet whatever you feed it, so the value is in feeding it real quotes and testing its answers. The worked example below costs a sweatshirt at $25.32 and shows why the wholesale margin is far thinner than the retail one.
What a tech pack gives the cost sheet, and what it does not
A tech pack (technical package) is the document you send a factory: sketches, measurements, fabric and trim specifications, construction notes, labels and packing. For costing, five parts matter: the bill of materials, the measurement chart, the construction notes, the artwork or print details and the packing instructions. If you are still building one, AI tools for clothing brands from sketch to tech pack covers how to draft it.
What the tech pack does not say is just as important. It does not give the price of anything. It does not give the marker length, which depends on how the pattern pieces are laid on the fabric. It rarely mentions sample costs, freight or duty. A cost sheet fills those gaps with numbers from quotes, and flags with a clear label whichever ones are still estimates. I would colour estimated cells yellow and quoted ones white, so nobody mistakes a guess for a quote when the sheet goes to a buyer or a bank.
The main example: a heavyweight crew sweatshirt
Take an illustrative small label ordering 500 sweatshirts in four sizes (S to XL) from a factory. Fabric is brushed-back fleece, cuttable width 160 cm, at $6.80 a metre. The factory has quoted $6.50 a piece for cut, make and trim, and a one-colour chest print costs $0.85 a piece. All figures here are made up for the example.
Step one: fabric consumption
Your pattern maker lays one set of S, M, L and XL on the fabric width and finds the marker is 6.0 m long. That is four garments, so 6.0 / 4 = 1.50 m each. Add an allowance of 4% for spreading, end loss and shrinkage: 1.50 x 1.04 = 1.56 m per garment. At $6.80 a metre the main fabric costs 1.56 x 6.80 = $10.61 (10.608 rounded).
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Buy nowStep two: trims and packaging
- Rib knit for neck, cuffs and hem: 0.25 m at $5.20 a metre = $1.30.
- Thread: $0.18.
- Woven main label, care label and size label: $0.20 together.
- Hang tag with string: $0.15.
- Polybag: $0.08.
- Share of the carton, at $2.50 for a carton of 25: $0.10.
Materials and trims come to 10.61 + 1.30 + 0.18 + 0.20 + 0.15 + 0.08 + 0.10 = $12.62.
Step three: making, printing and landing it
Add CMT at $6.50 and the print at $0.85. Goods value so far: 12.62 + 6.50 + 0.85 = $19.97. Then add inbound freight at $0.55 a piece and an illustrative import duty of 10% of the goods value (about $2.00). Your own duty rate depends on the garment's classification and where you import to, so ask a customs adviser and enter the figure they confirm, not the one an AI tool offers.
Step four: overhead, development and quality
Overhead at 8% of the goods value: 19.97 x 8% = $1.60. Sample and development cost of $400 spread over 500 pieces: $0.80. A 2% allowance for seconds and rework: 19.97 x 2% = $0.40.
The full sheet:
| Line | Basis | Per garment |
|---|---|---|
| Main fabric | 1.56 m x $6.80 | $10.61 |
| Rib, thread, labels, tag, bag, carton | quotes and estimates | $2.01 |
| CMT | factory quote | $6.50 |
| Chest print | one colour, quote | $0.85 |
| Goods value | sum of the above | $19.97 |
| Inbound freight | estimate | $0.55 |
| Import duty | 10% of goods value (illustrative) | $2.00 |
| Overhead | 8% of goods value | $1.60 |
| Development and samples | $400 / 500 | $0.80 |
| Quality allowance | 2% of goods value | $0.40 |
| Total cost | $25.32 |
The "rib, thread and so on" row is 1.30 + 0.18 + 0.20 + 0.15 + 0.08 + 0.10 = $2.01. Total cost is 19.97 + 0.55 + 2.00 + 1.60 + 0.80 + 0.40 = $25.32.
Step five: price and margin
A target gross margin of 60% on retail means price = cost / (1 - 0.60) = 25.32 / 0.40 = $63.30, which rounds to a $64 price point. At $64 the margin is (64 - 25.32) / 64 = 60.4%. A wholesale buyer who expects to pay half of retail pays $32, leaving 32 - 25.32 = $6.68, a margin of 20.9%. That figure, before shipping to the buyer and any payment terms, explains why many labels hold a higher wholesale price or lower the cost before they agree to a wholesale programme. For more on holding a floor, tiered wholesale pricing with margin floors works this through.
The prompt that builds the sheet
Give the AI every figure you have and label the ones you do not. Ask for the arithmetic in a table, with an assumptions column, so the output is checkable.
