What It Really Costs to Make One Hand Block Printed Shirt
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Why does a hand block printed shirt cost more than a printed shirt from a mall brand?
The short answer is time and hands. The long answer is below: every rupee that goes into making one Entimessi Heritage shirt, from raw cloth to your door.
The breakdown
| Stage | What happens | Cost per shirt |
| Cloth | 2.25 metres of 60s cotton at ₹120 per metre | ₹ 270.00 |
| Preparing the cloth | Washing, softening, and harda treatment | ₹45.00 |
| Hand block printing | Printer's wages and dyes | ₹270.00 |
| Dyeing and washing | Indigo or alizarin dyeing, washing, sun-drying | ₹90.00 |
| Freight to Kolkata | Transporting printed fabric from Jaipur | ₹3 0.00 |
| Cutting and stitching | Pattern, cutting, boutique tailoring, buttons, labels | ₹ 450.00 |
| Finishing and packaging | Pressing, quality check, premium packaging | ₹ 80.00 |
| Delivery | Courier shipping to the customer | ₹100.00 |
| Marketing & Overheads | Customer acquisition, studio rent, team salaries | ₹ 350.00 |
| Payment and platform fees | Payment gateway and store hosting fees | ₹ 75.00 |
| Returns | The cost of reverse logistics, spread across every order | ₹ 120.00 |
| GST | Paid to the government (12%) | ₹ 268.00 |
| Total cost | ₹ 2,148.00 | |
| Selling price | ₹ 2,499.00 | |
| Profit Margin | ₹ 351.00 |
(The remaining ₹351 is our profit margin, which we reinvest into designing new collections and growing the brand).
Where the time goes
Printing the cloth for one shirt takes a skilled printer about 1.5 hours of active work, but the process spans 5 days once you count the crucial sun-drying time between colours and dye baths. A commercial screen-printing line covers the exact same amount of cloth in a matter of seconds. That gap in time is the exact reason for the gap in price.
What the artisan earns
The printers and dyers who create the fabric earn ₹405 per shirt; roughly 16% of the final retail price. In mass-market mall brands, factory labor often accounts for less than 2% of the retail price. By working directly with printing clusters and cutting out middlemen, the hands that actually craft the fabric take home a much fairer share.
Why we publish this
"Hand block printed" is easy to claim and hard to check. A price that looks too low for the work is one of the clearest warning signs of a digital imitation (see how to tell hand block from screen and digital print). Showing our numbers is the simplest way to show what real hand-work costs.
See how the printing itself is done in our guide to Dabu, Bagru and natural indigo, or browse our Studio Collection.
Note for journalists and researchers: You are welcome to quote these figures, provided you credit Entimessi with a link back to this page.