How to Price a Suit Without Guessing

Most small shops price from the neighbour, not from the numbers

Ask a tailor why a shalwar kameez is 1,800 and not 1,500, and the honest answer is usually "the shop down the road charges that". It works until it doesn't: fabric prices move, karigar rates move, and the shop discovers months later that its best-selling item has been earning nothing.

You do not need a costing department. You need three numbers and the discipline to look at them once a month.

The three numbers

1. Labour cost per suit

What you actually pay for the stitching. If a karigar gets 350 per suit, labour is 350 - not "about 300" and not "whatever is left". If you stitch yourself, pick a rate anyway: your time has a cost, and pretending otherwise hides whether the shop is profitable.

2. Consumables per suit

Thread, buttons, interlining, zips, collar patti, packing, transport for the customer's cloth. Small individually; surprisingly large across a month. Many shops estimate this at 60-120 rupees per suit - measure yours for a week rather than guess.

3. Overhead per suit

Rent, electricity, chai, the machine's maintenance, the phone bill. Divide the monthly total by the number of suits you make. That is your overhead per suit, and it is usually the number that shocks owners in a shop making 150 pieces a month.

Floor price = labour + consumables + overhead. Anything below that is a loss being paid for by the rest of the shop. Your margin sits on top.

A worked example

A simple shalwar kameez, 150 suits a month:

• Karigar rate: 350
• Consumables: 90
• Overhead (rent 25,000 + bills 8,000 + misc 5,000 = 38,000, divided by 150): 253
• Floor: 693 rupees

Selling at 900 leaves 207 per suit of gross margin. Selling at 1,200 leaves 507. Seeing this written down usually reframes the question from "what does the next shop charge" to "what does this suit have to cost".

Where shops leak margin without noticing

• Extra work priced as a favour. The lined collar, the extra pocket, the rush job. Each has a cost; if it is free, the customer orders it every time.
• Remakes charged to nobody. A suit cut twice costs fabric, time and delivery trust. Track how many remakes you do - most shops underestimate by half.
• Udhaar that quietly becomes permanent. Outstanding balances are not profit until collected.
• Discounts given verbally at handover. By month end nobody remembers who got 100 off and why.

The monthly ten-minute review

1. Suits delivered this month
2. Revenue collected (not billed - collected)
3. Karigar payments made
4. Consumables purchased
5. Outstanding udhaar at month end

Five numbers. If revenue minus (karigar + consumables + overhead) is a number you are happy with, the pricing is right. If not, you now know which of the three is wrong instead of guessing.

Where software helps here

The reason shops do not do this review is that the raw data lives in three notebooks. When bills, payments, karigar piece-work and udhaar sit in one record, the monthly review is reading a screen.

NaapPro keeps the order, its bill, its payments and the karigar's piece-work on the same record - so the numbers above are produced as a side effect of normal work rather than as an accounting exercise. The free plan covers customers and naap; Pro adds billing, udhaar and karigar payroll. If you want the fuller picture, see how the billing side works.