Gifting dresses
The next system in the tutorial order: dresses given to the clients you have met rather than sold to the system, with each client's own preferences and measurements behind the choice.
Dressmaker Guide
How Off-the-Rack Works in Dressmaker
Learn how the Off-the-Rack system differs from commissions, how to think about dress cost and value, and why Quality and Prestige matter when a finished dress is sold.
Understand Off-the-RackWant to value a dress now?Sale price calculator
Solved from build 25482629. Every figure on this page is read from the build's own data: the game's copy for this system, the solver's census of its briefs, and the price engine the dress builder uses.
What It Is
Off the Rack is a system beside the workbench, not a step behind it
The game introduces this system in one line, and that line is the whole premise: make dresses outside a brief, then sell them for income and prestige. The page starts there rather than with a shop, because a shop is not in the export.
“You can now also make off the rack dresses which you can sell for extra income and prestige!”
NonCom/Unlocked
The unlock line. Off-the-Rack is not available from the first minute: it arrives partway through the game's tutorials, announced the way the photo step was announced before it.
“Click the non commissioned dress tab to start.”
NonCom/OpenTab
The tab it names is the one the dress catalogue opens in, so an off-the-rack dress is built on the same workbench as everything else — same patterns, same cloth, same decorations.
The screen's own labels
- Off Rack Dresses
- Sell
- Sell dress
Quoted as the game prints them. Notice what the vocabulary does not contain: no shelf, no rack slot, no customer queue, no timed sale, no haggling. A page that invented those would be describing a different game.
Everything this page says about the system's purpose comes from those lines. Where the recovered material stops — how a dress is offered, whether it can be held back, what a buyer wants — this guide stops too, and says so.
The Difference
Off the Rack beside a commission
A commission is a brief checked row by row, and the build's own records say how many rows: every brief carries a budget, and the requirement rows run into the hundreds. An off-the-rack dress has no brief at all, which is the difference worth settling before the arithmetic.
| Off the Rack | Commission |
|---|---|
| No client brief. The dress is made for the system, not against a named client's requirements. | A brief from one of the game's 88 commissions, each belonging to a character and to a step in their story. |
| No requirement list to satisfy, and no row to fail. | A list of requirement rows — 432 of them across the build, drawn from 10 kinds and checked one at a time. |
| No spending cap. What the dress costs to make is the maker's decision. | 88 of the 88 briefs carry a budget row, measured against what the dress costs to make. |
| Sold as a finished dress, for what the game's own line calls extra income and prestige. | Completed against the brief: rows that pass, rows that do not, and a completion the client accepts or refuses. |
| Value comes from the dress itself — what it cost, how well it was made, and the maker's Prestige. | Value is the brief's target: a Quality figure, style scores, composition shares, counts and trim lengths. |
88
commissions in the build. Each one is a requirement list rather than a request, and the list is what the dress is checked against.
432
requirement rows across those briefs, drawn from 10 kinds. Style tags are the bulk of them — 238 rows — and 87 ask for a Quality figure.
80
is the Quality figure most briefs ask for: 67 of the 88 briefs. In commission work Quality is not a nicety, it is a gate.
Read the right column as what the site can count, and the left column as what the game's own line says. Off-the-rack is not 'commissions without a client' — it is a second use for the same workbench, and nothing recovered suggests the two are scored the same way.
The Decision
When Off the Rack is the right door
Three intents, three doors. They are not ranked: a dress made for a brief and a dress made to be sold are both legitimate, and the game keeps them apart on purpose.
- 01
I have a client's requirements to meet
A commission carries a brief with a budget and a row of requirements, and it is finished when the dress passes them. Take the brief to the solver, build against the rows, and the checking is arithmetic rather than opinion.
- 02
I want to make a dress and see what it is worth
No brief, no budget, no rows to pass. The dress is judged by its own value instead, which is where the rest of this page goes: cost, Quality, Prestige, and the price they produce.
That is this page — the value chain is below. - 03
I only want to try combinations
If the goal is a neckline, a cloth or a colour rather than a finished, sellable dress, price nothing yet. Build on the bench and read the style scores as they move.
The three can meet: a dress built for one purpose can be worth making for another, and the build's own recipes show commissions solved with ordinary catalogue cloth. But a dress is scored against whichever system it is handed to, not against both at once.
The Arithmetic
How a dress gets its value
One chain, in the order the game applies it. The sale screen prints its rows in this order and the sale price calculator multiplies in this order, coins and all.
- 1
Materials
The cloth and the decorations, priced by the engine that prices the dress builder: cloth by the area each panel cuts plus a small charge per panel, a point decoration per piece, a path trim by the metre.
- 2
Labour
Charged for the panels joined and the decorations placed. The build does not publish the rate, which is why this page prints a chain and a calculator asks you for the number.
- 3
Base value
Materials plus labour: two different sums with one thing in common. Neither of them knows what Quality the dress scored or what Style it wears.