Build a cost sheet for one garment from the tech pack summary below.
Tech pack summary: heavyweight crew sweatshirt, sizes S-XL, brushed-back fleece,
rib at neck, cuffs and hem, one-colour chest print, woven main label, care label,
size label, hang tag, polybag. Order 500 units.
My figures (treat these as given):
- Marker: 6.0 m for one set of S, M, L, XL on 160 cm cuttable width
- Fabric $6.80/m; rib $5.20/m, 0.25 m per garment
- CMT $6.50; print $0.85; freight $0.55
- Trims: thread $0.18, labels $0.20, tag $0.15, polybag $0.08, carton share $0.10
- Overhead 8% of goods value; $400 development over the run; 2% quality allowance
- Duty rate: UNKNOWN, use 10% as a placeholder and mark it ESTIMATE
Tasks: 1) consumption per garment with a 4% allowance, showing the sum;
2) the full line-by-line sheet with a column for source (quote, estimate, rule);
3) selling price for a 60% gross margin and the margin at $64 retail and at
half-retail wholesale; 4) list every line that is an estimate; 5) list anything
in the tech pack that I have not priced.The last task catches silent omissions, and it works best when you paste the full tech pack rather than a summary. A realistic reply (illustrative) might note that the construction notes call for a printed neck label as well as the woven one, which has no price, and that the polybag is priced but the barcode sticker many retailers ask for is not. Both are small, and small lines add up across 500 pieces: a missed $0.10 is $50 on the order.
Where AI consumption estimates go wrong
Ask AI for consumption without a marker and it will use a rule of thumb: roughly so many metres for a sweatshirt of this size. Rules of thumb are reasonable as a first reaction and bad as a number to order against. Two mistakes cost real money.
Quoted width versus cuttable width. A mill may list a fleece as 170 cm wide, but selvedges and any uneven edge reduce the usable width. If the cuttable width is 155 cm and you assumed 160, consumption rises by roughly 160 / 155 = 1.032, so 1.56 m becomes about 1.61 m, and fabric cost rises from $10.61 to about $10.95, an extra $0.34 a garment or $170 over 500 pieces. Always cost from the cuttable width stated by the mill or measured on a sample.
Average across sizes. The marker above averages four sizes. If your sales skew to the largest sizes, the average cost per garment sold is higher. Weight the consumption by the size mix you expect: if XL uses 1.70 m while S uses 1.30 m and most orders are M to XL, the blended figure rises (the full sum is worked through further down). Ask the AI to compute it from your mix, and ask the factory to confirm.
Trims: the lines people forget
Trims are the small items sewn in or added before the garment ships. A garment with a fastener, drawcord, eyelets, buttons, interlining and a care label has more trim lines than fabric lines, and each one has a minimum order, a lead time and a wastage rate. Ask the AI to read the tech pack and produce a trims table with quantity per garment, including spares: a shirt with six buttons usually needs a seventh in the polybag, and a wastage allowance for buttons lost in sewing.
A filled-in fragment for an illustrative button-front shirt: six front buttons plus one spare plus two cuff buttons per sleeve (four) = 11 buttons at $0.06 = $0.66; interlining 0.12 m at $1.40 per metre = $0.17; thread $0.20. If the AI returned nine buttons because it allowed one button per cuff instead of two, the shortfall is two buttons ($0.12) a shirt, which is small until the factory stops at 480 shirts and waits for a delivery of buttons. Ask the AI for the quantity of each trim for the whole run, rounded up to the supplier's pack size. That exposes minimum order issues before you commit.
Comparing two factory quotes honestly
A cost sheet becomes a decision tool when it compares quotes. Say Factory A quotes $6.50 CMT with a 500-piece minimum, and Factory B quotes $5.90 with a 1,000-piece minimum. On the sheet the CMT difference is $0.60 a garment, which at 500 pieces looks like $300 saved. But Factory B forces a 1,000-piece order. Rerun the sheet at $5.90 CMT with the $400 development cost spread over 1,000 pieces and each sweatshirt costs about $24.20, yet the extra 500 tie up 500 x $24.20 = $12,100 in stock you may not sell this season. Putting the two quotes in adjacent columns, with the cash committed at the foot of each, stops a small saving from hiding a large risk. Vetting a supplier and planning a sample order covers how to ask the right questions before you get to quotes.
