How do minimum order quantities work in furniture?

Four costs that set a furniture MOQ

Pattern and sample work

Drawing, patterning and building an approved sample is a fixed cost paid once per design, regardless of run size.

Changeover

Switching production from one piece to another takes hours of setup. Longer runs spread that time across more pieces.

Material buying

Fabric, foam and lumber are priced by quantity. A run too small to meet a mill's own minimum pays a surcharge that ends up in your unit price.

Time to learn a new piece

The first pieces of a new design take longer to build than later ones. Some factories set a minimum large enough to spread that time across the run.

Three ways to lower a quoted minimum or a short-run unit price

Where a factory quotes a minimum, three moves can bring it down. E and J has no minimum, so for a short run, ask how each of the three would change your quote.

Consolidate onto shared frames

Four variations of one frame, or one silhouette from our library in several sizes, cost less to set up than four unrelated pieces, because the frame engineering and much of the patterning are shared.

Commit to a reorder schedule

A quarterly reorder lets a factory plan material and production time, which can be worth as much to it as a larger one-time order. If you plan to reorder, say so in your program brief; the guide to keeping a program consistent across reorders covers what to agree on.

Be flexible on covering

If a mill's minimum yardage (the least fabric it will sell in one order) is what forces the quantity up, a similar fabric from stock can remove that constraint.