5 Things Sewing businesses waste money on

I don’t know a single small business owner who hasn’t started a business, started truly bringing in money, and hten at the end of the month, gone wait… did I make any money at all? The overhead cost of running a handmade business is honestly startling, because the phantom costs all truly add up. Numbers are everything in business, it tells us how we’re stacking. And I think a lot of handmade business owners try to replace profit with fulfillment, as if they can’t have both. So if that’s you, i want to introduce a concept to you…


Money is a scoreboard for the impact we get to make on the world.

It isn’t everything, it isn’t the devil, it isn’t the end goal, it’s simply a version of energy. The more you have left of it at the end of the month, the more there is to impact other things in your life and the lives of others. And above all, money helps you go faster... it loves speed.

So as business owners, when we’re looking at the scoreboard, or how we’re stacking from month to month, it’s easy to look at where that money’s going when it wasn’t necessary to spend it, and regret. So today’s episode is about exactly that - 5 things sewing businesses waste money on. Because how you stack matters and how you stack at the end of this month changes how you stack the end of the next month. So what I want for you is to approach this next month with a new level of awareness and set of five red flags to protect your business from in the coming weeks.

So here’s the first one, you’re gonna hate it:

Buying fabrics they don’t really need

We’ve all been there. You run into Joanns to get a zipper and skim the apparel fabrics on your way back into the store. You see a buttery soft periwinkle silk-looking fabric and can’t help but reach out to feel it. You see the finished garment in your mind - no you don’t have the pattern! But you don’t care, you pick it up because ‘just a few yards’ is a safe buy, right? After all, you could sell the finished product so it’s a write-off!

It’s an unpopular opinion but listen, this isn’t good business practice, it’s a bad habit worth breaking. There’s no plan, you paid retail price, you didn’t get enough to actually make it a real business purchase because that means creating a repeatable garment, and above all, your ‘investment’ is now just an expense, especially if you never end up making anything out of it.

This one is the most common for makers who go from hobbyists sewing for fun to side hustling - they pay the premium price because that’s their habit, but it isn’t proper business and it’s going to make you poor.

Inevitably, you either never get around to making it, or, your idea changes, and you no longer have enough to make what you want out of it. So the truth is, the fabric will get folded neatly and get put on a shelf full of other fabrics you only bought 2 yards of. You’ll eventually donate these because you’ll grow tired of looking at them, or they’ll just start looking outdated.

Buying not enough of a certain supply

Extra website subscriptions

Late fees

Paying retail price vs wholesale

Listen to the podcast form of this blog:

I know that sounds nuts, let me play it out for you how this is actually a waste of money. You’re restocking notions and buy a little bit which should last you for the month. You get a surge of sales after a Tiktok video, or simply, a wholesaler has a shortage, and suddenly, the elastic or snap tape you needed to finish product vanishes… and now you’re under the gun to finish product. All of a sudden, you can’t get it from the same supplier you usually can to beat the clock, and you’re stuck cobbling together orders on amazon prime and other websites to get enough to get you by, and paying way more for it than had you just kept an additional month’s worth of supplies at the best price possible.

I got in the habit of keeping a month’s worth of basics on-hand during 2020 when things became impossible to get and it’s truly given me more peace in my making. If you want to get up to this point where you have an extra month’s worth of inventory on-hand, without breaking the freaking bank, think of it like stocking the pantry. The same way you’d buy an extra can of green beans, or soup, we buy an extra roll of velcro, jeans zippers, or box of hook & eyes. When you’re already ordering supplies for other things, an extra $4 isn’t shocking, but it IS a game changer when you lost your hook & eyes to the floor and you’re on a time crunch on a few pieces and you live in a fashion desert (ie a place where there are no sewing stores, or the one you have is overpriced).

Subscriptions are easily the sneakiest way us business owners (and people in general) throw away money out of our bank accounts each month without noticing.

I think we all do this, but the moment you realize you’re paying for multiple platforms for individual tools, when some have all the tools in one space, you kick yourself when you see how much money you wasted. For a while, i was paying for my email marketing platform, and also paying for a freebie opt-in popup subscription. 3 months later, i realized that my initial email marketing platform, that cost $20 a month, had that feature already baked into it, which meant, i’d already thrown away $60 on the other subscription that wasn’t even needed in the first place. The same goes for galaxi.ai, the ai platform i’ve been using - it hosts all of the AI services in one platform for $30/month - that’s WAY cheaper than it would be to have individual subscriptions!

