This page teaches a merchandiser, planner or brand buyer how trims and secondary materials are costed and placed on a material cost sheet next to the main fabric cost, using Order A's own fixed figures as the worked example. It is for anyone who has costed fabric alone and left trims as an afterthought, or a single lump sum. This mainly teaches the money flow of an order: fabric is usually the largest single material cost, but trims and secondary materials add up to a real share of price that a costing sheet must show component by component, not as one bundled figure.
Course 2's first two lessons built and defended Order A's own fabric consumption and wastage figures. This lesson moves to the materials that sit alongside fabric on any material cost sheet: trims, such as Order A's own fixed USD 0.20 per piece, and secondary materials such as labels, thread and packaging. It shows how each is costed on its own line, at its own quantity and price, rather than folded into a single guessed figure, and uses Cedar & Co.'s own domestic order as a second, clearly labelled example of the same method applied outside an export price framework. The method itself never changes; only the price framework around it does.
You need: no specific previous lesson, though Lessons 1 and 2 of this course are helpful background on how a fabric figure itself is built and defended.
By the end of this lesson you can:
Not covered here: building and defending the fabric consumption and wastage figures themselves (Lessons 1 and 2, already covered), auditing a finished material cost line for errors (Lesson 4 of this course), building a complete material cost sheet for a whole order (Lesson 5 of this course).
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Trims | Everything sewn or attached to a garment besides the main fabric: labels, buttons, zips, thread, care labels. |
| Cost component | One part of a garment's total price: fabric, trims, making, overhead, or profit. |
| Fabric cost | The cost of the fabric used in one garment, driven by fabric price per kilogram and consumption per piece. |
| Bill of materials | The list of every material and cost component in a garment, with its cost, used to build up the FOB price. |
| Ex-factory price | What the buyer pays the factory for the finished goods, at the factory's own gate, before any delivery cost is added. |
A material cost sheet treats fabric, trims and secondary materials as separate rows, each with its own quantity per piece and its own price, because each material is bought from a different supplier at a different unit and price, and each can change independently of the others. Order A's own fixed trims figure, USD 0.20 per piece, is itself a sum of several smaller items, such as a woven label, a care label and sewing thread, each with its own small quantity and price, rather than one single trim purchased at USD 0.20.
| What can differ | The shapes you meet | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| What counts as a trim | Order A's own labels, thread and care label; Order B's own zip, rivets and pocket bag lining for the jeans | Each product family has its own typical trim list, but every trim is still costed the same way, quantity per piece times price. |
| Export or domestic framing | Order A's trims sit inside an export FOB price; Cedar & Co.'s own domestic T-shirt trims sit inside an ex-factory price it pays Delta Garments, with no FOB shipping terms attached | The costing method for trims does not change with the buyer; only the price framework the total sits inside changes. |
| Secondary materials beyond trims | Export packaging and hang tags for Northline Apparel's shipment; Cedar & Co.'s own simpler domestic polybag and price ticket for its own shops | An export order commonly carries more secondary-material requirements than a domestic order sold through the brand's own shops. |
| Who supplies the trim | Trimco, the trims supplier, for most of Order A's labels, thread and buttons; a fabric mill occasionally supplying its own matching sewing thread | The costing method stays a quantity-times-price calculation regardless of which supplier the material comes from. |
| Related product families | Socks and hosiery (a simple woven brand label, minimal other trims); terry towels and home-textile bedding (a printed or woven jacquard border counted as a secondary material rather than a sewn trim) | Some product families use far fewer trim items than a fitted garment, but the same separate-row costing method still applies. |
Cedar & Co., the domestic brand with 12 shops, buys its own basic T-shirt from Delta Garments on a Make to Stock basis, forecasting its own demand rather than working from a single buyer's purchase order the way Northline Apparel does for Order A. Before agreeing an ex-factory price with Delta Garments, Cedar & Co.'s own buyer insists on seeing fabric, trims and secondary materials costed on separate rows, exactly as Order A's own costing sheet does, rather than one bundled "materials" figure.
Cedar & Co.'s own trims list is simpler than an export order's: a woven brand label, a care label and sewing thread, with no export shipping carton labelling requirement since its own shops receive stock directly. Its own secondary materials are limited to a simple polybag and a price ticket for its own shops, illustrative figures rather than Order A's own fixed ones, since the jeans order's (Order B's) and Cedar & Co.'s own trim breakdowns are not fixed facts of this course. Cedar & Co.'s buyer checks that each row, fabric, trims and secondary materials, is priced separately before agreeing the total ex-factory price.
The worked numberOrder A's own fixed figures, each on its own row:
Of Order A's USD 3.20 FOB price, the remaining USD 1.85 is made up of making, overhead and profit, already covered in Course 7's costing lesson, and is not re-derived here; this lesson's own focus stays on the two material rows, fabric and trims.
