Let's tallk about what it costs to make a kilt. I've done this before, eh, but it's been a while.

OK, I'd like to actually make a living as kiltmaker. I live in the San Francisco Bay Area. I own my house and have a mortgage. To do that, and save for retirement I make (or made, in my last job) ...oh, never mind. Thats pure fantasy.

So let's move to a rather less expensive housing market, where you can get by on a LOT less income, say ....$40,000 per year.

How much per hour, working a 40-hour week, 50 weeks per year, will earn $40,000 a year?
Answer: $800 per week, or twenty dollars an hour.

OK, I'm a custom handsewn kiltmaker, and a real pro and FAST, and let's say it takes me twenty hours of work to make a kilt. Let's say all I do is make kilts...I don't advertise, I don't answer correspondance, I don't have a web site, I don't package up kilts to mail them, I don't order material, I don't pay taxes or do bookkeeping, I don't do ANYTHING but make kilts all day long, 40 hours a week. Ri-i-i-i-i-i-ght.

Well, simple math says that it's $400 labor to make a kilt at $20 an hour, for 20 hours.

Labor: $400

Now, let's buy the material. Let's pretend that it costs $60 a yard. Now, since I'm running a business, I get a discount over retail prices, right? Let's pretend...because I don't actually know what the discount is...but let's pretend that it's 50%. So that $60 a yard stuff costs me $30 a yard. OK, double-width, right? So your eight yard kilt meant that I bought four yards of it.... $120, and we'll just sort of forget the tax and shipping for now, hmmm?

Tartan: $120

Then there are buckles and liner material and hair canvas and thread, we'll say that runs fifteen bucks a kilt.

Other material: $15.

So at any sort of reasonable estimate, paying a living wage in the USA, a custom, mostly hand-sewn wool tartan kilt has GOT to cost a minimum of $535.

OK, instead of paying our kiltmaker a decent wage, let's starve the poor sucker. Let's pay him ten bucks an hour, for a stunning annual income of twenty thousand dollars a year.............Riiiiight.....

Forget the tax, the shipping, the advertising, forget ALL of it....which of course is total fantasy, but we'll play fantasy for now. Ten bucks an hour, $20,000 a year and what does this kilt cost? $335.

....and that, folks, is why custom-made, First-World constructed kilts cost so much.

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Let's make 6-yard kilts out of poly-viscose, and machiine sew them, eh? Can we do that and not starve?

Kiltstore.com sells the Marton Mills poly-viscose for about $20 a yard to retail customers. I bet they sell it "to the trade" for about ten bucks a yard. OK so the tartan in a six-yard kilt made of poly-viscose costs about $30, maybe $40. Let's call it $40, and maybe that covers part of the shipping.

Tartan: $40

Buckles, thread, liner material, etc.: $15

OK, let's pretend our worker can sew up a machine-sewn kilt in a day. That's what Bear used to say...it took him a day to make a kilt. All right, so if he's making that $20/hour, to make a living at $40,000/year that's $160 labor.

Labor: $160

Add it up, and you get $215, which is just about exactly what a USA Kilts semi-traditional kilt costs.

Remember, that's blithely ignoring eighteen million other things that eat time and money:

Rent
Sewing Machine maintenance
taxes
the utility bill
the web site
answering correspondance
ordering material and supplies.etc. etc.

NOBODY IS GETTING RICH, MAKING KILTS.