Ask five shops what they charge for a left-chest logo and you will get five different answers. Published guides don’t agree either: rates per 1,000 stitches go from about US$0.50 to US$3 (sources at the end). That range is useful as a reference, but it can’t tell you whether your price covers your costs.
This guide walks through the method in four steps: machine time, cost per piece, margin, and a check against the market.
1. Turn the stitch count into machine time
The stitch count matters because it tells you how long the machine is busy. A practical formula:
- Stitches per minute: what your machine actually runs at, not the maximum on the box. Wilcom says multi-needle machines usually run at 700–800 stitches per minute.
- Efficiency: the machine doesn’t stitch 100% of the time (thread breaks, slowdowns, restarts). 75% is a reasonable starting point; measure your own.
- Color changes and trims: on a multi-needle machine each takes a few seconds (Wilcom: 3–4 seconds per trim). On a single-needle machine you change the thread by hand, which can take a minute or more.
2. Work out your cost per piece
Your cost per hour of machine time is everything it costs to keep the machine running for one hour: your pay, rent, electricity, needles, maintenance and machine payments, divided by the hours you actually embroider. This is the number most shops never calculate, and it is the one that decides whether you make money.
If the customer brings the garment, leave it out. If you supply it, add what it costs you.
3. Add your margin
The margin pays for the time you don’t bill: answering messages, quoting, hooping, trimming threads, mistakes, and growth. Printavo also recommends pricing garments higher than you would for screen printing, with a markup of 50% or more, and warns against big quantity discounts because in embroidery more pieces bring more problems.
4. Check it against published rates
Divide your price by the stitch count (in thousands) to get your price per 1,000 stitches, and compare it with the published range. If you land far below it, check your cost per hour; if you land far above, check your machine speed and efficiency.
Here is the whole method with one example. The costs (US$30 per machine hour, thread and stabilizer) are assumptions for the example, not market data: replace them with yours.
| Step | Result |
|---|---|
| Machine time: 8,000 ÷ (750 × 0.75) + 6 color changes + 10 trims | 15.3 min |
| Labor: 15.3 min × US$30.00/hour | US$7.64 |
| Thread + stabilizer | US$0.25 |
| Cost per piece | US$7.89 |
| Price with a 40% margin | US$11.05 |
| Same price per 1,000 stitches | US$1.38 |
| Published range for 8,000 stitches (US$0.50–3.00 per 1,000) | US$4.00 – US$24.00 |
In this example the price lands inside the published range. With a different cost per hour, the same logo could land well outside it, and that is exactly what the check is for.
Don’t forget digitizing and setup
Two costs are easy to forget:
- Digitizing: turning the logo into a stitch file. Printful, for example, charges a one-time digitization fee for each new design.
- Setup: loading the design, threading colors, hooping the first piece. Some shops charge it per order; Printavo suggests rolling it into the price per piece instead.
Either way, decide it before you quote, not after.
Pricing by tiers instead of a straight line
A straight price per stitch is easy to calculate, but Printavo argues it is a poor way to show customers how more stitches affect the order, and recommends a tiered matrix by complexity. A common approach is to calculate your cost per stitch with the method above and then round it into tiers (for example, up to 5,000 stitches, 5,001–10,000, and so on) so the customer gets a simple number.