Tailoring "Profitable to GM"?

[obuw]

I am starting to train tailoring on my mule, and I read the tailoring guide here that says it is profitable to gm. Well, that doesn't seem to be the case. I'm at ~40 adjusted skill making fancy dresses, which cost 12 cloth (36gp) each, and sell for 12gp. Not even counting the cloth lost to failures. Am I missing something?

[Nystal]

I am starting to train tailoring on my mule, and I read the tailoring guide here that says it is profitable to gm. Well, that doesn't seem to be the case. I'm at ~40 adjusted skill making fancy dresses, which cost 12 cloth (36gp) each, and sell for 12gp. Not even counting the cloth lost to failures. Am I missing something?

I'm not sure exactly which guide you're going off, but I would assume its based off Gathering your own wool/cotton for free.

[obuw]

I'm going off the only guide I can find on tailoring really...

viewtopic.php?f=9&t=2250&start=15

Well, not the guide itself, but posts starting from page 2.

So it's not profitable, not even close, and I'm not missing anything?

Is this era accurate? I don't remember clothes ever selling for as little as for 12gp on OSI.

[liinniejj]

it was very profitable for me anyway i gathered all my wool myself for free thus no costs there beside just sewing kits ofcourse then made fancy shirts when i could etc and i made good money of it as it costed me near to nothing to skill due to sheep sheering and cotton plucking. ofcourse if you buy yer cloths its gonna be a hell of a lot less profitable clearly.

[obuw]

Considering you'd make at least twice as much money selling the wool you collect to the vendor, I don't see how that approach makes it profitable in any meaning of the word.

Another question: I can't find any npc who can train me above 23.5. I tried delucia, trinsic, britain. Is there a better trainer anywhere?

[Jill Stihl]

Plain dresses should be getting you around 30gp* each from NPC vendors. If they're only paying 12gp someone has crashed the prices before you got there.


*Exceptionals go for 30gp, I'm not sure on non-exceptional but it'll only be a couple of GP less.


Edit - Sorry I misread plain/fancy in the OP.

[obuw]

Hmm, thanks for the info. I guess I'll check other shops then. (It was non-exceptional fancy dresses I was selling).

[Light Shade]

You should be coming out with about 30,000gp of profit after finishing Tailoring unless its changed since I did it.

[obuw]

Hmm, yep, right now the Delucia tailor sells fancy dresses for 25gp, but plain dresses for 56gp. So I guess moving to another shop will solve my problem. Thanks all.

[Aeris]

Keep in mind the "revenue per cloth invested" ratio is different for every item. I think fancy shirts are most profitable per cloth (though I haven't actually checked every item, it just seems that 8 cloth and sale of 27-30 gp is the best from what I've tried; also many recommend making this item).

As Jill said, keep in mind that there are only so many tailor NPCs in Britannia (I think only around 14, not counting the lost lands), and they each only have a certain amount of gold. If someone else on the shard is also trying to profit off tailoring, then you will frequently find they'll beat you to it, and the NPC will offer you prices of less than 40% the max price.

[Francois424]

You have to raise your skill using "selective" items.
Target those that gives you the better reward per cloth used.

Since this server went for the 'twitt OSI rules' or material prices costing 7x what they did, you'll be having a hard time breaking even while skilling-up most of the time... we still do not have the Bundle of Flax @ ~106gp on vendor yet (I'm pretty sure that's how much they are worth), and I did report it multiple times; Maybe it'll get fixed later.

In the meantime, I strongly suggest making a tamer and do what other did: build a flock of sheep in Yew or Delucia, or even moonglow, and shear them over and over. Pure profit.

Around 70 you start making some good leather items, and it's much better from there-on.
Make a spreadsheat, calculate your cost to make a bolt of cloth and your revenue while trying different items, you'll get good in no time.

Oh and Btw: plain dresses are 28gp/30gp

[obuw]

Ah, thanks for the informative post Francois. I already gave up on tailoring after my last post - didn't much of a point gm-ing a useless skill if it actually costs me gold.

Although, when you say "twitt OSI rules', material prices costing 7x what they did, that piques my interest. Do you mean the material prices are not era accurate? More so, were they era accurate to begin with, and they were intentionally made NOT era accurate with a patch to prevent people from "abusing" the system?

As for sheep pens, yep, that's how I made most of my starting money when I started playing. I just sold the wool though. ;P

[Scienter]

It's important to mention that the administration injected a patch regarding the amount of items you can sell pertaining to the shopkeepers gold on hand.

[Francois424]

Ah, thanks for the informative post Francois. I already gave up on tailoring after my last post - didn't much of a point gm-ing a useless skill if it actually costs me gold.

Although, when you say "twitt OSI rules', material prices costing 7x what they did, that piques my interest. Do you mean the material prices are not era accurate? More so, were they era accurate to begin with, and they were intentionally made NOT era accurate with a patch to prevent people from "abusing" the system?

As for sheep pens, yep, that's how I made most of my starting money when I started playing. I just sold the wool though. ;P

OSI in their infinite wisdom (LOL) decided that being a townie was a smelling piece of s**t turd of a way to play and started nerfing every way to make money (even the mage-escort via gate spell) except for dungeon runs.

Now that's out of my system, spool of thread use to cost 3gp per.
Then a patch came around '99 to put it to 21. 3 was too cheap, 21 is too much.
Good price should've been 10-12 gp each.

Unfortunately, it is era accurate, which sucks.
The only thing not accurate are the Bundles of FLAX, which where around and cheaper than the rest of the materials ( if you buy them ).
However, they are stillnot available for sale on UOSA (for the moment)

[Wil]

When I crunched the numbers last year the best cloth gains were:

Fancy shirt, $112.50 per pile of wool
Bandana, $105 per pile of wool
Plain Dress, $90 per pile of wool
Skullcap, $90 per pile of wool

Of course these drop as the merchant buys them so if someone else is running around selling fancy shirts, leave it off your list or come back later. I assumed shearing sheep for wool... there are so many sheep in the world it didn't make much sense to me to buy yarn or bolts at the vendor.

Leather gains were better once your skill is high enough to usually succeed. Gloves, sleeves and gorgets (all plain, not studded) all returned good gains versus purchased hides and acceptable gains versus purchased leather.

Gain per 300 hides purchased @ 3 each assuming 100% tailoring success:
Leather Gloves, $2400
Leather Sleeves, $2400
Leather Gorget, $2100

I don't know how the current resource rules affect that. If the merchants aren't popping 999 hides all the time, the cost of collecting the leather would make it not worth it.