Pricing decorated apparel jobs consistently

Ask three people in a decorating shop to quote the same job and you will get three numbers. Not because anyone is careless, but because the price depends on garment cost, quantity break, number of colours, number of print locations, decoration method, and whatever the shop decided about that customer two years ago.

Held in someone's head, that produces inconsistency. Held in a spreadsheet, it produces a spreadsheet only one person can edit.

What actually drives the number

Decorated apparel pricing is unusual because the decoration cost has almost nothing to do with the garment cost. A one-colour left-chest print on a $4 tee and on a $40 jacket is the same press time. Pricing purely as a markup on garment cost overcharges cheap goods and undercharges expensive ones.

The inputs that genuinely move the price:

• Quantity. Setup is fixed, so per-piece cost falls steeply and then flattens.
• Colours per location. Each colour is another screen, another setup, another chance to register wrong.
• Number of locations. A second location often means handling the garment twice.
• Decoration method. Embroidery prices on stitch count, screen print on colours, DTF on coverage. They are not interchangeable formulas.
• Garment cost — which sets the margin floor, not the decoration price.

The cost of inconsistency

Two prices for the same job is not just untidy. It shows up in three concrete ways:

• Lost jobs, because a rep quoted from list price when the shop buys a tier below it.
• Lost margin, because someone forgot the second location or the rush charge.
• Lost trust, when a repeat customer is quoted differently for the same order and notices.

The third is the expensive one. A customer who catches a pricing inconsistency starts checking every quote you send.

Rules, not lookups

The fix is to express your pricing as rules the system applies, rather than a table someone reads off. Set your quantity breaks, your per-colour and per-location charges and your method-specific rates once, and every quote is built from them.

Three things follow that are hard to get any other way:

• Any rep can quote. Pricing knowledge stops being one person's expertise and becomes the shop's.
• Price changes propagate. When a supplier raises garment costs, you change it in one place instead of hunting through templates.
• Quotes are auditable. When a customer questions a number, you can show how it was built.

Keep the override

Automated pricing that cannot be overridden gets abandoned within a month, because real shops discount. A long-standing customer, a job that fills an empty Tuesday, a nonprofit you support — all legitimate reasons to depart from the rule.

What matters is that the override is visible and deliberate. A discount somebody chose is a business decision. A discount that happened because the formula was wrong is a leak.

Dynamic pricing in PromoSoft

Pricing rules are defined per shop and applied automatically as items are added to a quote or order — calculated from quantity, decoration method, number of processes, locations and colours. Reps quote from the same rules, so the same job prices the same regardless of who builds it, and any override stays on the record.

Related: quote management · creating quotes.