Wearing apparel

A clothing factory is two businesses bolted together and they are measured in different units, which is why so few of them know where the money goes. The cutting room buys cloth by the kilo, spreads it by the metre and consumes it as square metres of pattern piece; the sewing floor buys minutes and sells garments. Fabric is sixty to seventy per cent of the cost, and the marker decides all of it, so the marker is laid here on the real outlines rather than on bounding boxes — a sleeve is nearly a quarter air inside its own box, and a planner that cannot see that is buying the air. The marker is drawn to scale, because a cutting room argues about markers and cannot argue with a column of lengths. Two numbers are then kept apart on every screen, deliberately: marker efficiency asks how much of the cloth is garment, and cloth per garment asks what the store issues for each one that leaves. They disagree — a marker full of extra-larges can be the most efficient in the building and the dearest way to cut the order — and a factory watching only the first buys cloth it did not need. The sewing side is costed in standard minutes at the line's own efficiency rather than as a percentage of fabric, which is the only way to tell a style that is cheap to cut and dear to sew from one that is the other way round.