The Travel Tailor's Real Cost Per Suit

I met a tailor at an airport gate who had just finished three days in a city, had written four suits, and was pleased with the trip. He talked me through the numbers on the flight and he had them all, except one.

He knew what each suit cost him ex-works and what he charged for it. What he did not know was what the trip had cost, because the trip was filed in his head under marketing.

It was 900 euro spread across four garments, which is 225 euro a suit, which was most of what he thought he had made.

Travel is a cost of goods

This is the most common error in the travelling model, and it is an accounting error rather than a business one, which is why it survives so long. The business is often fine. The picture of the business is wrong.

Flights, hotel, transport, the dinners you buy clients, the day you did not earn anything because you were in transit: all of it attaches to the garments you wrote on that trip and to nothing else, since there is no other product for it to attach to.

Put it in the model and two things change. A thin trip stops looking like a good one. And you start managing the number that decides the outcome, which was never your buy price; it is how many appointments you can stack into the days you are already paying for.

The break-even count

The whole calculation takes a minute. Total trip cost, divided by gross profit per garment, equals the number of garments that trip needs before it has earned anything at all.

A 900 euro trip against 300 euro of gross profit per suit breaks even at three. The fourth order is the first one that pays you. If you know that number before you book the flight, you know what a trip needs to look like before it is worth taking, and you will start filling the diary differently.

Price is not the lever here. Appointment density is. One more client on a trip you were already taking costs you almost nothing and drops straight through. This is the reverse of a shop, where the fixed cost sits still and you grow into it. Here the fixed cost gets on a plane with you and you decide how thinly to spread it.

Two things follow from that. Return to cities rather than collecting new ones, because a second visit converts better and costs the same. And be careful with the marginal city, the one you add because it is nearby and you know two people there; that is often the trip that loses money while feeling productive.

The figures for a fixed shop work the same way with different fixed costs, and are worth reading alongside this if you are weighing up doing both.

Ex-works versus landed

The number a manufacturer quotes you is almost never the number you should be pricing against.

A half-canvassed two-piece leaves us at 171 euro ex-works. That is a real figure and we publish it deliberately, because a supplier who will not tell you the price until you are on a call is managing you rather than quoting you.

But ex-works means it is yours at our door. What lands in your client's hands also carries freight, duty, any payment or currency fees, and the cost of the occasional remake. Model on the landed figure, always, and treat a quote on different terms as not yet comparable to another quote until you have normalised both. Two suppliers quoting the same garment on different Incoterms can differ by a third before either has been dishonest.

We set out how to read a quote and normalise it separately, including the difference between DDP and DAP, because it is the part most people get wrong on their first order and the part that decides whether the model works.

Then add your trip cost per garment on top of the landed cost, and only then look at your retail price, because that is your real margin. Usually it is still good. Rarely is it what people thought.

Cloth that survives a carry-on

Your client travels. Your cloth needs to as well, and this is a specification question rather than a marketing one.

Weight and weave decide it. Under 240 grams a cloth creases readily and holds the crease, which is fine for a summer jacket and poor for a suit that lives in a bag. The 240 to 300 gram band is where most business suiting sits and where recovery is best. Above 340 grams you are into autumn and winter cloths that behave well but are not what somebody wants across three cities in July.

Weave matters as much as weight. A tighter worsted twill at 280 grams will come out of a suitcase better than a looser plain weave at the same weight, and a high-twist yarn better than a soft one. Asking for the weight and the weave is a more useful question than asking whether a cloth is good for travel, which every supplier will answer yes to.

Of the 822 cloths we list with a stated weight, 597 sit in the 240 to 300 gram band, and the full range across our books runs from 98 to 440 grams. Ask us for the weight of anything before you show it to a client, and ask the same of anybody else you are considering. A supplier who cannot give a number in grams is not reading from a mill book, and the test for that is worth running once on everybody you buy from.

Our house cloth range lists the composition and weight of every line in it, so you can check this rather than take it from me.

Lead time as a promise

Our production runs 14 to 20 working days from confirmation, and European delivery adds a few days on top. Rush production is available, five days at a 50 per cent surcharge and three days at 70 per cent.

Do not quote any of those numbers to your client. Quote your own date, built on the outside of our range with your buffer added, then deliver inside it.

A travelling tailor lives or dies on this in a way a shop does not, because you are not there when the parcel arrives. You cannot smooth over a late delivery with a friendly conversation across a counter. The date is the entire relationship, and a programme's reputation is made by the first ten dates it hits rather than by the fastest one it ever managed.

The one case worth paying the rush surcharge on is a fixed event, a wedding or a specific meeting, where being close is the same as being late. Everywhere else, take the standard window and promise wider.

Ship to the client

Route the finished garment to your client's home, office or hotel, under your own label. Measure in Vienna, order from Vienna, and it arrives in Amsterdam without passing through you.

This is what decides whether the model scales, because the alternative has you paying to ship every garment twice and being physically present to forward it. That constraint is what keeps most travelling tailors capped at the cities they can personally return to.

What you carry, then, is a swatch book, a measurement form and a style card. No rolls, no pattern blocks, no studio. If you are carrying cloth, you have pre-bought inventory and guessed at demand, which is the thing this model exists to avoid.

Our fit and sizing system shows what we ask for and what we do with it, and is worth reading before your next trip rather than after it. Consistency in how you measure matters more than expertise, because a consistent error can be corrected once in the pattern and an inconsistent one cannot be corrected at all.

Test it on one trip

Do not move your whole book to a new supplier because a sample jacket was good.

Take one client on one trip. Measure, order one garment, and watch four things: how long the quote took to come back and whether it was itemised, whether the cloth matched the swatch, whether the date held, and how it fitted straight out of the box with no alteration.

Four data points from one suit will tell you more than any amount of correspondence. If it goes well, put two more through before you rebuild your kit around it. The questions worth asking before you send money cover the rest.

And run the trip numbers on that first trip too, not only the suit numbers. Most people find their business is better than they feared and their good trips are fewer than they thought, and both of those are useful things to know before you book the next flight.

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We make made-to-measure suits under your own label from a single piece, in cloth from European mills and our own held-in-stock range, in our atelier in Shanghai, in 14 to 20 working days, shipped to your client under your name. If you want to run the one-trip test above, tell us the garment and we will quote it in full, with the weight and the reference on the page. The production guide for tailoring shops covers the process end to end, or tell us where you are travelling next.