How to price your first drop

New brands worry about charging too much without an established name [source]. Rather than starting from a rule of thumb like “double your cost”, start from what each sellable piece actually costs you to land, add your selling fees, and solve for the margin you need.

1. Landed cost

Landed cost per sellable unit is everything you spend to get finished, packed product in hand, divided by the pieces you can actually sell:

• Blank (plus spares if you supply them to the printer)
• Decoration, plus setup, screens or art fees
• Labels, neck prints, hang tags
• Packaging: poly bags, mailers, inserts
• Freight: blanks to the printer, finished goods to you
• Defects: misprints and damaged pieces, whose cost lands on the good ones

2. Selling costs

Payment processing, marketplace fees and any shipping you absorb. Percentage fees scale with price; per-order fees get split across the units in an order.

3. Solve for your target margin

price = (landed cost + per-order fees ÷ units per order) ÷ (1 − fee % − target margin %)

Worked example (placeholder costs)

Using the AS Colour 5026 at its lowest public price of $24.00 (AS Colour US (brand site)), plus made-up example costs: $5 print, $50 setup, $1 labels and $1 packaging per unit, $30 freight, 50 units, 3% defects, 2.9% + $0.30 payment fees, one unit per order.

• Landed cost per sellable unit: $33.61
• Price for a 50% margin: $71.99

Sanity checks

• If the target price is far above what similar brands charge, the fix is usually the cost side: a different blank, fewer colors or a bigger run.
• Check break-even sell-through. If you need to sell 90% of the run just to break even, the drop is risky.
• Price the whole size run: 2XL and up usually cost more per blank.