Effective Hourly Rate of Apparel Projects
The price is the dollar amount you see on the invoice. It is the easiest and simplest way to interpret how much something "costs".
Often times, we fail to take into account the invisible costs of doing things. While this type of accounting for every little thing in your life would be exhausting, you should build and develop awareness about the true cost of services and products offered by your business.
How do you figure out your effective hourly rate for apparel?
Based on my calculations, if you're working with Forever Fierce, your EHR should be $500-1,000 per order. I estimate that you should spend no more than 2 hours total on this entire experience per order. If you're spending more than 2 hours of "time on task" for apparel, something is wrong and we need to fix that.
I am going to walk you thru this exercise.
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Forever Fierce
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Task
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Time/Cost
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Notes
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Design phase
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30-45 minutes
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This will be the most time intensive part. There will be back and forth and edits needed on a design. What drags this part out is trying to please everyone with the design. If you open this up for "member feedback/voting", you are asking for a nightmare. Trust the templates we have for clients. They are proven and have had a great success rate of meeting the minimum order and getting an order together.
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Receiving Samples
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5 minutes
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Simply open the box and make a quick post that sizing samples are available at the front desk. We send these samples for free and we have a decade of experience of picking and recommending the right garments.
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Preorder process
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5-30 minutes
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I will give you the game plan and marketing template. This saves you 1-2 hours of time. If you're running the preorder yourself, you should set aside 10-20 minutes per day for billing. If we're doing a webstore for you, all you have to do is make an announcement that the preorder is live.
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Confirming the order
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5-10 minutes
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Simply confirm the totals in the document we send you and pay the invoice.
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Total time: High estimate: 1.5 hours, low estimate: .75 hours
Example profit per order: $750
Orders for the year: 4
Profit: $3000
End of Year Effective Hourly Rate High End Time Estimate: $3000/ 6 hours= $500 per hour
End of Year Effective Hourly Rate Low End Time Estimate: $3000/ 3 hours= $1000 per hour
But what about that local guy? What is the true cost of working with them?
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Other Vendors
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Task
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Time/Cost
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Notes
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Design phase
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2-3 hours
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You message them about an apparel order and they ask "well what do you want". You're not sure so you task your spouse or gm with researching a design idea. They wind up messing around on canva way too long and present you with a design that you're underwhelmed with. So you decide to hop on social media and just copy what another gym is doing and send it to the vendor. It takes them a week to get back to you with a mock up and you're now a week behind schedule.
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Receiving Samples
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1 hour
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The local guy doesn't really get the fitness space. He shows you a bunch of garments that don't really fit what your people are looking for. So you hop on a facebook group and ask what garments people are using. Then you need to go on Amazon and order the garments because the local guy doesn't send samples for free.
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Preorder process
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2-4 hours
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There is no gameplan. You have no idea what to do, how to pitch this, or best practices for running an apparel order. You build all the marketing templates yourself. You schedule them on your own. You jump back on social media to see if anyone has a process for running a preorder effectively. You give up. The advice is all over the map. You launch it and pray this is the right way of doing things.
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Confirming the order
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1-2 hours
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Your preorder process wasn't very organized and you have to cross check your texts, emails, and facebook pages to ensure you took down everyone's order. You think you did it right but you're in the middle of a workout and you just remembered you forgot to write down Sally's order when she told it to you the other day. You forgot what she told you and you're mad at yourself for misremembering it. It wrecks your workout and now you're annoyed the rest of the day. You finally place the order and hope you got everyone's order down.
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Total time: High estimate: 10 hours, low estimate:6 hours
Example profit per order: $1000 (lets say someone has us significantly "beat on price")
Orders for the year: 4
Profit: $4000
End of Year Effective Hourly Rate High End Time Estimate: $4000/ 40 hours= $100 per hour
End of Year Effective Hourly Rate Low End Time Estimate: $4000/ 24 hours= $166 per hour
As you can see, invisible costs will eat you alive. The best way to improve your profitability and buy back your time is to work with experts and vendors who take things off your plate. You need to avoid working with vendors where you're essentially buying yourself another job.
Yes, you may save a couple bucks up front but the real math will make this abundantly clear who is the better vendor.