So someone on Twitter just said it doesn’t make sense for a bra w/ $50 of materials to cost $300 & she’s right. It should cost more.

Let’s go super simple & basic here (mostly because I’m bad at math) so we can see how “$50 of materials” transforms into hundreds of $ for a bra.

So, you got $50 of materials. Again, bad at math, so we’ll say you have $50 of labor going into making the bra. We are now at a factory cost of $100. That is how much the factory spent making this garment.

The factory now needs to sell to the brand. And they’re not going to sell at-cost because they run an actual business and have folks/entities they need to pay and things they need to purchase. So let’s say they sell that $100 bra to the brand at 2x, and now that bra is $200.

The brand now needs to wholesale to to its retailers. The brand has bills to pay and folks to pay, so they’re not going to sell at-cost. Now they sell at 2x, and the price is $400. For the wholesale rate. Just for the retailer to get it in hand. It hasn’t even made it to you yet.

The wholesale to retail rate is usually something like 2.5, so we’ll just do that here. 2.5 x 400 is $1,000.

And that’s how you would go from $50 of materials and $50 of labor - not to $250 for a retail price - but to something significantly higher.

And clearly, before people bungee jump into this thread with their “well, actuallys,” this is a very generalized, simplified series of calculations that is just meant to show how you can get from smallish numbers to biggish numbers.

EVERYONE along the supply chain gets paid. You don’t just have the folks sewing, you have folks who repair the machines, folks who shop for fabrics and finishings, the actual companies making fabrics and finishings, the folks who sweep the floor, the folks who box the garments...

You got rent, taxes, freighter fees, duties and customs, designers and pattern graders to pay, administrative assistants to pay, PR folks to pay, tradeshows to pay. You need to have enough money to make the next season, account for increased labor costs, invest in your brand...

Stores have rent, staff, light bills, TAXES, markdowns to take into consideration, the inevitably damaged and/or unsellable product to account for, costs of returns...

And please don’t interpret these tweets as covering everything because they really, really don’t.

Rather this is to illustrate for people who may be unaware - because I was unaware for so long - that there is a lot more than we may consider (a lot of mundane stuff, tbh) that also needs to be paid for.

Which again, brings us to, if a t-shirt costs $5...how did they get there?

Again, y’all, this is extremely - and deliberately - oversimplified. There are people who write entire books and teach entire graduate-level courses going into detail about stuff I’m just barely touching in 140-character tweets. Yes, I know I left stuff out.