Forty garments. P180 each. The supplier can ship on Friday. You have P10,000 saved. Do you take it?
You have done the reading. You know who your customer is, you have spoken to people, and you have decided on a direction. Now someone is offering you actual stock at an actual price, and the window is this week.
This is the moment most clothing businesses in Botswana are won or lost, and it almost never feels like it at the time. It feels like progress.
New here? This episode follows The clothing business in Botswana, which is about finding a customer worth serving. This one is about what it costs to guess wrong about them. The unit economics below are the same ones that article publishes.
The offer
The supplier quotes P180 a garment for a 40-piece order. You will pay freight, duty and clearing on top, which works out at about P35 a unit on this consignment.
| Item | Amount |
|---|---|
| 40 garments at P180 | P7,200 |
| Freight, duty and clearing (about P35 a unit) | P1,400 |
| Total to pay before you sell anything | P8,600 |
| Your savings | P10,000 |
| Left for packaging, transport and marketing | P1,400 |
You plan to sell at P350. So the sum that runs through your head is the easy one: forty times P350 is P14,000, against P8,600 of stock. P5,400 of profit, and you will have the money back within the month.
That sum is wrong in two specific ways, and the first one is the one everybody catches.
What one garment actually earns
P350 is not what the garment earns you. It is what the customer hands over. Between the two sit the costs that only happen because you sold it:
| Per garment | Amount |
|---|---|
| Selling price | P350 |
| Supplier price | (P180) |
| Freight, duty and clearing | (P35) |
| Packaging | (P10) |
| Delivery or the cost of getting to the customer | (P25) |
| Contribution per garment sold | P100 |
P100, not P170. And that P100 is not profit either — it is what is left to pay for everything that happens whether or not you sell anything: the transport to restock, the data, the advertising, the storage, the stall fee if you have one. Call that P3,000 for the season.
Which gives you the only number that matters before you answer the supplier:
Break-even = P3,000 ÷ P100 = 30 garments.
You have to sell 30 of the 40 — at full price — before the business has made one thebe. That is a 75% sell-through, and it is where the second error lives.
Your turn
The supplier needs an answer before Friday. Choose yours before you read on — then open your card and see what it costs you.
Buy all 40. The unit price will never be this good.Show what this choice costs you
The unit price is real, and so is the risk you are buying with it. On these figures you need 30 of the 40 sold at full price to break even, and if every single one sells you clear P1,000 — a 12% return on the P8,600, for a season of work and all of the risk. The question to ask the supplier is not "can you do better than P180". It is "what happens to the ones I cannot sell".
Buy a small test batch and pay more per unit.Show what this choice costs you
Usually the right answer, and it is not the cautious one — it is the one that buys information. Twelve units at P205 instead of P180 costs you P2,880 landed and leaves P7,100 in the bank. You will not make money on twelve garments: contribution drops to P75 a unit, so P900 if every one sells. That P25 a unit is not a loss, it is the price of finding out which sizes and colours actually move before you commit the rest.
Buy nothing yet. Take paid pre-orders first.Show what this choice costs you
Not the timid answer either. A paid order is the only evidence that survives contact with a bank statement, and taking twenty of them before you buy turns a guess into a purchase order. It is harder than it sounds: you need honest delivery dates, a refund position you can actually honour, and a supplier who will hold or part-ship. If you cannot get those, this becomes a promise you may not be able to keep — which costs more than the stock.
There is no vote counter here and no results to show you: a tally we invented would be exactly the kind of number this episode is telling you to check. The argument happens on the PulaGo Facebook page instead — comment A, B or C and say why. Bonus points if you have sold a batch like this and the real sell-through surprised you.
The number that is not in the offer
The supplier quoted you a price. Nobody quoted you a sell-through — the share of the batch that actually sells, at the price you planned, before the season turns and the colours stop looking current.
It is the number the whole decision turns on, and it is the one you do not have, because you have never sold this batch before. So test the decision against three of them:
| Sell-through | Garments sold | Contribution | After P3,000 of fixed costs | Stock left, at landed cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 100% | 40 | P4,000 | P1,000 | P0 |
| 75% | 30 | P3,000 | P0 | P2,150 (10 garments) |
| 60% | 24 | P2,400 | (P600) | P3,440 (16 garments) |
Read the last column, not the fourth. At a 60% sell-through you are down P600 and P3,440 of your savings is in a box in the spare room, in the sizes nobody wanted. The loss on the page is small. The money you cannot reach is not.
And 60% is not a pessimistic number for a first order chosen by one person guessing at a size curve. It is an ordinary one.
The clearance trap
So the season ends, sixteen are left, and the obvious move is to discount them. Something is better than nothing.
Except the variable cost of a garment is P180 + P35 + P10 + P25 = P250. Which means:
| You sell it at | It earns you |
|---|---|
| P350 | P100 |
| P300 | P50 |
| P250 | Nothing at all |
| P200 | (P50) — you pay P50 for the privilege |
"Half price to clear" is not a small loss on a good season. On these figures it is below the line at which the garment earns anything, and the money you recover is your own stock money coming back with the profit stripped out of it.
This is why the people who do this well buy narrow and deep — fewer styles, the sizes that actually sell, re-ordered quickly — rather than wide and shallow across colours they liked in the catalogue.
So what would make this a yes?
None of this says do not buy stock. A clothing business with no stock is a conversation. It says the offer as it stands does not contain enough information to answer, and here is what would change that:
- A sell-through you have actually seen, from a smaller batch, a pre-order round or a season you have already traded — not one you have assumed.
- A size curve from your own customers, not the supplier’s standard pack. The ratio of mediums to extra-larges is the difference between a 75% sell-through and a 50% one.
- A re-order you can place quickly. If selling out means waiting six weeks for more, you will buy wide to cover yourself, which is exactly what creates the unsold tail.
- A price you can hold. If you already know you will be discounting by month two, the plan is a P250 garment, so price and buy accordingly.
- Money you can afford to have stuck. Not lost — stuck. The question is not "can I afford P8,600", it is "can I afford for P3,440 of it to be unavailable until March".
If you can answer those five, the P180 is probably a good price. If you cannot answer any of them, you are not buying stock — you are buying a guess, at P215 a unit.
Run your own numbers: the Clothing Business Starter Toolkit (Excel) has a Stock & Pricing tab that does exactly this calculation. Enter your supplier price, freight, units bought and units actually sold, and it returns contribution per unit, margin, break-even and the landed value of whatever is left. It opens on its own sample product mix, so clear that first.
What episode one said, in a different industry
In The Pula Challenge #1 a cleaning contract paid P1,500 a month, left P200 after direct costs, and turned into a P50 monthly loss once the overheads were allocated to it.
Different business, same shape of mistake: a number that looks like profit because the costs it still has to carry have not been written down yet. In cleaning it was the overheads. In clothing it is the garments that do not sell.
The arithmetic is not hard. It is just the part everybody does after they have already said yes.
This scenario is fictional and every figure in it is illustrative — a teaching example, not a Botswana market rate, a supplier quotation or a forecast of what any batch of stock will do. Confirm import duties, clearing costs and tax treatment with BURS, and your licence position with the relevant authority, before committing money.