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This is a show for burnt-out fashion designers (and TDs, PDs, patternmakers and beyond) who want more flexibility while still doing work they love. As a freelance fashion designer, you can build your fashion career on your own terms. Freelancing in fashion is the only way to get freedom in your day (instead of being tied to a desk). Whether you want to earn extra money on the side, fund your fashion brand, or replace your salary, the FDGP podcast will help you get there. Listen in for actionable tips and strategies to kickstart or grow your career as a freelance fashion designer, build your confidence, and create the life you want. Hosted by $100k+ fashion freelancer Sew Heidi, the show features interviews and strategy sessions with successful freelance fashion designers from around the world who've ditched toxic fashion jobs and taken control of their own destinies. This is the only place to get REAL insights from REAL freelancers who have built REAL careers on their own terms. (Formerly the Successful Fashion Freelancer podcast.)
Heidi [00:00:00]:
No one talks openly about salary and pay rates or, honestly, anything that has to do with money and fashion, which can make it really, really hard to figure out your freelance rate. Paid the truth is, one of the number one questions that I hear from freelance fashion designers all the time is, how much Paid I charge? What should my rate be, etcetera? And, unfortunately, I don't have a super perfect magic answer because the reality is that your rate will be different than my rate or the rate of other fashion designers reading this because we're all different. We don't live in the same area. We don't have the same skills, and we don't offer the same services. But there are some simple strategies to calculate and negotiate your pricing, whether you wanna freelance hourly by project. Here's some really awesome techniques that are gonna help you figure out your pricing. Full disclaimer that every pricing tip I've shared here is a real life strategy that I have successfully used in my freelance career or one of my freelance accelerator, fast students have used. And I also surveyed over a 100 fashion professionals and freelancers and asked what their rates were, how much they were charging, and how much they were getting.
Heidi [00:01:04]:
I'm gonna share some of those real life examples for both hourly, daily, and project prices below. So first, let's talk about hourly. I actually suggest that everyone starts with hourly. It's the simplest option for you and your clients. And the simple way to do this is to use a strategy called drop 3 zeros. If you've ever worked as an employee, this is the easiest option. You just take your yearly wage Paid you drop 30. So for example, if your yearly wage is $60,000 an hour, you can drop 3 zeros and say, okay.
Heidi [00:01:34]:
I can earn $60 an hour. If it was $35,000 a year, you can charge $35 an hour. Now this isn't this number is going to vary depending on, again, where you live and what your skills are. If you've not been employed in the fashion industry, then look at jobs that you could take based off of your skill level, and you can base it based off of that rate from that job. Now there's a lot of pros and cons to charging hourly. Pros is that it's very comfortable for many freelancers, especially when you're starting out. It's very normal and understandable for for clients, and it's really simple to plan your finances based on how many hours you work. Now the cons of this is that you only have so many hours in a week and your income is potentially capped.
Heidi [00:02:19]:
You can only raise your rate so much before your client refuses to pay such a high hourly rate. I say that because that can happen. However, I do know freelancers that charge a 150, 200, upwards of even $300 an hour, and they get it. Okay? Another con to charging hourly is that it can be really laborious to track your time for every email and phone call and meeting, and, yes, you should be charging for emails and phone calls and meetings. And the last is that as you get faster at doing the work, your rate does not scale proportionally. K? So we'll get into day rates and project based rates in just a minute, but I wanna share a few real life examples of charging hourly from people who were so gracious enough to share this data. This is as of, this data was collected in late 2023, December 2023. So depending on when you're listening to this episode, these numbers may or may not have changed much.
Heidi [00:03:11]:
Christina Ward, who is a freelance print designer, charges between 45 to $55 an hour. Andresia Iope, who is a freelance kids wear Fashion and textile Designers, charges $60 an hour. Carolyn Kwan does freelance illustration and textile Designers charges a $100 per hour. She lives in Australia. Maddie Sacone is a freelance fashion buyer Paid merchandiser. She charges 70 per hour in Canada. Another woman by the name of Eileen Holmes is a freelance graphic, freelance apparel graphic and textile designer in New York. She charges 85.
Heidi [00:03:46]:
Andrew Zoe does freelance packaging design in Canada for a 120 Canadian dollars per hour. Ferdinand Onanda. I'm I might be butchering some of these people's names. Sorry. Ferdinand Onanda is a freelance graphic designer in Florida. He charges a $100 an hour. So you can see the the range really varies. I even have one more in here too.