A common mistake is writing a single figure such as "trims: USD 0.20" onto a costing sheet without breaking it down into the label, thread and care-label items that actually make it up. A bundled figure cannot be checked against a price change in any one item; if a label supplier raises its own price, nobody can tell how much of the bundled USD 0.20 that single change should move, because the bundle was never broken into its own parts to begin with.
This mistake is easy to make because trims individually cost very little compared with fabric, so it can feel like unnecessary detail to list a label and a thread separately when their combined effect on the total price is small. The safeguard is to remember that a bundled figure is exactly the kind of typed, unformulated number Course 7's costing lesson already warned against for a share of price: it looks correct on the day it is written and goes silently wrong the first time any one item inside it changes.
A garment needs more than its main fabric. It needs small extra items sewn on, like labels and thread, called trims, and it often needs other materials that are not sewn on at all, like a bag or a price ticket, called secondary materials. Each of these gets its own line on a cost sheet, with its own quantity and its own price, the same way the main fabric does. Order A's own trims figure looks like one number, but it is really several small items added together. Grouping several different items into one guessed total instead of listing them separately makes it impossible to tell what happens to the price when just one of those items changes.
Cedar & Co.'s buyer is reviewing a proposed ex-factory price from Delta Garments for its own domestic T-shirt. The costing sheet Delta Garments first sends lists fabric on its own row, but groups trims, thread and packaging together under a single line reading "materials: USD 0.28."
Should Cedar & Co.'s buyer accept the bundled "materials: USD 0.28" line as it stands? Decide before opening the answer.
No, the buyer should ask Delta Garments to break the bundled line into its own separate rows before agreeing the price. Two facts decide this.
First, USD 0.28 covers five different items, a label, a care label, thread, a polybag and a price ticket, each bought from a different supplier at a different price. A single bundled figure cannot show which of these five is driving the total, or by how much, in the way Order A's own separate fabric and trims rows can.
Second, if any one supplier's price changes, for example the polybag supplier raising its price, nobody reading the bundled figure can tell how much of the new total that single change explains. Cedar & Co.'s buyer should insist on the same separate-row structure Order A's own costing sheet already uses, so each item's own price can be checked and renegotiated on its own.
A bundled materials figure carries a real cost the first time any one item inside it changes price. If Cedar & Co. had accepted the bundled USD 0.28 "materials" line and the polybag supplier later raised its price by USD 0.03 per piece, Cedar & Co. would have no way of confirming whether Delta Garments correctly passed that change through to the ex-factory price, or quietly absorbed it into an unrelated row, or overcharged Cedar & Co. by attributing more of the increase to the bundle than the polybag price change actually justifies.
The Material cost sheet holds separate rows for fabric, trims and secondary materials, exactly as worked through in this lesson, so no material cost is ever bundled into a single guessed figure.
| Question | Order A (filled in) | Cedar & Co. (illustrative) |
|---|---|---|
| Fabric cost per piece | USD 1.15 | USD 1.02 (illustrative) |
| Trims cost per piece | USD 0.20 | Not fixed; cost each item separately |
| Secondary materials per piece | Included in Order A's own trims figure | Polybag and price ticket, costed separately |
| Material rows bundled together? | No, always separate | No, always separate |
Download the Material cost sheet from the course page and list your own order's trims and secondary materials on separate rows before pricing them.
1. Why is Order A's own fixed USD 0.20 trims figure treated as a sum of several smaller items rather than one single item?
2. Why does Cedar & Co.'s buyer refuse to accept a bundled 'materials: USD 0.28' line from Delta Garments?
3. A different order's costing sheet lists a zip at USD 0.06 per piece and rivets at USD 0.02 per piece as two separate trim rows. What is the combined trims cost per piece for just these two items?
| EN | AR | FR | TR | Meaning |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Trims | الإكسسوارات | Fournitures (accessoires) | Aksesuar (yardımcı malzeme) | Everything sewn or attached to a garment besides the main fabric: labels, buttons, zips, thread, care labels. |
| Cost component | عنصر التكلفة | Élément de coût | Maliyet bileşeni | One part of a garment's total price: fabric, trims, making, overhead, or profit. |
| Fabric cost | تكلفة القماش | Coût du tissu | Kumaş maliyeti | The cost of the fabric used in one garment, driven by fabric price per kilogram and consumption per piece. |
| Bill of materials | قائمة المواد | Nomenclature | Malzeme listesi | The list of every material and cost component in a garment, with its cost, used to build up the FOB price. |
| Ex-factory price | سعر خروج المصنع | Prix départ usine | Fabrika çıkış fiyatı | What the buyer pays the factory for the finished goods, at the factory's own gate, before any delivery cost is added. |
You can now place trims and secondary materials on a material cost sheet alongside fabric. The next lesson turns that sheet into an audit tool, checking a material cost line that looks suspicious against the figures behind it. Back to the course map