- 4×1.00 at Quality 50
Quality bonus
Half, plus one hundredth of the Quality score. Quality 50 is a flat 1.00× and leaves the base value exactly where it was.
- 5+1% per level
Prestige bonus
One percent per Prestige level, applied after the Quality step and to whatever that step produced.
- 6
Sell price
What the game pays. The sale screen prints exactly these rows, which is why a dress's price can be reproduced rather than estimated.
The order matters, because the game settles in whole coins
Each step is rounded to whole coins before the next one is applied, so multiplying both bonuses in one go can land a coin away from what the screen shows. The calculator multiplies in the game's order for that reason.
The chain describes value, not profit. It says what the game pays for a dress; it does not pretend to know what the dress cost beyond the material inside it, which is the cost sheet's subject rather than this page's.
Material Cost
What did the dress cost to make?
Two bills and one total. Material cost is what the dress is made of and nothing else: Quality, sale price and Prestige are answered on their own rows and are never mixed into this one.
Cloth
Decorations
Material cost
A dearer cloth raises the base value and the bill
Expensive material is not a shortcut. It raises the materials half of the base value, so the price the game pays goes up — and the money the dress took to make goes up with the same cloth. A dress in the dearest cloth is worth more and costs more, and the two numbers have to be read together.
What the catalogue actually charges
- Cloth is priced from nothing to 80 a unit in this build, and 106 of the 352 cloths cost 20 or less.
- 289 cost 50 or less, so the price ladder is long and mostly shallow — a dress in a mid-priced cloth is not a compromise.
- Decorations run from a coin or two to 70 an item, and 137 of the 331 cost 2 or less.
Read that ladder as a budget and not as a ranking. A cloth at the top of the range is not 'better' cloth by any recovered measure — it is a different cloth at a different price, and the style weights it carries are what commissions ask about.
Quality Bonus
Why Quality matters when a dress is sold
Quality is the first of the two multipliers, and the one a maker controls while the dress is being built. It says nothing about the dress's style or price class — it scales the whole base value.
The multiplier Quality produces
The multiplier starts at half, so Quality 50 is the point where a dress sells for exactly its base value. Below that line the dress sells for less than its materials and labour, which is the one figure on this page worth reading twice.
- Quality 0×0.5050%
- Quality 25×0.7575%
- Quality 50×1.00100%
- Quality 75×1.25125%
- Quality 100×1.50150%
Where the score comes from
- Grain placement — how the cloth's lines were lined up with the pattern.
- Fit — the distance between the dress and the measurements it was cut to, where there were measurements to cut to.
- Sewing accuracy — how the panels were joined, which is scored whoever the dress was for.
The three inputs are weighted differently depending on whether the dress was cut to a customer's measurements, because Fit cannot be scored when nobody was measured. That is why two dresses in identical cloth can sell for different money.
The quality guide walks the three inputs and their weights; this page needs nothing from it but the multiplier. When a dress sells for less than expected, the ladder above is the first place to look and the calculator's quality breakdown is the second.
Prestige Bonus
Prestige also changes the final value
The second multiplier, and the only one on this page that comes from outside the dress. It applies after Quality, to whatever Quality left, and the game's own line names selling as one of the ways it grows.
One percent a level
The ladder in this build runs to level 51. Because the bonus is a percentage rather than a sum, one level is worth more on an expensive dress than on a cheap one.
- Prestige 0×1.00100%
- Prestige 10×1.10110%
- Prestige 25×1.25125%
- Prestige 51×1.51151%
Selling and Prestige feed each other
The line that unlocks this system promises extra income and prestige from off-the-rack dresses, and the multiplier above then makes every one of those levels worth more on the next dress sold. That loop is why the same dress is worth noticeably more to a maker who has been selling for a while.
What raises Prestige, how quickly, and what else it opens belongs to the economy guide rather than this page. Here it is one multiplier and the one input a dress cannot change.
Prestige does not make cloth cheaper and does not change what a dress costs to make. It multiplies the price the game pays, and that is the whole of its effect on this chain.
The Boundary
Does Style increase the sale price?
This question is usually answered wrongly, by importing a real-world shop's instinct: surely the cuter dress sells for more. The recovered formula says otherwise, and the difference is worth stating plainly.
Short answer
No. There is no Style term in the recovered sale price formula.
The chain has four inputs: materials, labour, Quality and Prestige. Cute, Formal, Romantic and the rest are not among them, and no multiplier per style could be fitted and still reproduce the prices the build publishes.
Style still decides what the dress is
- Commissions ask about style scores more than about anything else: 238 of the build's requirement rows are style tags.
- A brief usually names two or three of them at once, at different targets, which is what makes a commission a design problem rather than a shopping list.
- Style is also the dress's identity, here and in the game: the library, the strategy pages and every pattern's weights are read in those terms.
The honest version of the rule is a narrow one: Style is not a direct sale-price multiplier in the recovered formula. That is not a claim that Style is unimportant, and not a claim that nothing outside those four inputs matters — it is a claim about the four inputs the formula has.
