How much does it cost to ethically manufacture a dress?
What's underneath the price tag?
A common myth is that if something is expensive, it must be good quality. We believe that if we pay a lot of money for something that their practices must be honest and fair. For the most part, this is somewhat true - you get what you pay for - but in the case of fashion, there are a lot of questions we still need to ask.
When all you see is the price tag, it's hard to know what's going on under the surface.
This graph is a quick comparison that we've done based on the exact costs of one of our dresses vs quotes for the same dress if we went large scale and unethical.
This example was done based on the difference between 20 dresses and 600 dresses. 600 may sound like a lot but this is still quite small compared to most big-name companies who do 10s of thousands in each style.
Can you see now why they can have 50% off sales and still make money?
Or how, if they were making 15,000 of a style that they could charge you $5 and still make a profit?
Take a look at who is actually getting paid in their production line.
This is only a basic outline of the costs involved for a simple dress. Obviously there's a lot more that goes into it depending on the structure of the business and the design of the garment. Some print licences can be $650-1500 just to use the design on fabric and that's before paying for the actual printing costs and the fabric.
If you have other questions you'd like to ask, please send us an email.
We like to be transparent about our pricing structure and we also feel that there needs to be more education around the heart-breaking conditions of modern slavery in the fashion industry.
As conscious consumers (and decent human beings), it's important that we consider whose pockets we're putting our money into.
Always ask: #whomademyclothes.
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