[EricH]

Originally Posted by Tristan Lall

That's sort of what I was afraid of...assuming you're budgeting for engineer-style wages (e.g. $25/h) a significant portion of your overhead is going to go towards paying yourselves to cut and sew (I'd guess $5–$8 per piece for your labour). What about contracting out the fabrication to an established tailoring business, maybe on a piecework basis? At least that way, you'd be paying up to the same amount for proven skill, and freeing yourselves for other productive activity. (That would depend to some extent on your expected volume...but if you're turning over anything more than a hundred pieces per month, it would probably work out much more efficiently.)

Another consideration: are you going to bunch orders together into production runs, or respond individually to orders? If you can run orders together (like once per week), you'll probably be significantly more efficient.

We aren't going for engineer-style wages at this point. When you own the business, anything left from overhead and labor (which, if you have no employees, is $0) is your pay.

We are going for individual orders, unless a pre-wash is requested. At that point, it's whenever the washing machine has enough to do a load.