Material Cost
Calculate Dress Material Cost
Add up the fabric and the decorations, find out which part is expensive, then try a cheaper cloth, a lighter pattern, or one bow fewer.
No dress priced yetSolved from build 25482629
Start here
Load the dress you want to price
A dress can arrive three ways: a link someone sent you, a build this device remembers, or a dress you assemble here by hand.
No dress loaded yet
From a link
Any dress link works — from the dress builder, the fixer, or a build you shared with a friend.
Builds saved on this device
Nothing is saved on this device yet. Builds are saved from the dress builder.
Build a dress by hand
Pick a pattern, a cloth and decorations from the same catalogues the dress builder uses — 178 patterns, 352 cloths and 331 decorations — and the material cost follows every choice.
Parts
The dress being priced
Nothing is on the table yet
Load a dress, open one of your saved builds, or choose the pieces by hand, and every cost below fills in.
Total material cost
One number for the dress, made of exactly two things.
- Fabric
- 0,000%
- Decorations
- 0,000%
Materials only. Quality, labour and any selling price are counted elsewhere.
Where the money goes
Each cloth is one line however many parts it covers, and decorations are split by the way they are charged.
Cost by fabric
Total 0,00No cloth has been cut yet.
Cost by decoration
Total 0,00No decorations are on this dress yet.
Cost by part of the dress
What each part of the garment carries, and how much of the bill it is.
Only cloth is counted per part, because the game charges a decoration to the dress rather than to a panel. Decorations are their own row.
Cost drivers
What is making this dress expensive?
Each line is read off this dress's own cost sheet.
Nothing stands out in this dress. No single material carries a large share of the cost.
Preview
What would a change cost?
One change at a time, priced by the engine, with everything it moves.
Load a complete dress to preview a change.
Ways to spend less
Every row below is a real change to this dress, priced by the same engine and checked for what else it does.
No cheaper change was found for this dress. It is already lean for what it is wearing.
Suggestions are computed from this dress. Hidden and developer-only items never appear here.
Keep going
The material cost is one answer. These are the next questions.
- What would this dress sell for?Turn this material cost into a selling price and see what the materials leave behind.Calculate sale price
- Change the dress in the builderTake this exact dress back to the bench and keep working on patterns, cloth and decorations.Open in dress builder
- Work out how much fabric you needQuantities only, with no money involved: how much cloth each part cuts.Open fabric calculator
- Fix a failing commissionRepair a dress for a brief with the fewest possible changes.Open dress fixer
- Start from the brief insteadGive the solver a commission and let it return a complete outfit rather than a cheaper version of yours.Open commission solver
How it works
How the material cost is calculated
Three rules produce every figure on this page, and the dress builder prints the same ones.
- 1Fabric is charged on the pattern, not only the priceA part's fabric cost scales with the panel area its pattern cuts, plus a small charge per panel, and then with the price of the cloth on that part. A cheap cloth on a generous pattern can therefore cost more than a better cloth on a frugal one.
- 2A decoration is either bought or measuredA bow, jewel or brooch is charged per piece placed. A trim, ribbon or lace edge is charged by the metre of length drawn, so shortening a hem is one of the most direct ways to lower the material cost.
- 3Only materials are countedThe total is the cut cloth plus the decorations. Quality and sale price are separate answers, so nothing here should be read as profit.
Questions
Cost calculator questions
Do I have to build the dress here?
No. A dress can be loaded from a link, from a build saved on this device, or by hand. All three use the same dress format the builder writes, so a dress moves between the pages without being re-entered.
Why is a cheaper cloth sometimes only a little cheaper?
Because the price per metre is only half of the sum. What each part is charged depends on the panel area its pattern cuts as well, so a cloth at half the price on a pattern that cuts twice the area can come out at the same cost.
Why does a trim length change the cost so much?
Length-priced decorations are charged per metre of the line you draw. Doubling a hem doubles that decoration's cost, while a per-piece decoration costs the same however the dress is shaped.
Does a cheaper dress lower its quality or sale price?
This page does not answer that — material cost is only the money in the materials. Style scores are shown beside every suggested change, and quality and selling price have their own tools.
Related
Related tools and catalogues
The pages that answer the questions this one deliberately leaves alone.
Material cost
A dress's material cost is what its fabric and its decorations add up to. This cost calculator reads the dress you loaded — from the dress builder, a shared link, or a build saved on this device — and prices it with the same arithmetic the game uses, so the figure at the top of the page is the figure a commission is checked against. Fabric cost is not simply the price of the cloth. Each part is charged on the panel area its pattern cuts, plus a small charge per panel, multiplied by the price of the cloth worn on that part, so two cloths at the same price can cost different amounts on the same dress. One cloth cut for four parts is one purchase, which is why the breakdown groups a repeated fabric into a single line. Accessories are charged two ways: a bow, jewel or brooch is priced per piece, while a trim, ribbon or lace edge is priced by the length you lay down, so the same decoration is cheap on a short seam and expensive around a hem. Point and path decorations are therefore kept apart, and the cost drivers name the single line carrying the bill. Cheaper alternatives are measured rather than guessed: a swap is offered only after the engine has priced the whole dress again, and every option states the style, fabric and commission effects it has.
The material cost is the money in the cut pieces and the decorations, and nothing else. Quality, sale price and profit are answered on their own pages, and the cost sheet here never mixes them into this total.