Knitwear Landed Cost: The Real Price of an Imported Sweater

By YZR Sweaters · 2026-10

We quote FOB every day, and we quote it happily — but we also tell buyers not to build their retail pricing on it. FOB is what the sweater costs on the dock in China. It says nothing about the freight it hogs (knitwear is light for its cube), the duty it attracts, or the fees that appear between the port and your warehouse. Here is how the stack actually builds up, with a worked example you can copy into a spreadsheet.

Start from a real order, not a formula

Formulas are useless without numbers, so take an order we could run any week: 3,000 pieces of a 12-gauge lambswool crew neck, FOB Shenzhen at USD 9.50 per piece. Each piece goes into a poly bag, twenty pieces to an export carton — 150 cartons, roughly 16 CBM and about two tonnes. That cube-to-weight ratio matters: sea freight charges by the greater of weight or measure, and knitwear almost always pays on measure. Bulky knits can literally cost more to ship than to knit, which is why we discuss carton sizes before packing and carton planning, not after.

The cost stack, line by line

Here is the full build-up on that order, sea freight to a European port:

• FOB goods value: 3,000 pcs × USD 9.50 = USD 28,500.00
• Origin charges and documentation: export customs declaration, booking, bill of lading, origin handling — call it USD 450.00 (USD 0.15/pc)
• Sea freight, LCL: 16 CBM at roughly USD 110–130 all-in per CBM with terminal handling on both sides — call it USD 2,000.00 (USD 0.67/pc). A full container would change the arithmetic; LCL versus FCL is worth a separate look.
• Cargo insurance: around 0.3% of goods value — USD 100.00 (USD 0.03/pc)
• Customs duty: here is the line that hurts. Duty is levied on the customs value, and the customs value is not your FOB number — for EU and UK entries it includes freight and insurance (a CIF-style base), while US entries are valued at FOB. At an illustrative 12% on a CIF base of about USD 31,050: USD 3,726.00 (USD 1.24/pc). The exact rate depends on fibre and heading — wool, acrylic and cotton sweaters all sit under different codes, and HS codes and duty rates repay an hour of homework.
• Broker, entry and port service charges: USD 600.00 (USD 0.20/pc)
• Delivery port to warehouse: USD 350.00 (USD 0.12/pc)

Total: about USD 35,726 — or USD 11.94 per sweater landed, against an FOB of 9.50. The freight and fee stack added 26%, and duty alone was bigger than the entire shipping bill. Run the same order by air freight and the transport lines triple or worse; air versus sea is a genuine business decision on knitwear, not a default.

The costs that never appear on a quote

The lines above are the visible ones. In our experience these are the costs that quietly wreck margin models:

• Sampling and courier. Development spend on a style should be amortised across the units that style actually sells. If USD 500 of sampling and couriers lands on a 3,000-piece order, that is another USD 0.17 per unit.
• Inspection. Third-party pre-shipment or inline checks — typically USD 300–400 per man-day — belong in the per-unit number too. See how inspection fees should be planned.
• Rejects and seconds. A 2–3% allowance for AQL-passed but second-quality pieces effectively raises the cost of the good 97%. Two percent on this order is another USD 0.24 per sellable unit.
• Payment friction. Telegraphic transfer fees, and the spread between the rate your bank gives you and the rate you modelled. On volatile months this is real money — our piece on currency risk on knitwear orders covers how to blunt it.
• Financing. If you pay a deposit in March and the goods sell in October, six months of working capital cost sits inside every sweater. Accountants call it interest; buyers call it a surprise. Seasonal importers who land goods early can blunt this with a bonded warehouse strategy that defers duty and VAT until stock is actually withdrawn.

None of these are hidden by anyone malicious. They are simply not on the FOB quote, which is the only document most buyers compare. And one more line item deserves its own homework: import VAT or GST, which is assessed on goods plus freight plus duty — the compounding that most landed-cost spreadsheets get wrong, and which we break down in our import VAT and de minimis guide.

Compare suppliers on landed, not FOB

This is where the discipline pays off. A factory quoting USD 9.00 FOB with poor carton discipline — mixed cartons, sloppy poly bags, no shipping marks — can easily cost more landed than a factory at USD 9.50 that packs to your spec, consolidates cleanly and never misses a document. When we quote, we are happy to show buyers the carton plan, the carton dimensions and the total CBM for their order quantity before they book freight, because we know that number lands in their model. Buyers who run quotations and landed cost side by side make better decisions than buyers chasing the lowest FOB in the inbox — and the same logic applies when comparing China against other sourcing countries, where wage differences get eaten by freight and duty differences faster than most people expect.

At YZR Sweaters we are a Dongguan knitwear factory working with fashion brands, wholesalers and online retailers, and we treat your landed cost as part of our job: honest FOB, export-ready packing, documents sent before the vessel sails. If you want a quote you can drop straight into a landed-cost model, send us the styles and quantities and we will build it with you.

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