On the seeming disconnect between tiny pants and prices

As well as answering questions you ask, I try to preempt questions we might get asked with this blog. And as we've been talking about thongs here recently, I want to answer a question that might get asked which is 'why does a tiny scrap of tiny tiny tiny cost <£x>

I know. I've asked it too. And now I've found out at least part of the answer.

The long and the short - or the tl;dr of it is that the fabric cost is a tiny part of the actual cost of making the Pants and changing that - even by 50% - can mean very little in terms of our costs.

The actual cost of a pair of Pants is made up of:

• Materials (fabric, lace, threads, the satin label, the cardboard swing ticket, the tiny safety pin)
• Time (wages for the team) to make them. Some Pants are faster than others, but we don't pay piece rate. Our team are employed and contracted to do certain hours, not a certain number of Pants. There is no financial penalty for poor quality even if it means we can't sell the Pants made.
• What we call 'overhead' - fixed costs that stay the same no matter how many Pants we make. Our rent and our rates particularly fall into this category. Having premises and keeping them safe - fire extinguisher checks, electrical checks, a person to organise them, and renew the insurance, do regular safety inspections, plus ordering paper, answering the phone all that stuff - all these are fixed costs that stay the same whether we make 100 pants or 10,000 - or even zero - in a week.

Tiny pants may use a tiny bit of fabric - but they need us to pay just as much rent and rates as bigger Pants. Let's say a thong used half as much fabric as a Rosalind Pant. We still need to run the sewing machines for as long to stitch it, we still need to pay the rent for as long as it takes to make it, store it, pick and pack it. We might still need the same amount of thread, we'd need the same number of bows, mini safety pins, labels and swing tickets - one each per pant.

That 50% reduction in fabric cost represents a tiny, tiny change in the actual cost of producing that Pant.

Who knows what will happen in the bright shiny future when we have achieved vast economies of scale and we're making a gazillion Pants a week - maybe then shaving a centimetre here and a few seconds there will make a difference. But until then, it matters very little. We try to price our Pants fairly based on the time that went into designing them, the time it takes to make them, and the value we think you get from them - we design them to last and last. We hope you have many many happy Pants days together - whatever style you're wearing.

(*There are a bunch of reasons for this. One of these is that if we had more women in the sewing room, meaning that one woman could stay at the same workstation all through their shift, the room would be more efficient. As it is, we have more work stations that women and so people have to move from job to job which loses time in terms of movement but also in terms of flow and smoothness - if you do the same things over and over you just get faster. We'd LOVE to make more jobs but for that we need to make more sales and while we are selling more every month, we are still a very well kept secret in a lot of ways and so those new jobs have to wait until we are selling more Pants. This feels a bit catch 22 - we can't sell more til we make more and we can;t make more til we sell more. Genuinely - if you have idea on how to get the Pants word out there I'd love to hear them - please tell me in the comments below)