Ask a unit owner where the money goes and you will hear about labour, electricity and
the machine that needs servicing. Then look at the cost sheet. Fabric is usually the
biggest single line on it — and most of what is wasted is not wasted at the
machine. It is wasted on the cutting table, before a single stitch is sewn.
Measure it before you spend anything
Almost every unit guesses its wastage, and almost every guess is low. The number is easy
to get and you do not need software to get it. Take one month:
- How many metres of fabric were issued to the cutting table.
- How many metres actually ended up in garments — pieces per
garment multiplied by garments cut.
The gap between the two is your wastage. If 100 metres went to the table and 88 metres
left it as garment pieces, 12 metres were lost — 12 per cent. At ₹250 a metre
that is ₹3,000 from that one lot, and if the same rate holds on 800 metres a month
it is ₹24,000 a month and ₹2,88,000 a year.
Those are arithmetic, not a claim about your unit. Put your own three numbers into the
fabric wastage calculator and it does the same sum with them.
Until you have that figure, every machine you consider buying is a guess.
Do this first, this month
One lot. Metres issued, metres in garments, price per metre. Write it on paper. Everything
below is easier to judge once you know whether your number is 4 per cent or 18.
What a marker is, and why it decides the number
A marker is the plan of how every pattern piece is laid on the fabric before it is cut.
Draw it badly and the gaps between pieces are fabric you bought and threw away. Draw it
well and the same garments come out of less cloth. Nothing else in the cutting room moves
the number as much.
Marker efficiency is the share of the marker area that is actually pattern
pieces. The rest is the gaps. It is the one figure worth writing on the board in a cutting
room, because everything else below is just a way of raising it.
The five things that actually move it
1. Fabric width
The same set of pieces nests differently on 36″, 44″ and 58″ cloth. A
piece that leaves a wasted strip down one side of a narrow fabric may sit two-across on a
wider one with almost nothing left over. Before you order the next lot, lay the marker both
ways and compare. Wider is not automatically better — it depends on the garment
— so check rather than assume.
2. How many sizes you put in one marker
A marker of one size has to fit that size's shapes together, and the hollows stay hollow. Put
a small and a large in the same marker and the small pieces drop into the spaces the large
ones leave. This is the single biggest gain available to most units, and it costs nothing but
planning the cut order so that sizes can be combined.
The limit is your order book: you can only combine sizes you actually have to cut.
3. One-way fabric and matching
Velvet, corduroy, most prints and anything with a nap can only be laid one way, so pieces
cannot be turned to fit. Checks and stripes cost again, because pieces have to line up at
the seams. Both are real costs and neither is avoidable — but they should be
priced in, not discovered afterwards. If your costing uses one fabric figure for
plain and printed alike, the printed orders are quietly paying less than they cost.
4. Grain line
Every piece has a direction it must be cut in. Turning one off-grain to close a gap saves a
few centimetres and produces a garment that twists after the first wash. That is not a saving;
it is an alteration, a return, or a customer who does not come back.
5. The ends of the lay
Every lay loses fabric at the ends — the bit too short for another pattern piece. One
long lay wastes those ends once; four short lays waste them four times. Where the order
allows it, fewer and longer lays beat several short ones.
Paper marker, or software
Markers were planned by hand long before software existed, and a good cutting master still
beats bad software. What software changes is not skill, it is time: trying six arrangements
by hand takes an afternoon, so in practice the first workable one gets cut. On screen the
same six take minutes, and the one that fits best is the one that goes to the table.
It also prints the efficiency figure, which means you can see whether this week was better
than last.
One of these is ours
Fashion Dot, which publishes this blog, sells tailoring
CAD software that plans markers.
Everything above applies to it as much as to anything else — and the test is the same
one: ask whoever is selling to run a marker on
your patterns, with your fabric
width and your size mix, and show you the efficiency figure next to your current one.
A demonstration on somebody else's patterns proves nothing about yours.
See the Fashion Dot CAD software
The honest order to do things in, which is the same order
the CAD roadmap sets out: get the patterns
drafted digitally first. A marker is made of pattern pieces, so marker software has nothing
good to work with until the pieces themselves are clean and graded. Automating the cutting of
a hand-traced pattern is an expensive way to cut an inaccurate shape faster.
In order, cheapest first
Measure your wastage → combine sizes in one marker → check the marker on two
fabric widths → price nap and checks separately → then look at software.
Three of those five cost nothing.
What to look at next month
One number, the same way, every month: metres issued against metres in garments. If it moves
the wrong way, the question is which of the five above changed — a new fabric, a new
size mix, shorter lays, a new cutter.
If you want the other half of the sum, the
fabric consumption calculator works out what one garment should take,
and the four-question page is there if you are weighing this up
against the other things a unit could spend on first.
Want to see it working?
Book a free demo of our machine or software, at your unit or at our
showroom. Tell us what you make and we will show it on that.
Book a free demo