Understanding Lolita Clothing Production, Quality, & Cost

Why do I have to read this whole long post to understand if I should buy this dress?

Well.



More seriously, there are a lot of factors that differentiate disposable fast fashion and a garment intended to last you a long time. This is a detailed answer to a set of related questions often asked in one of my servers. You can always just ask a more experienced lolita for their advice if you're not sure! The goal of this post, though, is to help you understand what you're looking at when you see an appealing jpeg of a dress on a website.

Brands

What is a Brand?

"Brand" is often used to describe established, flagship Japanese brands like Angelic Pretty, Baby the Stars Shine Bright, Metamorphose, etc, while other brands often are referred to as "indie brands," even Chinese brands. This type of brand hierarchy is based more on design influence (real or perceived) and quality (real or perceived) than actual business differentiation.

In this article, I will use "brand" interchangeably with "business," and I will disambiguate between Japanese, Chinese, and Western brands based on brand origin and brand size only. When it comes to understanding lolita garment quality and cost, we have to evaluate lolita brands outside the hierarchy described above.

Market Size

While lolita fashion originated in Japan, China has outpaced the Japanese domestic market to become the largest market for lolita fashion. (Here's a great blog post from Raine Dragon about the Chinese lolita market.) China is a much larger country - when you think about scale, this just makes sense. Production volume, production costs, and retail prices for Chinese brands are driven by a combination of market size and access to domestic manufacturing.

Brand Size

How "big" is a brand? We can break this down in the following ways:

• Number of employees
• Small brands may be run by just 1-2 people. In some brands, the owner produces garments or accessories themselves; in others, production is primarily or solely outsourced.
• Sales platforms
• Physical storefronts vs event sales vs online sales
• Physical storefronts and event sales have a high overhead; online sales can offset this to a certain degree.
• Number of items produced (production volume)
• Gross sales and net profit
• "Big" brands with significant sales figures may actually net much less profit than midsize brands if they are maintaining storefronts and producing many unique items.

Production Volume

Producing many items isn't directly linked to net profit.

• How many total items are sold?
• How many unique items are sold?
• Each item has its own associated design costs, especially for brands that outsource manufacturing.
• How many materials are common between items?
• For example, lining fabric, trim, and/or notions used in multiple items may be able to be bought in larger quantities at a volume discount. This is a way to reduce production cost.

Production Costs

Labor

Manufacturing

First, I'll break down manufacturing by scale, then discuss manufacturing by country. My examples here are all garments/soft goods, but this applies to accessories as well.

Minimum order quantity (MOQ) is the minimum number of orders required for a unique design to be produced. Most factories and workshops have a set MOQ; meeting that MOQ, as well as affording samples (more details in the next section), is a barrier for many smaller brands in outsourcing garment production.

• Handmade: made by the brand owner or owners, either as small production runs or one-off garments. Examples: Wirehead (Lithuania), Belladonna (US).
• Allows brands to work with no or low MOQ. No need to purchase samples. Higher cost for buying fabric/trim by the yard/smaller selection of both available. Custom fabric uncommon.
• In-house: sewists are employed by the brand. Examples: Lady Sloth (Poland), Summer Tales Boutique (the Netherlands).
• Allows brands direct control over production with low MOQ. Cost to produce samples is much lower. Likely to have higher costs for fabric/trim. Custom fabric possible.
• Domestic: items are made in a factory or workshop in the same country as the brand is based. Examples: Atelier Pierrot (Japan), MR Corset (Japan), many Chinese brands.
• Higher MOQ, but faster design iteration cycles, since samples can be shipped domestically. Easier to visit a factory and meet with factory staff in person if necessary.
• International: items are made in a factory or workshop in a country other than where the brand is based. Examples (as of 2023): Angelic Pretty* (China, Philippines, Myanmar), Baby the Stars Shine Bright* (China), many other JP brands.
• Higher MOQ, but lower labor cost and possibly lower material cost depending on the country of production. Slower design iteration cycle.

* AP & BTSSB primarily outsource production to international factories, but both continue to manufacture some items in Japan (for example, AP's most recent Petit Heart release).

Countries with significant soft goods factories and workshops:

• China - has sophisticated manufacturing infrastructure, direct access to domestically-produced fabric and trim, skilled staff. Quality & QA vary from high to middling, but it's not cheap to manufacture in China anymore.
• Japan - fewer options and higher cost, but factories and workshops used by lolita brands generally produce high-quality work.
• Southeast Asia (Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines, Myanmar) - growing soft goods manufacturing industry, labor costs are lower. Quality & QA vary from high to middling.

Design

Sample costs are significant, and a sample must be ordered for every item design in every colorway. (For sized items, generally the colorways are split over different sizes.)

Complexity

In short, how many seams are in each garment? Ruffles require hemmed edges on both sides, so they add significant labor, in addition to gathered skirt tiers and trim. Quality garments feature topstitching at the waist, pockets, and collar to reinforce the main seam and add additional structure to those areas. Lining adds additional seams.

