Calculator
Bridal alterations margin calculator
See what one alterations job leaves after the sewing hours and the fitting room hours it actually consumed.
Free tools
Calculators for bridal boutique owners
Two working calculators for the two numbers that decide a bridal season: what alterations actually earn, and how many gowns you can honestly promise.
Bridal shops rarely fail on taste. They fail on two pieces of arithmetic that are easy to avoid doing: the real margin on an alterations menu once seamstress hours and fitting room time are counted, and the number of gowns the shop can carry through a spring without a pickup date slipping. Both calculators below run in your browser, keep nothing and are meant to be argued with.
Use your own numbers, including the uncomfortable ones. Count payroll load on your seamstress rate, count the stylist standing in the room while a hem is pinned, and count the third fitting you keep telling brides is unusual. The results are more useful when they are honest, and both tools are built to be run again the week your rates or your appointment mix change.
Calculator
Fitting room and workroom capacity planner
Find out whether your sewing hours or your fitting rooms are the real ceiling on how many gowns you can finish each week.
Working document
The gown countdown sheet
One page per gown that carries a bride from deposit to pickup without anything living only in your head.
Why the gown arithmetic is open to any shop
Neither one asks for an email address. A boutique owner should not have to trade her contact details to find out what a hem, a bodice take and a five point bustle actually leave after the seamstress hours are paid for, or how many gowns her workroom can finish in a week. Both run in the browser on this page, the figures stay on your screen, and closing the tab leaves nothing behind on our side.
They are worth running even if you never put a gown on a shared board. This arithmetic already gets done in every shop in the trade, usually after close, on the back of an alterations ticket: sewing hours multiplied by what you pay your seamstress, plus the staffed fitting room time nobody counts, set against the number you quoted the bride the day she left her deposit. The second sum gets penciled on the workroom wall in January, when you count sold gowns with April and May wedding dates against the hours your seamstress genuinely has. Written down properly, those two figures tell you whether to raise the bustle line on your menu, hire a part time sewer, or stop taking rush gowns inside ten weeks.
Both numbers assume somebody booked the hours
The gross per gown and the weekly ceiling only mean something once the sewing hours behind them are committed to actual weeks in front of actual wedding dates. If your version of that today is a handwritten list in the workroom and a stylist's memory of what was pinned in June, a short demo shows the same hours booked against the calendar the whole shop can read. Bring the figures you just ran and your busiest spring month.