A mistake that cost a style its margin
Here is how it typically happens, in an illustrative case. A label costs a jacket at $31.40 with a chat tool, prices it at $79, and finds after delivery that the margin has gone. The tool read "lining" in the tech pack and priced a standard polyester lining at $1.90 a metre. The designer meant a bonded lining at $4.60 a metre, and that detail sat in a construction note, not the bill of materials. At 1.2 m of lining that is (4.60 - 1.90) x 1.2 = $3.24 a jacket. Across 300 jackets it is $972 of margin that nobody planned for. The fix is a rule: any material mentioned in the notes must also appear in the bill of materials with its price source, and the AI's last task, "list anything in the tech pack that I have not priced", becomes the first step of the routine.
Checking the finished sheet in ten minutes
- Re-add the totals. Recalculate the goods value and total in the spreadsheet with a SUM, not with the AI's total.
- Trace every white cell to a quote. Keep the quote email or PDF named in the source column.
- Test a 10% fabric rise. Fabric at $7.48 a metre gives 1.56 x 7.48 = $11.67, up $1.06 a garment. If your price cannot absorb that, you know where the risk sits.
- Check the overhead basis. A percentage of goods value applied to a cheap style and an expensive style charges the same share, which may not reflect the work involved.
- Ask a second pair of eyes. Your pattern maker confirms consumption; your factory confirms CMT scope.
This is also the point to review how the style will actually sell. Costs that look fine at full price change if returns are high, which is common in clothing, so reading return reasons with AI is worth doing before you commit to a size run. The cost sheet is one of the few documents that connects what you design to what you earn, which is why a mistake in it is expensive and a habit of checking it is cheap.
Weighting consumption by the sizes you expect to sell
The 6.0 m marker above treats the four sizes as equal. Real orders are not. Suppose the pattern maker gives per-size consumption before allowance of S 1.30 m, M 1.45 m, L 1.55 m and XL 1.70 m, which sum to 6.0 m and average 1.50 m. Now suppose this label expects its 500 pieces to split 10% S, 30% M, 30% L and 30% XL, so 50, 150, 150 and 150 garments. The weighted figure is 0.10 x 1.30 + 0.30 x 1.45 + 0.30 x 1.55 + 0.30 x 1.70 = 0.130 + 0.435 + 0.465 + 0.510 = 1.54 m. With the 4% allowance that is 1.60 m, so fabric costs 1.60 x $6.80 = $10.88 a garment, $0.27 more than the flat average and about $135 more across the order.
It also changes the fabric you buy: 500 x 1.60 = 800 m, which is eight rolls if the mill sells 100 m rolls, against 780 m from the flat figure. Ask the AI to do this arithmetic from your size split and show every product, then compare with the pattern maker's numbers. If your own sales history exists, use it. If it does not, start with a plausible split, write the assumption in the sheet and revisit it after the first run. The point is not precision to the centimetre; it is stopping a flat average from quietly undercosting a range that sells mostly large sizes.
A price ladder from the same sheet
Once the total cost is fixed at $25.32, the same sheet answers the pricing questions a buyer will ask. Use a simple ladder and ask the AI to add the arithmetic to each row, then check it yourself.
| Channel | Price | Gross profit per piece | Margin |
|---|---|---|---|
| Own shop, full price | $64.00 | $38.68 | 60.4% |
| Own shop, 20% off | $51.20 | $25.88 | 50.5% |
| Wholesale at 50% of retail | $32.00 | $6.68 | 20.9% |
| Wholesale for 100+ pieces, 45% of retail | $28.80 | $3.48 | 12.1% |
The sums: 51.20 - 25.32 = 25.88, and 25.88 / 51.20 = 50.5%; 28.80 - 25.32 = 3.48, and 3.48 / 28.80 = 12.1%. These are gross figures, before shipping to the customer, payment fees, returns and marketing, which is why the sale-price row matters more than it looks: a 20% discount cut profit per piece by a third (from $38.68 to $25.88). The ladder helps you decide whether a style can support a wholesale programme at all, and what discount floor to put in a promotion before it stops making money.
Reusing the sheet for the next colourway or style
Build the first sheet carefully and the second takes minutes. A second colourway changes only the fabric dye, perhaps a surcharge for a small dye lot, and the print colour. A new style changes the consumption, trims and CMT. Keep the common cells, such as overhead rate, quality allowance, freight per piece and the cost of a carton, on a single assumptions tab that every style sheet reads from. When freight rises from $0.55 to $0.70, one change updates every sheet.
Ask the AI to compare two style sheets: "List the lines where Style B differs from Style A by more than 10%, with reasons I should check." A heavier jacket will show higher consumption and CMT, which is expected, but if a lighter T-shirt shows a higher trims cost than a jacket, the question is whether someone entered a hang tag twice. The comparison finds oddities that line-by-line review misses because each line looks reasonable on its own.
