How to Request a Quote for Custom Bags: What Factories Need

Buyers often assume a quotation is a matter of looking at a bag and naming a price. It is not. It is a sum of material quantities, a multiplication by component prices, an estimate of minutes at each operation, and an overhead and margin applied on top. Every one of those four terms needs an input, and the inputs come from the buyer.

That is why the fastest way to a firm number is not to ask harder but to supply more. A buyer who sends six complete inputs gets a price back that can be held to; a buyer who sends two gets a range and a follow-up email with four questions in it.

What Does Geometry Actually Mean to the Person Pricing?

Not a photograph — a set of panel sizes. The person costing the bag needs to know how much material each panel takes, and that comes from the drawing rather than from the silhouette. Two bags of the same external size can use very different amounts of cloth depending on how the gussets and the base are constructed.

The second geometry input is the seam count and the seam type, because labour is minutes. A bag with one continuous gusset and a bag with four separate gusset panels look similar and take very different time to assemble. Where the buyer has a construction note, send it; where they do not, say so and accept that the labour estimate is provisional.

A third input sits behind the first two and is almost never supplied: the operation list. How many separate operations the bag passes through — cut, bind, assemble, line, close, turn, topstitch, fit hardware, inspect — is the raw material of the labour estimate. A buyer who cannot write it can still ask how many operations the price assumes, and the answer is often revealing.

How Much Material Detail Does a Price Need?

Enough to buy it. A shell line needs the fibre or polymer, the denier or the gauge, the weave or the construction, the coating or finish, the finished weight, and the colour reference. Four of those six are routinely missing, and the two that survive are usually the denier and the colour.

The same applies to the parts buyers treat as small. Lining, foam, interlining, webbing, binding, thread and hook-and-loop each need a specification, because each is a line on the material cost. A bag quoted without a lining specification has been quoted with a guess about the lining.

Why Is Hardware the Input Most Often Under-Specified?

Because it looks interchangeable. A 25 mm side-release buckle in black is a description that fits several hundred parts, and those parts differ in material, in pull strength, in cycle life and in price. Without a performance figure the person costing has to pick one, and the one they pick will be the one they already buy.

The performance figure is not a nicety. On a bag that carries load — a camera bag with a body and two lenses, a kit bag with wet kit, a cooler bag full of drink — the hardware is the part that fails in service, and the failure is a return rather than a repair. State the pull in newtons and the cycle count, and the price will be for a part that survives.

How Does Quantity Change the Number It Produces?

Through four mechanisms, and only one of them is the obvious one. The obvious one is the price break: more pieces means a lower unit price from suppliers and better machine utilisation. The other three are the material buy, the setup cost, and the freight.

Setup is the one buyers forget. Cutting, setting a weld parameter, threading a line and making a first-off all cost the same whether the run is 500 or 5,000, and on a short run that fixed cost sits on few units. Freight behaves the same way: a carton of 40 and a carton of 50 carry the same broker entry and the same terminal handling, and the difference lands on the unit cost.

What Does the Date Needed Actually Constrain?

Whether the standard window fits at all. Bulk is 35-50 days from written sample approval, and sampling is 6-10 working days from a signed pack. Add the courier time for the sample and the approval cycle on the buyer side, and a date that looks comfortable can be tight by three weeks.

There is a second-order effect of a tight date that buyers rarely price in: it reduces the number of quotations worth getting. Where a date is comfortable, two or three material directions can be costed and compared. Where it is tight, the only direction worth costing is the one that can be delivered, and the buyer loses the comparison along with the choice.

Stating the date on the RFQ is what lets the answer be honest. Where the date does not fit, the options are a material that is in stock rather than one that has to be dyed, a stock hardware finish rather than a plated one, or a partial shipment. All three are available and all three are easier to arrange before the order than during it, and all three are visible on a request that says what the date is.

What Should Come Back With the Number?

Five things: the unit price at a stated quantity and Incoterm, the material list the price was built from, the sampling schedule, the bulk window, and the assumptions. A quotation that returns only the first of those five is a number without an argument behind it.

The assumptions are worth insisting on. They are the difference between a price that can be checked and a price that can only be accepted, and they are also the fastest way to find a mistake: an assumption that does not match the RFQ is either a misread or a gap, and both are worth knowing before the order rather than after it.

How Do You Compare Two Quotations That Are Not on the Same Terms?

Put them on one Incoterm first, and only then compare the numbers. A FOB Xiamen price and a CIF price differ by freight and insurance; a CIF and a DDP price differ by duty, entry and inland delivery. Comparing them directly is comparing two different products.

Then compare the material lists rather than the totals. Where two quotations differ by more than a small margin, the cause is almost always a material: a different shell weight, a different foam density, a different hardware source. Find that line and the difference explains itself.

Where the material lists match and the totals still differ, the cause is usually labour or overhead rather than materials, and that is a harder conversation because there is no line to point at. Ask what operation count each price was built on; a bag with four gusset panels and a bag with one continuous gusset are the same bag to look at and not the same bag to assemble.

There is a related point about the artwork file itself. A logo supplied as a screen-resolution raster cannot be scaled to a print area without loss, and the redraw is a cost and a delay that belongs on the request rather than arriving later as a surprise.

How Does Branding Change What the Request Must Say?

Decoration is a separate cost line with its own lead time, and the request has to say which process, how many placements, what size and where. Embroidery, heat transfer, silicone, a woven label and a printed panel each have a different setup cost, a different unit cost and a different minimum.

The number of placements is the figure most often understated. A logo on the front panel and the same logo on the strap pad, the lining and the puller is four placements, and each one is a separate operation with its own spoilage. Stating four rather than one changes both the price and the sampling schedule.

What If the Buyer Genuinely Does Not Know Yet?

Say which of the six is unknown and ask for a range against it. "Price this at 600D and at 420D" is a request a production team can act on; "price this bag" with no material is not. A buyer who names their uncertainty gets two numbers and a recommendation.

That is a better position than pretending certainty, because a quotation issued against a guess will be revised, and a revised quotation reads as a change of mind. Two numbers up front read as diligence and cost the same effort.

What Does a Reference Sample Do That a Drawing Cannot?

It carries the hand, the weight and the construction at once, and it resolves three questions a drawing leaves open: how stiff the shell feels, how the bag stands when it is empty, and how the panels meet at a corner. A buyer sending a reference should mark which of those three matters, because a reference sent without a note gets read for its silhouette alone.

Where the reference is a competitor's product, the note matters more. A production team reading it will otherwise copy everything, including the parts the buyer wanted to improve. Marking the two or three features that matter and the one that does not is the whole instruction.

How Does the Request Turn Into a Programme?

The quotation is accepted in writing, the pack is finished and signed, and the sampling clock starts at 6-10 working days. Bulk follows at 35-50 days from written sample approval, inspected at AQL 2.5 under ISO 2859-1, shipped FOB Xiamen, paid T/T 30/70. Every one of those figures is on the quotation if the request asked for it.

Where the request did not ask, they have to be negotiated afterwards, which is the slowest place to negotiate anything. The landed cost calculator takes the quoted FOB figure and builds the rest of the unit cost from it.

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