The product and the price
Work backwards from what your customer pays to the most the mill can cost you, per piece and per set.
Your shelf priceYour marginA piece count
Start at the shelf, not at the mill. Take the price your customer will pay, take out your own margin, your inbound freight, your duty, your returns and your cost of holding the stock, and what is left is the most the mill can charge you. Do this before you ask anybody for a quote, because it tells you immediately whether the product you have in mind can exist at that price.
Then price the set, not the piece. A duvet cover set is a cover plus one or two pillowcases; a bed in a bag is more again; a towel line is usually a bath, a hand and a face towel and often a bath sheet. Each of those is a separate piece with its own cloth consumption and its own price, and a mill that quotes you one number for a set has made assumptions about the split that you cannot see. Ask for the piece prices and add them up yourself.
For a reality check on your own line, the home textile numbers show what whole shipments of your product actually declared at the United States border, per piece where a piece count exists. It is an average of everything inside a customs line rather than a price list, and it is the closest honest thing to one that is published free. Open your product group and read the supplier countries under it: if your target price is far below what an entire trade is paying, the specification is what has to move.
A caution that belongs here rather than at the end. Home textiles are heavy and bulky for their value, so freight is a much larger share of a landed cost than it is on garments. A price that works on a spreadsheet with the freight left out will not survive step 8.
What a bad answer looks like: one price for “the set”, or a cover price with the pillowcases “included”, so you cannot see what any single piece costs or what split the mill has assumed.
Check it outside, at the source:
- UN Comtrade (opens in a new tab) the HS6 values and quantities every figure on our product table is computed from, so you can pull your own line rather than take ours
- OTEXA, US textile and apparel imports (opens in a new tab) the US Commerce view of the same trade by country and category, with an Excel export, which is the cleanest cross check there is
- US Harmonized Tariff Schedule (opens in a new tab) confirms which line your product actually falls in before you read anything at all into its unit value
Tools for this step
- What is actually paid, by product
Open your own product line rather than the category average and read the value, the growth and the price per piece being paid into the United States, with every supplier country under it.
Every tool for this guide, grouped by what you are trying to do, is on the tools page.