Two more costing cases for other kinds of label
- A made-to-order knitwear studio has no minimum fabric order, so yarn cost is the largest line. Costing by weight (grams of yarn per garment, multiplied by price per kilogram) replaces the marker step, and the AI is asked to check the yarn weight against a finished sample.
- A uniform supplier sells to businesses at a fixed price list. Its sheet adds an embroidery line priced by stitch count and a setup fee spread over the run, and the margin test is against the quoted price per piece to each customer.
In both, the order of work is the one you have just seen: quantities from the pack and the pattern, prices from quotes, arithmetic by the AI, checks by you. If you would like help turning this into a standing template for every new style, that is something my AI implementation consultation can cover.
Clothing costing questions from small labels
What does CMT mean on a cost sheet?
CMT stands for cut, make and trim: the factory's charge for cutting your fabric, sewing the garment and finishing it. It usually excludes fabric and trims you supply. Always ask exactly what a quoted CMT covers, since packing, labelling and pressing are sometimes extras.
How do I work out fabric consumption for a style?
Lay the pattern pieces for a full size set on a marker at the fabric's cuttable width, measure the marker length, divide by garments in the set, then add an allowance for end loss and spreading. Your pattern maker or factory should confirm the figure before you rely on it.
Can AI calculate consumption from a tech pack?
It can estimate from measurements, but a marker needs a pattern layout it cannot see. Use its figure as a sanity check against your pattern maker's marker, and treat any big gap as a question to resolve.
What margin should a clothing brand aim for?
It depends on channel and volume, so work backwards. Decide the retail price you can get, the share wholesale buyers expect, and what is left after returns, shipping and payment fees. A cost sheet shows whether the numbers can work before you place the order.
Should the cost sheet include sample costs?
Yes. Spread development and sample costs across the first production run, so a style that needed three sample rounds carries that burden honestly instead of being under-priced.
Further reads
- AI Marketing for a Clothing Brand: One Drop Planned Start to Finish — Plan the launch of a style once it is costed.
- FOB Price Calculation: An AI-Built Costing Sheet for Exporters — Build the export price once the garment cost is known.
- Tea Blending Business: Cost Each Blend and Set Trade Prices With AI — Another cost-to-trade-price sheet for a different product.
- Boutique Inventory Management: AI for Size Runs and Reorders — Plan size runs once the style is costed.
- AQL Sampling Plan: Pick Sample Sizes for Incoming Goods With AI — Check the delivered garments against an agreed sample plan.
- Subscription Box Pricing: Build a Margin Model With AI — Another margin model built step by step with AI.
- AI Tool for Clothing Designers: Tech Packs and Mock-Ups Before Sampling — No single AI tool covers sketch to sample: which tool does each stage, what a tech pack draft needs from you, and what to leave to the pattern cutter.
- Automation in Clothing Manufacturing: What a Small Workshop Can Automate — Order intake, tech pack checks, fabric and cutting-plan sums, production tracking and customer updates for a cut-and-sew workshop, with tool costs and limits.
- AI Tech Packs for Fashion Brands: Draft Specs a Factory Can Use — Draft a factory-ready tech pack with AI: the sections, a measurement table, the BOM, and the checks that stop sampling mistakes.
- AI in Fashion Photography: Lookbook Images for a Small Brand — Create on-model fashion lookbooks from flat-lay photos, maintain model consistency, and comply with marketplace AI disclosure rules.
- AI Clothing Brand Designer Tools: Concept Looks and What You Own — What AI clothing design tools can produce, what you can and cannot claim to own, and how a concept becomes a garment a factory can make.
- AI Pattern Making: Can It Replace CAD for a Small Apparel Maker? — AI can draft the numbers around a garment pattern but not the pattern itself. Here is what to hand over, what to keep in CAD, and how to check fit.
- AI for Fashion Companies: Line Sheets and Buyer Emails From Product Data — Start with the wholesale line sheet built from product data, then buyer emails. A fashion brand's order, prompts, sample outputs and pre-send checks.
- AI for the Garment Industry: Where a Small Cut-and-Sew Maker Starts — Where a small cut-and-sew maker should start with AI: order follow-up, buyer emails, then tech-pack drafts, with checks for each.
- AI in the Textile Industry: Two Mill Jobs Priced by Payback — Two small-mill jobs priced by payback, quote costing and defect records, plus where camera inspection systems start to make sense.
- AI Tools and AI Development: The Complete 2026 Guide — the AI hub, including every tutorial in the AI-for-business series.
Sources: standard apparel costing practice (consumption, CMT, trims, landed cost). All prices, rates and quantities in the example are illustrative, not quotes.