Example Calculation
One dress, two cloths
The example is not invented. The dress is built from the patterns the build's own recipes use most often, with the catalogue's two zero-panel fillers and two real decorations, and its cloth is priced by the same engine the dress builder prices with.
| Row | Cheap cloth | Dear cloth |
|---|---|---|
| Cloth for the dress | 13 | 103 |
| The two decorations | 7 | 7 |
| Material cost | 20 | 110 |
Quality 80×1.30
Prestige 15×1.15
Labour — your figure
Same cut, same two decorations, and the only thing that changed is the cloth: several times the price a unit, several times the bill. That is the value chain in one table — a dearer cloth lifts the base value and the price the game pays, and it lifts what the dress cost to make by the very same cloth. Nothing in the table is a Style figure.
The final row is the one this page cannot print. Labour is a real input to the base value and the build does not publish its rate, so the example stops where the recovery stops and the calculator asks you for the number. The two tags below the table are the levels the dress is priced at: Quality 80, which is the figure most of the build's briefs ask for, and Prestige 15.
Common Mistakes
Five readings that cost a dress
Each of these is a wrong answer to a question this page has just answered, and each is worth a re-read before a dress is handed over.
- 1
Spending more on cloth because it costs more
A dearer cloth lifts the materials half of the base value, and the material cost by the same cloth. Expensive is not a synonym for good value: the cloth that makes a dress worth more is also the cloth that makes it more expensive to have made.
- 2
Assuming expensive cloth rescues Quality
Quality multiplies the whole base value, so a badly made dress in fine cloth still sells for less than the material in it. No cloth can lift a score of 40.
- 3
Expecting Style to move the price
Cute, Formal and Romantic are not multipliers in the recovered formula. A dress built to a style is not paid more for wearing it, however much that style cost to assemble.
- 4
Comparing two sale prices without their costs
A dress selling for 80 is not automatically the better dress next to one selling for 60. Read the two numbers that matter together — sale price and material cost — and the cheaper dress can come out ahead.
- 5
Mixing a commission reward with a sale price
A commission is completed against a brief; an off-the-rack dress is sold for income and prestige. One dress can serve either system, but the two are scored and settled by different rules, and merging the two accounts is how a plan stops adding up.
Four of the five are cured by the same habit: read the cost and the price together, and decide which system the dress is being handed to before judging it.
What to Do Next
Four questions, four pages
Whatever the dress is doing wrong, one page answers it. None of these is a step in a sequence — take the one that matches the problem in front of you.
The dress costs more than I expected
Price the build and find the line carrying the bill: the cloth on the largest panels, or the trim laid around the hem. The cost sheet names the driver and prices the cheaper swaps.
The dress is not worth what I hoped
The multiplier moves with the Quality score, and the score moves with three inputs. See which of the three is holding the figure down before changing anything else.
I want to know what the dress sells for
Sale price is materials plus labour, multiplied by Quality and then by Prestige. Enter the dress and the two multipliers, and the calculator prints the figure the game pays, in the game's own rounding order.
I want the dress to look or read differently
If the goal is a silhouette, a cloth or a colour rather than a price, build it on the bench first. Every pattern, cloth and decoration carries the style weights the game scores, so a swap can be read before it is sewn.
The two numbers to read together
Material cost is what the dress took to make; sale price is what the game pays for it. Read them as a pair — the difference between them is the figure worth watching, and it is not the same as profit, because labour and the dress's own bonuses sit inside it. Both tools take the same dress, so one leads to the other.
Beside This System
Explore another Dressmaker system
The systems next to this one, in the order the game's own tutorials introduce them. Two of them are not built yet, and they keep the sentence without the link rather than promising a page that does not open.
Money and Prestige
This page explained one system's value. The economy guide takes the whole of it: where income comes from, what Prestige is for, and how the two climb together.
Off-the-rack is a system, not the economy. Everything below this line is one page about one of them.
The Chain
The workflow that leads here
An off-the-rack dress is made the way every other dress is made. The nine pages before this one are that workflow in order, and the three tools below it price or check the result.
Notes on This Page
The description of the system is quoted from the game's own localization table — the line that unlocks it and the line that names its tab — and the screen's labels are quoted alongside them. The commission column is a census of the solver's own brief records. The value chain, the two ladders, the price range and the worked example are all computed by this site's engine from the build's catalogue and requirement data, which is the same arithmetic the dress builder and the sale price calculator run.
One input is missing on purpose. The build does not publish the labour rate, so this page never prints a base value or a sale price of its own: it prints the multipliers and hands the number to the calculator that asks for it.
What is not on this page is a shop. The export contains no rack, no queue, no buyer preference and no markup, so no paragraph here describes one. Should the game's own screen say more later, this page should be extended from that text rather than from expectation.
This page is one chapter of the Dressmaker guide, which covers the whole process from the first measurement to the finished dress.