As a growing small business owner, you need every dime that comes in to have a job and go as far as possible for you. Vanishing costs like unnecessary subscriptions can set you back years.

I’m sure I’ve said it before, but my business uses Slack for all communication, be it between clients or internally or subcontractors. When I was growing the small batch manufacturing division of my business, our Slack account started getting chunky - like we’re talking it cost me several hundred dollars a month because I was paying per user for premium so that our files never expired. And the cherry on top? Half those users were inactive, and only hopped in once or twice a month!

I backed down the slack channel to a basic free package, and made a rule that any important files shared in there needed to be backed up elsewhere as well as this should just be a messaging app, not the entire mainframe. For transparency, the only paid subscriptions our business uses is Squarespace & Showit (because we have two different websites built on 2 different platforms), Flodesk for email, Galaxy.ai for AI tools, Buzzsprout for podcast uploads, Shopify for online orders from our storefront, and Thinkific for our online courses. Every single other digital platform or software we use is a free tool, which brings our total monthly digital overhead down to about $220 a month.

Letting any business documentation lapse, or missing deadlines for tax filings. Whewwww this one can be painful. I remember a couple of years ago, I had paid an accountant to handle the entire move of turning my LLC into an S corp. There were so many documents that had to be filed and fees to be paid and if anything was done incorrectly it would result in fines, so I paid a pro to do it. They completely dropped the ball, it took 6 months, they didn’t file things correctly, and guess who got stuck with the fines? To top it off, during this process, my business bank had closed. When I switched banks, I couldn’t find one that would allow me to open a business account without articles of incorporation. I had to keep going back and forth between the secretary of state and the accountant, i felt like just a helpless number, and because it was mid-pandemic, everyone was operating as a skeleton crew and no one ever had answers. So now here it choked the actual operation of my business, because i had nowhere to deposit business checks to that were made out to the business name. It was pure mayhem, it still goes down as the most stressful era of my life because we had bills to pay and mouths to feed, and I was utterly helpless and having to figure out ways to be resourceful and just make things work until it all got ironed out. When it comes to secretary of state fillings, business entity filings, franchise & excise tax payments, income tax payments, trademark renewals - all of these things are devastating if you have a month of all of it being due and the renewal due dates never quite made it onto your calendar. Adding these things to your calendar, even on an accounting calendar of its own, is a sure fire way to protect your income from taking unnecessary hits later.

You would think that the moment you’re able to, you’d pay retail price rather than wholesale in order to improve your bottom line, but the truth is, there’s a disconnect between when people would benefit from shopping wholesale and when they actually do.

Undoubtedly, the HARDEST change we make from hobbyist to entrepreneur is shifting from paying retail price to paying wholesale. You have to order more fabric than small business owners traditionally need as they enter the scaling phase in their business, so it feels more expensive than doing what they’ve been doing, which is simply cashflowing to buy only what is needed since you literally need every dollar you bring in to keep going. But if I told you that spending an extra $10 today will save you $30 tomorrow, would you do it? What if we added on 2 more zeros? The moment you have a quantifiable product that is routinely bringing in sales, it’s time to see what elements of your supply chain you can get at wholesale price simply by purchasing more material at a time. What’s great about some wholesale contracts, is that they give you better payment terms than you would get as a regular retail consumer. Net30 and even Net60 terms can mean the WORLD to you, and for them it’s just standard.

I think so often, small business owners don’t actually take themselves seriously, and think they have to be ‘more successful’ before they can leverage wholesale relationships, and inadvertently waste so much time that they could’ve been increasing their bottom line just by putting in one phone call or filling out one form. We’ve created wholesale relationships with fabric dealers just by committing to buying an entire bolt of fabric, and in turn have saved thousands of dollars by locking in wholesale prices even on minimum yardage just because we would buy a lot from one dealer overall. Fabric buying is sort of like being loyal to one particular airline - find what you love and commit, then go to them every time to see if they can’t maybe find you what you’re looking for even if they don’t have it. The reward is usually worth the loyalty, rather than relying on a big box store to have what you need.