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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.
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Bridal alterations margin calculator
See what one alterations job leaves after the sewing hours and the fitting room hours it actually consumed.
An alterations menu that reads well to a bride can still lose money quietly. The charge is visible, the hours are not, and the fitting room time a stylist spends pinning and steaming almost never gets counted at all. This calculator puts both kinds of labor against the ticket so you can see the gross per gown before you set next season's menu.
Enter what you typically collect for a full alterations job, the hands on hours at the machine, and the staffed time in the fitting room across all appointments for that gown. The result shows what is left per gown, what it works out to per hour of shop time, and what the whole thing produces in a month at your current volume.
Your result
Labor cost per gown
$354
Sewing hours and fitting room hours priced at what you pay for them.
Gross per gown
$296
What the ticket leaves before rent, thread, notions and everything else.
Gross per hour of shop time
$24.67
Compare this against what an hour of selling floor time earns you.
Monthly alterations gross
$5,328
Your current volume carried through at the same margin per gown.
These are labor only figures, so treat the gross as the pool that still has to cover rent, insurance and everything the workroom consumes.
The hours most shops forget to count
Almost every bridal owner can quote her sewing hours within a half hour. Very few count the fitting room. A pinning appointment with a mother and two bridesmaids in the room runs long, the stylist is not selling while it happens, and the same gown comes back twice more before it is finished. Three hours of staffed room time per gown is common and rarely appears in a pricing decision.
The second forgotten cost is rework that nobody charges for: a hem redone after she changes shoes, a bustle retied because the maid of honor could not follow it, a strap moved after weight loss. If that happens on one gown in five, add the average hours back across all gowns and rerun the numbers. Margin that looked comfortable often gets thin fast.
Reading the gross per hour figure
The per hour number is the one to watch as your mix changes. A couture gown with heavy beading can carry a large ticket and still produce a poor hourly yield, while a simple crepe hem and a French bustle can quietly be the best paid hour in the building. Pricing by the piece without knowing this is how shops end up subsidizing their hardest work.
Run the calculator twice, once with a plain gown and once with your most complicated recent job. If the hourly figures are far apart, your menu is the reason, and either the complicated tier needs to move or your intake needs to price beading and layered skirts separately from the base hem.
Questions about this calculator
Should I include my own time if I sew the gowns myself?
Yes, at whatever you would have to pay someone to replace you. Owners who enter zero for the seamstress rate always see wonderful margins and learn nothing. Use a rate that reflects the local market for a skilled bridal seamstress.
Does this work for a shop that sends alterations out?
Use the amount the outside workroom bills you as the seamstress cost, converted to an hourly figure, and keep your own fitting room hours in the second field. The gross per gown will be smaller and the picture is still worth seeing.
Why is there no overhead line in the calculator?
Rent, utilities and insurance do not vary per gown, so mixing them in hides the labor picture. Take the monthly gross, subtract your fixed costs for the month and you have the real contribution alterations make to the shop.
More free tools and working documents
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.
Now hold that figure against your spring
The result above describes one gown or one ordinary week, and a bridal season is neither. What decides April is how many pinned gowns land in the same seven days with one seamstress and a bride who booked a flight. Send us your open orders and we will lay them out week by week so you can see exactly where this number stops being true.