Why pattern width decides what a garment costs

Why does three centimetres change the price so much?

Because fabric is bought by length off a roll of fixed width, and the only question that matters is how many pattern pieces fit across that width. That is not a gradual relationship. It is a step.

Take a body panel at 74 cm. Two of them sit side by side across a roll of about 150 cm and the marker is efficient. Widen the same panel to 77 cm and two no longer fit: 154 cm needs a roll you have not bought. So the second panel drops to a new row, and every row now carries one panel where it used to carry two.

The fabric consumed per garment goes up by roughly 45%. Not 4%, which is what a 4% wider panel intuitively suggests. The intuition is wrong because the constraint is not the panel, it is the row.

This is why a designer can make a garment meaningfully more expensive without anyone noticing at the time. Three centimetres reads as a small styling adjustment. On a costing sheet it is the difference between two panels across and one.

What does that cost in money?

On the example above, about 5.50 a unit. Across a 300 piece run, roughly 1,600.

That is a real number for a decision nobody recorded, taken by somebody who was not thinking about fabric and had no reason to. It is also, and this is the part worth sitting with, larger than almost any discount you could negotiate on the same order. A pattern drawn against the roll width beats a better price on the table, because it changes how much you buy rather than what you pay for each metre.

The figure scales with everything: heavier fabric, more colours, more pieces. It is proportionally worse on a small run, because a small run has less room to absorb it and less leverage to renegotiate the fabric price afterwards.

What is a marker, and why does it decide this?

A marker is the map of every pattern piece laid out on the fabric before it is cut. Cutting works through many plies at once, so the marker is drawn once and every garment in the run inherits it.

The efficiency of that layout is the percentage of fabric that ends up in the garment rather than on the floor. A well drawn marker on a simple garment is usually somewhere in the eighties; the rest is the space between shaped pieces that nothing else fits into.

Two things about a marker matter to a brand that never sees one:

It is drawn against a specific roll width. Change the width and the same pattern gives a different efficiency, which is why the same tee can cost two different amounts at two factories using the same fabric at the same price.

It is drawn after your pattern is final. By the time anybody is calculating consumption, the panel is already 77 cm. The moment to influence it was during fitting, and nothing in a normal sampling process prompts anyone to check.

When should this be checked?

At the fit sample, while measurements are still moving.

That is the last point where a dimension can change for free. After the pattern is signed off, changing a body width means a new pattern, a new marker and usually a new sample, and the saving has to be large to justify the delay.

The check itself is cheap. Ask what the consumption is at the current measurement, and what it would be a couple of centimetres either side. A factory that cuts your garment can answer in the time it takes to redraw a marker, and if the answer is that 2 cm narrower drops you into a better layout, that is a decision you can make with the number in front of you rather than discovering it in the costing.

Sometimes the answer will be that the wider version is worth the money. That is a legitimate outcome. The problem is not width, it is width chosen without knowing what it costs.

What if I do not draw my own patterns?

Then ask one question, and ask it on every style: what is my wastage on this?

You do not need to interpret the answer to benefit from asking. A factory that tracks consumption per style will give you a number. A factory that does not will give you an impression, and the difference between those two responses tells you something useful on its own.

A number is something to work on. It can be compared between styles, watched across a season, and used to ask why one garment runs eight points worse than another that looks similar. No number is not a neutral answer; it means nobody is looking, which means nothing is improving.

What good looks like

Consumption stated per style on the costing, not buried in a single per-piece price. A marker efficiency you can see. And a conversation at fit stage about whether a measurement is worth what it costs in fabric.

None of that requires you to become a pattern cutter. It requires the question to be asked early enough that the answer can still change something.