Heidi [00:04:09]:
Aria is a freelance Fashion and technical designer from India. She charges $20 an hour. So you can see the rates really, really vary, and it can really depend on what your services are, where you live, as well as the confidence that you have to put yourself out there at a certain rate. Alright. So let's talk talk a little bit about how to charge day rates. It's very simple to essentially take what your hourly rate would or could be based off of the drop 3 zeros formula that I just shared, multiply it by 8. And let's say if you're charging $35 an hour, you multiply by 8, that's $280. So your day rate could be $300 per day.
Heidi [00:04:46]:
I don't see day rates happening very often in the United States. I see this much more commonly in the UK. And some of the pros of this is that it's simple to plan your finances based on how many days a week you work. And, again, you don't have to track every minute. You just can invoice how many days. And the challenge with this is that if you were are charged you by the day, an 8 hour day can sometimes turn into a 12 hour day. So I don't always love that. And the cons to this is that I I don't see many people doing this in a true remote freelance capacity.
Heidi [00:05:21]:
It's more on-site freelancing for x number of days. And to me, that's not actually freelancing. That's a permalance temp job. So, if you're just doing, like, a few days of consulting here and there, that may not be a huge deal. But think about carefully signing up to do a, day rate 5 days a week, and you might not be creating the lifestyle that you were imagining. So a few real life examples of day rates, 3 20 a day from Linda Briggs in the UK, 300 a day from Mark Barber in Germany, 800 a day from Sew Morin Staple, who's a freelance trend forecaster in France. Leanne hardcore Hardaker is a freelance clothing designer in UK charging 250 per day. All the, these these amounts are in their local currency.
Heidi [00:06:13]:
Let's see. John Gordon, a finance technical consultant, charges between 255175 per day. Kat Smith charging 350 between 3 100 pounds per day. So those are some ranges for day rates. We can see they're pretty much between, like, the 2.50 to 400 per day with some outliers stretching up towards 800 per day. After we get towards past charging per day or per hour where we're charging per time, we can think about how to charge by project or by a piece, I e, maybe 1 tech pack or one flat sketch. And And the reality is that you can earn a lot more money this way, but it can also bite you in the butt if you underestimate or if you don't put your foot down against an abusive client. The reality is that even in in almost a decade into my freelance career, I still underestimated some big projects, especially when working with new clients.
Heidi [00:07:08]:
Things can get really tricky. You have to know what questions to ask. You have to be really good at clearly outlining the project scope and managing client expectations. You have to think about things like making sure you're looking through all the files that you're gonna be inheriting Sew you don't wind up with a bunch of unusable illustrator flats with thousands of anchor points, and you have to redraw everything. And it's hard to bring that stuff up after the fact if it wasn't part of your promotion, your proposal initially. So I really, really, really, really recommend that you charge when you start out on hourly rate, and you move into project rates later once you sort of understand some of the nuances of quoting and asking the questions and learning how to lead discovery calls to get all of the information that you need in order to create an accurate proposal based off of a project based rate and what it might actually take. So if you're feeling up for it, maybe if you're a little bit more advanced or you're just like, I just still wanna go dive in. Here are some ways to calculate your project rate.
Heidi [00:08:03]:
So you can charge based on an estimated number of hours. Right? So if you know the tech pack is gonna take 3 hours and you wanna earn $50 an hour, then you can charge a $150 for tech pack. Your client doesn't know your hourly rate's 50. They don't know it's gonna take 3 hours. They just know that the tech pack costs a $150. But you have to be really careful about flat rate things for stuff like tech packs and even design. Right? Because the difference between a t shirt and a complex piece of outerwear is very, very, very vast. Right? And then also when you think about tech packs too, like, are you creating the flat sketches, or do they already exist? Do they have specs for trims and findings and hang tags and labels already developed? Do you have to create the graded specs and fill out the POM, or does your client already have that done? And so in reality, things like tech packs, I don't necessarily recommend a flat rate, but I recommend offering a range depending on the design.
Heidi [00:08:58]:
So tech packs might be anywhere from 300 to 1500 depending on the complexity of the design. And, yes, for anyone who's freaking out out there or the thought of charging $1500 for a tech pack, we do have people inside of our FAST program that charge that much. You can get that much. It is not beyond reach. So project Paid based rates, as I said, do get more complicated. And if you're doing a project based rate, you're gonna wanna make sure that your proposal is super thorough. It outlines exactly what the clients get gets, including number of revisions, all that sort of thing. And and if the client is getting maybe a little bit excessive with revisions Paid you're falling into a scenario that is called scope creep, where the scope of the project that was outlined in the initial proposal is creeping beyond what was initially outlined.
