Why is it so cheap?

For a T-shirt priced at €25* at Loom, you get:

  • €4 in VAT for the government
  • 10€ for the factory
  • €3 for our logistics, banking, and e-commerce service providers.
  • €8 to cover our operating expenses: team salaries, office space, stress tests, prototyping costs… and possibly our profits.

For an equivalent product (i.e., one purchased for €10 from a factory), most brands add between €15 and €70 in operating costs**.

Why do we only charge 8€? Because:

  • We don't create collections. We only incur research and development or design costs once. If we created collections, we'd have to start from scratch every season.
  • We have virtually no unsold inventory (which makes sense, since we don't carry a full collection). If a brand has 10% unsold inventory, it automatically has to raise its prices by 10%.
  • We never have sales or promotions (which makes sense, since we don't have any unsold inventory). So we don't set high prices just to lower them occasionally to encourage purchases.
  • We don’t do any advertising. It’s common for ready-to-wear brands to spend 10 to 20% of their revenue on various forms of advertising (Instagram, Facebook, subway ads, as well as affiliate marketing, promo codes, referral codes, sponsored posts, influencers, etc.). We don’t do any of that.
  • We aren't greedy. We don't have any investment funds or personal ambitions driving us to seek unreasonable salary increases (we've capped them at five times the Portuguese minimum wage anyway) or to generate record profits.

WOOO, but €25 for a T-shirt isn't exactly "cheap" either. How do the ones selling them for €10 do it?

It’s simple: they pay factories less. Either because the quality is poor, or because the cotton isn’t organic, or because they’re outsourcing to countries with weak protections for workers and the environment. But a high-quality organic cotton T-shirt, made under decent working conditions, is very difficult to sell for less than €25—which is our price.


If you'd like to learn more, we gave a TEDx talk on the "low-cost" trap: here's the link.

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* Almost all of our orders come with free shipping, so the price of our T-shirt is indeed €25, including shipping.
** This is roughly what’s known as a “markup factor”: we use 2.5, while markups in the industry range from 3.5 (fast fashion and some online brands) to 10 (luxury brands).