What a 360 euro shirt costs to make

What are the actual line items?

A shirt is not one price. It is five, and only one of them is the fabric.

Against a retail price of 360.

Every figure here is a working number for a shirt of this kind, not a quotation for a specific one. The point is not the exact total. It is which lines are large, which are trivial, and how little the difference between two well regarded countries actually moves the answer.

Why is the fabric two metres and not one?

Because of the fit and because of the check.

An oversized body takes more cloth than a fitted one, which is obvious. The part that is not obvious is the allowance for matching the pattern across the seams. On a checked flannel, the horizontal and vertical lines have to line up where the front meets the side, where the sleeve meets the body, and across the pocket. To achieve that, pieces cannot be nested tightly on the marker; each one has to start at the right point in the repeat, and the fabric between them is lost.

That allowance is real money and it is invisible on the finished garment, which is exactly why it is invisible in most people's mental costing. A plain fabric in the same weight and the same shirt would use meaningfully less.

At 18 a metre this is Italian mill cloth, and it is the single largest line by a distance: about two thirds of the total cost of making the shirt. Every argument about where a garment is made is an argument about the second largest line while the largest one sits unchanged.

Why do the buttons barely register?

Eleven corozo buttons at roughly fifteen cents each is 1.65. Under two euros, on a 360 shirt.

Corozo is cut from the nut of a palm, so it is a natural material with the density and the temperature of something solid rather than moulded. It is the button a shirt at this level is expected to have, and it costs a rounding error.

This is worth internalising because trims are where brands most often try to save and where there is least to save. Switching to a moulded polyester button might recover a euro. It also changes the first thing a customer touches when they pick the shirt up. The saving is inside the noise of the fabric line; the perceived difference is not.

What is actually in the construction figure?

Labour, and it is the only line that changes with the country.

The shirt has a single chest pocket, a curved hem, and mitered cuffs, where the corner is folded and stitched on the angle rather than square. That last one is the tell. A square cuff corner is fast; a mitered one asks the machinist to fold, align and stitch an angle that has to be identical on both cuffs and on every shirt in the run. It takes longer and it takes a better operator.

Made in Portugal that construction is about 12. Made in Italy, closer to 17.

Five euros. That is the whole difference between two countries with very different reputations, on a garment retailing at 360. It is about 1.4% of the retail price.

Most conversations about where to manufacture are conducted as though this number were the decisive one. It is smaller than the fabric allowance you spend matching a check.

So where does the other 300 go?

Not into the garment.

Somewhere between 53 and 58 leaves the factory. The rest is everything a brand is and does: design, sampling, the samples that did not work, photography, the warehouse, the returns, the discounts, the staff, the rent, the marketing, the wholesale margin if there is one, and the profit. A shirt sold through a retailer is usually marked up twice before it reaches a shelf.

This is not an accusation. A brand that spent 53 and charged 60 would not exist for a second season. The multiple is how the rest of the business is paid for, and a customer buying a shirt at 360 is buying a great deal more than 53 euros of shirt.

But the number is worth knowing precisely because so few people who sell clothing have ever seen it laid out. It changes which decisions feel important. Once you can see that construction is 12 and the fabric is 36, "can we save on making" becomes a much less interesting question than "is this the right cloth".

What this means for your own costing

Three things carry over to any garment, not just this one.

The fabric line dominates. Get the cloth decision right and the rest is detail. Get it wrong and no amount of negotiating on labour recovers it.

Pattern matching is a fabric cost, not a construction cost. If you specify a check, a stripe or a directional print, ask what the consumption is with matching and without. It is a real number and it is usually a surprise.

The country difference is smaller than you think. It is not nothing, and there are good reasons to choose one over another, including lead time, minimums, and how easily you can visit. But if the whole case for a decision rests on five euros of labour, the case is thinner than it looks.