Embroidery is the easiest decoration method to price accurately and the one most often priced by guesswork. The reason it is easy: the machine tells you exactly how much work a design is. The stitch count is right there in the file.
Build your rate
rate per 1000 stitches = (loaded hourly cost / realistic stitches per hour) x 1000 x markup
Two words carry the weight. Loaded means wages plus your share of rent, power, thread, needles, backing, maintenance and machine depreciation, not just the operator's pay. Realistic means measured across real jobs including thread breaks, colour changes and trims, not the number on the machine's spec sheet. Most shops run at 60 to 75 percent of nameplate speed once reality is included.
The full cost of a job
| Line | Basis | Changes with quantity? |
|---|---|---|
| Blank | Per garment | Linear |
| Stitch time | Per 1000 stitches per position | Linear |
| Hooping and handling | Per position per garment | Linear |
| Thread and backing | Per garment | Linear |
| Digitising | Per design, once | Fixed |
| Machine setup | Per design or colourway | Fixed |
Note how little of embroidery is fixed cost compared with screen printing. Digitising and setup aside, embroidery is close to linear, which means your quantity discounts should be modest. A shop giving 40 percent off at 100 pieces on embroidery is usually just giving away 40 percent of the margin.
Worked example: 50 polos, left chest, 7,400 stitches
At a £1.10 per thousand rate:
| Line | Calculation | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Blanks | 50 x £6.20 | £310.00 |
| Stitches | 50 x 7.4 x £1.10 | £407.00 |
| Hooping | 50 x £0.70 | £35.00 |
| Thread, backing | 50 x £0.35 | £17.50 |
| Digitising | Once | £28.00 |
| Total cost | £797.50 | |
| Per unit | £15.95 |
The digitising is 3.5 percent of a 50-piece job and 35 percent of a five-piece job, which is the only place quantity really bites.
Things to charge for that shops forget
Cap hooping. Caps are slower, fiddlier and higher-reject than flats. Price them as their own category.
Colour changes. A twelve-colour design on a single-head machine costs real time in changes and trims. Either charge above eight colours, or set a limit.
Names. Individual names are a separate setup per garment, and they are the single most common source of an unprofitable "quick" job. Charge per name, always.
3D puff and appliqué. Different materials, slower running, higher reject rate. Separate line items.
Where quality costs you money
Bad digitising shows up as thread breaks, puckering and rejects, all of which land in your cost, not the digitiser's. A well-digitised file at 7,400 stitches often runs faster and cleaner than a badly digitised one at 6,000. That is why what you send your digitiser is a margin question, not just a quality one.
Hooping is the cost everyone under-prices
Stitch time is easy to price because the machine reports it. Hooping is the opposite: it is invisible on the file, varies wildly by garment, and on low stitch counts it is often the larger cost of the two.
| Garment | Typical hooping time | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Flat tee or polo | 25 to 40 seconds | Fast, forgiving, low reject |
| Jacket, lined | 60 to 120 seconds | Alignment matters, linings snag |
| Cap, structured front | 45 to 90 seconds | Frame change, higher reject rate |
| Bag or apron | 30 to 60 seconds | Awkward shapes, occasional refit |
| Sleeve or cuff | 60 to 90 seconds | Small frame, fiddly registration |
A 4,000 stitch left chest on a polo is maybe 45 seconds of run time and 35 seconds of hooping. Almost half the labour on that job is the part your rate per thousand stitches does not cover. If your pricing has one hooping figure for every garment type, your caps and jackets are subsidising your tees.
Two rates, not one
The cleanest structure most shops land on is a rate per thousand stitches per position plus a per-garment handling charge that varies by garment class. It looks like this:
- Stitch rate covers machine time, thread, backing, needles and machine depreciation.
- Handling charge covers hooping, unhooping, trimming, inspection and folding, by garment class.
- Digitising, once per design, never charged again on a reorder.
- Blank, at your landed cost including freight.
Quoted that way, a customer who brings you 200 flat polos gets a genuinely better price than one who brings you 200 lined jackets, which is correct, and you can explain why in one sentence.
Measure the run, do not trust the estimate
The gap between nameplate stitches per hour and what you actually achieve is where embroidery pricing goes wrong. Thread breaks, bobbin changes, colour changes, trims, a needle strike on a seam, an operator away from the machine when it finished: all of it is real time on real jobs.
The only reliable way to know your effective rate is to record what jobs actually took. If the operator clocks on to the job when the first hoop goes on and off when the last garment is folded, the job costing report gives you hours and labour cost per job at each person's rate, and margin after labour next to gross margin. Run that for a month and your rate per thousand stitches stops being a guess.
What shops typically find: flats run close to estimate, caps run 20 to 40 percent slower than estimate, and anything with names runs slower again. Those three facts, priced in, are worth more than any rate table copied from a forum.
Reorders are where embroidery beats every other method
A digitised file does not expire. There are no screens to remake, no films, no separations, and the run parameters that worked last time will work again. That makes embroidery reorders the cheapest work in the shop to produce and the easiest to win, provided two things are true: the file is still attached to the customer's record, and the person quoting can find it in seconds.
Printer's Friend keeps the digitised file on the design against the customer, so a reorder skips the digitising charge automatically and quotes at the reorder price without anyone having to remember the history. That is also why embroidery suits recurring club and school work better than any other method: the second year of a contract costs you less to produce than the first.
Printer's Friend prices embroidery on stitch count per position, keeps the digitised file attached to the design so reorders skip the charge, and shows the per-line margin while you quote. If you are pricing screen print or DTG alongside, see screen printing and DTG.