Heidi [00:09:47]:
You as a freelancer need to be prepared to pick up the phone, jump on Zoom, call them out on that. You have to sort of manage the project and manage the client. And what I find is with a lot of freelancers who are newer in their career, those are very hard conversations to have and to lead. And so if you are a little bit less experienced in general, maybe if you're not as assertive of a person, you're not used to managing a whole project, it can get really, really tricky and really challenging with project based pricing. So that's the first option with project based pricing is charging based on an estimated number of hours. But you can also consider charging based off of value because the reality is that just because you can finish the tech pack in 3 hours at $50 an hour, doesn't mean it's only worth a $150. You have built up skills over the years and over time that have given you the benefit of speed and efficiency, and you've got templates that you can Sew. And it doesn't mean that it's only worth those 3 hours of time.
Heidi [00:10:46]:
And so that tech pack that only takes you only, air quote, takes you 3 hours may be worth 300 or a 1000 or 1500 to the client. And so what I want you to think about is that some people kinda freak out when I say that, and I I don't want you to think that that you're all of a sudden like, oh my gosh. If I'm charging $1,000 a tech pack and it only takes me 3 or 4 hours Paid I'm making $300 an hour, You can look at it that way if you want, but some people kind of get a little bit jolted by that and and feel like I can't charge my client that. What the reality is is that your client is paying a flat rate in exchange for an item to them that is worth 300 or a $1,000. And it's it is separate from the time that it takes. It is the value of that item to them carries a value of $1,000. Right? We kind of I always use the example of a lawyer when I talk about this. You know, lawyers have all sorts of templates and stuff, and they're not necessarily, you know, we hired a lawyer to set up some some documents for my father-in-law.
Heidi [00:11:55]:
And I can tell you for a fact, not everything was written from scratch. And so it's it's he wouldn't charge on a hourly basis because the reality is that we're paying him for his expertise and that he knows how to put this stuff together. And even if he is using some templates and he's pretty fast at this, this is the value of what it's worth. Right? So that's kind of how you can think about your freelance rates when you come to charging by project by value. Again, this is a little bit more advanced and nuanced, and you can get into some some trouble on your first few projects. Most people I see are undercharging without fail on project based rates when they first start out that way. So know that going into it, there's going to be a learning curve, and that you'll get better with time Paid you can adjust going forward. So some of the pros and cons to charging by project or by piece.
Heidi [00:12:43]:
Right? By one tech pack costs about this. We already talked about these a little bit, but I'll just summarize real quick. The faster and more efficient you are, the more money you can make, which is amazing. You can charge based on value and and make really good money. And and the reality is that some clients really like knowing a flat rate of what something will cost. The cons, like I mentioned already, can take time to develop skills and accurately assess what a project is going to take and what work needs to go into it. Most freelancers tend to us underestimate it first. I've done this Sew so has pretty much every single one of my students.
Heidi [00:13:16]:
And scope creep, right, as I mentioned earlier, when the scope of the project creeps beyond the original agreement, is super common and can create really difficult conversations. The reality of that is that either you can get abused by doing too many revisions or you have to raise the rate mid project, and these, again, can just be challenging conversations. So a couple of real life examples of charging by project or by piece. Heidi is a freelance fashion designer specializing in fashion flats and tech packs. She lives in Venezuela, and her range for tech packs ranges between a 108150. Emma from California charges project based rates of anything between 525,000. Obviously, there's a lot that goes into that $25,000 project, but that is definitely possible. Becca Oakes is a freelance print designer from Australia, and she charges between 600 and 50 to $850 for a predesigned print Paid 900 plus for custom designed prints.
Heidi [00:14:17]:
So the reality is that when it comes to your rate, what I tell my all my students, the 1st year of freelancing, you're optimizing for learning, learning with an l, And the 2nd year of freelancing, you're optimizing for earning. So you're not gonna go out there and earn the best rate possible at the very beginning. There's a learning curve to this. I always talk about how pricing is like learning how to sew. Different fabric, different threads, different machines are gonna use different tensions and different settings Paid different presser feet. And the reality is the same with clients. Every client situation might be a little bit different, and it's not until you do a lot of projects that you really start to understand these nuances. Just like sewing, you can listen to this podcast.
Heidi [00:14:59]:
You can read all my guides on pricing. You can even talk to me 1 on 1 in some of my hands on programs on pricing. And until you actually get out there and, like, put that fabric through the machine and sew that fabric and do it a bunch, it is a learning curve that you learn by doing. So I've got some other great resources that I'll link in the show notes. I've got tips on how to raise your freelance rates. I've got a few other podcast episodes where some of our students specifically talk about the rates that they're charging and how they got those rates, etcetera. So we'll link to all of those in the show notes. Go out there, get a rate that feels comfortable and feels good for you, optimize for learning, and then raise your rates as you go.
Heidi [00:15:44]:
You're doing great. You got this.