L: Metamorphose Pintuck Tiered JSK (2023 - $235 USD), R: dawn A morning dew - Rozen Maiden JSK (2023 - $59 USD)

Here are two superficially similar, solid-color, button-front, pintucked dresses. However, the Metamorphose jsk on the left has 20 buttons, 15 pintucks, and self-fabric ruffles, while the dawn A morning dew jsk on the right has 8 buttons, 4 pintucks, and strips of lace instead of self-fabric ruffles. There is substantially less labor required to create the the dawn A morning dew jsk.

L: Angelic Pretty Shoulder Ribbon JSK (2022 - 27,800 yen/$200), C: Lady Sloth Spirit Board JSK - Casual (2019 - $160), R: Angelic Pretty Fancy Candy JSK (2019 - 26,784 yen/$250)

It's easy to compare Lady Sloth's casual Spirit Board JSK and AP'S Shoulder Ribbon JSK and see that the former is simpler, but what about Lady Sloth's casual Spirit Board JSK and AP's Fancy Candy JSK? Garments with custom prints aren't always as expensive to produce as garments with high labor costs due to added construction complexity, but construction complexity can also be hard to tell on first glance (Fancy Candy JSK has pockets and a faux belt at the waist, while Spirit Board JSK has neither).

Hem types

Of the below hems, the simple overlock hem and overlock & straight stitch hems (center images) are the easiest to do technically.

L: Rolled hem - Angelic Pretty Skirt (~2004-2005), C1: Overlock - Metamorphose Stella OP (2022), C2: Overlock & straight stitch - Angelic Pretty Velveteen Shoulder Ribbon JSK (2002), R: Overlock blind hem - Peace Now Cutsew (2010)

Photos courtesy Qiann: Rolled Hem - Arcadian Deer ~ College of The Sacred Glory Cross OP (2020), Immortal Thorn - The Forever Rose Jacket (2020)

Sometimes brands may try to cut corners by not finishing edges that are unlikely to fray at all, or using a relatively loose overlocked hem. This may not be evident from product photos, only from close inspection.


Fanplusfriend JSK (2020), Fanplusfriend Skirt (2019)


Topstitching


Metamorphose Gingham Sundress JSK (2002), Krad Lanrete - La Barbe Bleue JSK I (2018) [courtesy Qiann], Immortal Thorn - The Forever Rose Jacket (2020) [courtesy Qiann]

Materials

Fabric

Cast away your assumptions about fiber content! Cotton and polyester, the two most common fabrics used in lolita fashion, can both vary significantly in quality based on processing, threadcount, and weave or knit type. Polyester is also less likely to bleed color when washed or dampened. I certainly have my preferences, but any given polyester or poly-cotton blend fabric is not necessarily better or worse quality than any given cotton. Cheap polyester can be scratchy and crinkly; cheap cotton can be textured or so loosely-woven that it takes a print poorly.

How do you tell the difference?

• Firsthand inspection
• You've owned a lot of garments… you've seen some shit
• Worn photos/mannequin photos (as opposed to staged/fancy retouched photos)

Don't trust a photo that looks like this:



L: Elpress L Fish Scale JSK (2023), R: Doris Night Fire Phoenix OP (2023)

Worn photos give a clearer idea of what the garment will look like:



L: Elpress L Fish Scale JSK (2023 - 1098 RMB/$154), R: Infanta Mermaid JSK (2023 - 328 RMB/$46)

You can see here that the scales on the Elpress jsk are finished much more nicely and that they are made of a higher-quality fabric with a better drape!

Fabric prints are a special case. Some brands do custom designs, but others may use commercially available print fabric. If you aren't familiar with the brand in question, this can be quite hard to tell if the print doesn't incorporate brand names or logos.

Trim

All trim is not created equal, and most significantly, it usually has to be purchased in fairly large quantities, which means that smaller brands have to choose between buying trim they use on a number of pieces, adding detail using garment fabric (for example, gathers, pintucks, and/or self-fabric trim), or eating the cost on unused trim. Brands that do custom trim often do enough volume to hit trim factory MOQ or have a relationship with that factory that allows them to negotiate a lower MOQ, and/or use that trim in common across multiple items.

Notions

Zippers cost money. Buttons cost money. Elastic costs money. Grommets cost money. Both in terms of labor and actual component cost. Look at how and where these elements appear.

Pricing

Generally speaking, production cost is the biggest driver behind pricing, but there is one other factor we haven't touched on - which is release size and duration. The production cost per item is much higher for a one-off release by a smaller brand like Physical Drop than it is for items that are regularly kept in stock. With few exceptions (mostly socks), Japanese brands don't maintain stock, but some Chinese brands do. Sakurada Fawn, for example, has been selling basically the same blouse for ages and can do so at a low price because their design costs were all up front and now they are just paying for ongoing domestic production

TL;DR: the big picture

Chinese lolita brands often have substantially lower production costs than Japanese or international brands because they have access to both domestic manufacturing and domestically-produced materials, and many have a slightly different business model in terms of ongoing releases/in-stock items. Meanwhile, Japanese and international brands often incur many additional business and production costs and are generally producing fewer total items. For this reason, there are often significant pricing disparities between similar items.

When you consider whether a price is fair, you should think about:

• the market this piece was made for (how much do similar items from other brands cost?)
• where it was made (both in terms of the country, and relative to the brand's main location)
• the quality of materials (which you might only be able to find out from other lolitas if you can't get hands on with a piece).