Thirty percent. That is how much cotton moved within a single year at one point recently - and buyers who ordered a style in spring and reordered it in autumn have been seeing quotes come back visibly higher. Some of that increase is real. Some of it is a test to see whether you are paying attention. Telling the two apart is now a core buying skill.
A repeat order is priced from today, not from your last contract.
The first price you accepted was a snapshot: fabric at that week's mill price, labour at that month's wage level, freight at that route's rate. A repeat order is re-priced from the current snapshot. When raw materials move double digits between seasons, a higher repeat quote can be entirely honest. The mistake is treating the first order's price as a permanent entitlement - and the equal and opposite mistake is accepting any increase without decomposition.
Decompose the increase, line by line.
A credible repeat quote answers one question: how much of the increase is fabric, how much is trims, how much is labour, how much is freight? Ask for the split in writing. Fabric is the line you can verify externally, because commodity prices are public. Labour moves slowly, in single-digit steps, not leaps. Freight is verifiable with any forwarder. A factory that cannot or will not split the increase is telling you something, and it is not about cotton.
Three red flags inside a legitimate-sounding increase.
- The increase is a round number. Real cost movements produce uneven percentages. A clean up-ten-percent-across-the-board is margin recovery wearing a costume.
- Fabric carries the whole increase. Fabric is the largest cost line, so it is where padding hides best. If the fabric line moved by a certain percent, check that the raw material index moved somewhere near it.
- Every size rises identically. If all sizes rise by the same amount, the breakdown was not recalculated - because a larger size uses measurably more fabric than a smaller one.
What you can actually lock down.
You cannot fix commodity prices, and a factory that agrees to absorb every market move is a factory absorbing losses - which resurfaces later as quality problems. What you can lock is structure: the fabric specification, so that a substitution cannot ride in with the price rise; the labour component, which genuinely moves slowly; and the payment terms. Then the negotiation is about one honest variable instead of four blended ones.
The point.
A higher repeat quote is information, not an insult. The buyers who get good pricing long-term are not the ones who argue hardest - they are the ones who ask for the split, check it against public numbers, and pay real increases quickly while pushing back on round ones. Factories remember both buyers, and one of them gets the capacity in a tight season. For how to audit what actually arrives, see the small-batch QC checklist.
