Free tool
Bridal alterations margin calculator
See what one alterations job leaves after the sewing hours and the fitting room hours it actually consumed.
Free tool, no sign up
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.
Every bridal shop has two separate ceilings and most owners only watch one. The first is workroom capacity, the total sewing hours your team can put into gowns in a week. The second is fitting room capacity, the number of appointments your rooms and staffed hours physically allow. Whichever is lower is your true limit, and promising past it is how May goes wrong.
Set the numbers below for a normal week rather than your best one. The planner shows both ceilings, tells you which one binds, and projects how many gowns you can carry through a twelve week run so you can decide now whether to add workroom hours, add a room, or stop taking rush work in your busiest stretch.
Your result
Gowns per week the workroom supports
3.6
Your sewing hours divided by the hours one gown consumes.
Gowns per week the fitting rooms support
20.0
Room hours divided by the appointment time each gown needs.
True weekly ceiling
3.6
The lower of the two, because the tighter one always wins.
Gowns across a twelve week season
43
What a spring run can actually deliver at these settings.
Book to about eighty five percent of the weekly ceiling, because rush work, remakes and the bride who arrives with different shoes all come out of the same hours.
Which ceiling is really binding you
In most small bridal shops the workroom binds first. Two fitting rooms open thirty hours a week can absorb far more appointments than one seamstress can sew for, so adding a room or extending Saturday hours changes nothing except how many gowns are waiting on the same person. The fix is workroom hours, a second sewer or a simpler mix.
The pattern flips in shops with a strong workroom and a cramped floor, often a shop that shares rooms between consultations and fittings. There the sewing hours sit idle while pinning appointments queue. If your room capacity is the lower number, look at moving fittings to your quiet weekday mornings before you pay anyone for more hours.
Planning a spring run against the ceiling
Take the twelve week figure and compare it against the gowns already sold with wedding dates inside that window. If the sold count is higher, the calendar has already made a promise the shop cannot keep, and the honest moves are to add hours, push first fittings earlier or route the overflow to a trusted outside seamstress with a written handoff.
The earlier you run this, the cheaper the fix. A shop that spots the gap in January can hire a part time sewer, stagger first fittings into February and protect its April. A shop that spots it in April is paying rush rates and apologizing, and the bride does not care which ceiling was the problem.
Questions about this calculator
What should I use for hours per gown?
Use the average across your actual mix, including the heavy gowns, not the simple hem you can do in your sleep. If you track it, take the last twenty finished gowns and average them. If you do not track it, start at nine hours and correct it after a month of honest notes.
Should consultations count as fitting room hours?
Only if the same room is used for both. Enter the hours the room is genuinely available for fittings after consultations are carved out. Shops that share rooms usually find their room capacity is lower than they assumed.
Why book to eighty five percent instead of filling the calendar?
Because the remaining fifteen percent is spoken for whether you plan it or not. A gown arriving late from the designer, a bride who lost weight, a bustle that needs rebuilding after the trial: all of it lands in the same week and comes out of the same hours.
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.