How to Price Embroidery Jobs: A Markup Formula That Works

Pricing embroidery jobs is one of those things that every shop owner struggles with at some point. Charge too much and you lose the bid. Charge too little and you're working for free after thread, blanks, and machine time. Most shops either guess, copy a competitor, or use a flat rate that hasn't changed in years.

There's a better way. It starts with understanding your actual costs and applying a structured markup formula based on quantity tiers. This isn't theoretical — it's the exact approach I use in my own shop.

Start with your wholesale cost

Every quote starts with what you're actually paying for the blank garment. If you're ordering from SanMar, you're looking at wholesale pricing that varies by product and quantity. A Port Authority K500 polo might cost you $10.00 wholesale. A Port & Company PC78H hoodie might run $14.50.

Your wholesale cost is your floor. Everything you charge above that covers embroidery time, thread, digitizing amortization, overhead, and profit.

The quantity-based markup formula

Flat pricing is a trap. A 6-piece order takes almost as much setup time as a 200-piece order — digitizing, hooping the first piece, test stitching, color matching. But the per-piece handling time drops significantly at volume.

That's why your markup should decrease as quantity increases. Here's a formula that works:

The markup multiplier changes based on the quantity tier:

At 1.7x on a 144-piece order, you're still making $7 per piece on a $10 blank. On a typical corporate order of 200 polos, that's $1,400 in margin before you factor in embroidery fees for additional locations or complex designs.

Why this works better than flat pricing

With flat pricing, you either overprice small orders (losing them to competitors) or underprice large orders (leaving money on the table). Tiered markup adapts automatically.

A customer ordering 6 custom polos for a family reunion expects to pay more per piece — they know it's a small run. A purchasing manager ordering 300 polos for a company expects a volume discount. Your tiers satisfy both without you having to negotiate every time.

Don't forget the embroidery add-on

The markup formula above covers the garment cost plus a standard single-location embroidery. For additional decoration locations, most shops add a flat fee per location:

These add-ons stay consistent regardless of quantity because the per-piece embroidery time doesn't decrease much with volume — each piece still needs to be hooped and run through the machine.

Setting this up in practice

The biggest pain isn't choosing the markup — it's applying it consistently across every quote. When you're quoting 5-10 jobs a day, manually looking up wholesale prices, calculating markup by quantity, and typing it all into an estimate takes 15-20 minutes per quote.

That's the problem I built EMBquote to solve. You set your markup tiers once, and the AI applies them automatically every time you quote a job. It pulls the current SanMar wholesale price, applies your tier based on the quantity, and generates the estimate — ready to send to QuickBooks or print as a PDF.

Key takeaways

Price by quantity tier, not flat rate. Start with your actual wholesale cost as the floor. Use a 2.5x to 1.7x markup range depending on order size. Add flat fees for extra embroidery locations. And if you're doing more than a few quotes a day, automate the math so you can focus on the actual embroidery.