Selene said:
Please be careful with this statement.
Although sewing is not too hard once you get the hang of it, it still takes a bit of time.
Suggesting that something is possible to sew but than for less than you have seen it is a a big misconception, just material cost alone can be more than what the item you had in mind could cost without even taking in consideration the amount of labour that is needed! And even the time it takes to go pick these up is something not to be undervalued.
Not saying no one sells their sewn creations, but sewing aint cheap lol.
This! Thank you, I've had a lot of encouragement from people recently when I've said I want to start a little shop of my own but I'm worried about doing it for a number of reasons and this is one of the big ones.
I have been doing a lot of "puzzling" the last couple of weeks after making my own clone of the Threaded Armor and their inserts, using some scaled down templates (1/5th scale) and a measured sheet of paper to match various lengths of fabric to trace onto to see how many I could make from different lengths by squeezing as much as possible out of it. Add on thread and elastics and I reckon I can make them for around £24-£26 per pair with inserts.
This is buying fabric from a store not a manufacturer and at resale price, no bulk discount, buying direct from suppliers on whole rolls might bring the cost down. It is also only using a large size template, smaller sizes may make more and bigger will make less due to room on the fabric. If you were selling you also have to account for packaging which depending on the size of the order and what you use could add a couple more £'s, as well as utility costs to run the machines and decent lighting.
So lets call it £26 to buy fabric in bulk and include the product, packaging, utilities and any paperwork (still not taking in delivery fees as this would in theory be paid for by the customer).
This is a lot better than the £56 they sell them for, if I made them and sold them for the same £56 they charge I would make £30 pure profit. which sounds like a lot... But...
Even if I had a decent sized studio in which all the space and equipment and materials I needed were readily available to just grab fabric and get going. After you take cutting it all out, piecing it together, threading elastics, sewing, serging, adding snaps, printing invoices/care instructions, packaging and dispatching into account it takes a lot of time.
The one prototype pair I made took a little over 4 hours from start to finish, so that's £30 / 4 = £7.50 per hour, at my age the UK's national minimum wage is £9.50 per hour. Now given this was a prototype and I was figuring it out as I went without really knowing how it was all going to go together I could probably, with a little practice and focus, get that down to under 3 hours which would be a £10 per hour wage.
An important aspect of this is having enough orders coming in at any one time to keep going, if I had enough orders that I could work in bulk, all the cutting/serging/elastics etc. at once, this would save a little bit of time but I would still only be able to make maybe 3 or 4 in an 8 hour day which would bring that wage up to £15 an hour but that's working solidly for 8 hours, no mistakes, no breaks. Making that many at a time consistently there is wear on equipment (needles, blades, scissors, chalks, machine oils etc.) so probably closer to £13 per hour, not exactly an enticing wage for the amount of work it would take with no guarantee there will be enough orders to fill everyday like that each month.
I've also been really into knitting lately, still stuck with boring adult stuff for a while, but was just thinking about upscaling some knitted diaper cover pattern.
