The corduroy coat goes on sale soon, and it costs £295. Before that number lands in your inbox with no context, here is where it comes from: every metre, every hour, every button. Slow fashion pricing tends to get explained with words like "craftsmanship" and "heritage", which is fine, but tells you nothing. So this is the spreadsheet version.

There are ten coats - that number isn't a marketing decision, and we'll get to why.

What happened to the plan

The original plan was to have the coat made by a small, ethical manufacturer. The samples didn't come back right, the fabric wasn't the fabric we wanted, and we weren't willing to launch a coat that wasn't ready. So the first edition is being made by me, in my flat, one at a time. The manufactured version is still being worked out and there'll be more on that soon.

This is the proper first edition, and it is very much handmade, in the sense that there is one pair of hands.

The fabric: 31 metres

Each coat takes 3.1 metres of corduroy. The cord is a 455gsm heavyweight deadstock corduroy: fabric left over from someone else's production run. 455gsm matters: it's a similar weight to the vintage coat the pattern was taken from (although I'd argue it's actually warmer!), and it's the difference between a coat that works in October and a coat that gets worn all Winter.

Here's the bit of handmade pricing nobody tells you about. New heavyweight corduroy from a British mill costs £18 to £36 a metre, depending on how much you buy. This deadstock was £10.50 a metre, so the shell of each coat costs £32.55 instead of up to £112. The catch with deadstock is that there's only so much of it. We bought 31 metres of corduroy and 33.2 metres of lining, plus £22.50 extra to have the cord delivered on a roll rather than folded, to help the fabric maintain its pile.

The hours: 10 to 12 per coat

A fully lined coat with gathers, pockets, a collar and turned ties takes 10 to 12 hours to make. That's sewing time. It doesn't include cutting, pattern work, pressing, photography, listing, packing or the evening I spent turning a loop through itself with increasingly bad language.

Ten coats is 100 to 120 hours. That's around three working weeks of doing nothing else, and I also run a vintage shop.

The cost of one coat

At £295, that leaves somewhere between £43 and £73 a coat after card fees, depending on how well the hanging loops behave. That's the profit. It works because the fabric was deadstock and because I'm paying myself £15 an hour, which is less than you'd pay most people to sew a lined coat.

Make the same coat in new mill corduroy, bought a coat's worth at a time, and the honest price is somewhere around £370 to £420. That's what handmade actually costs, and it's why so little of it exists at a price normal people can pay.

Why there are ten

Ten is where four limits happen to meet:

• The fabric. It's deadstock, so there's a fixed amount of it. 31 metres makes ten coats.
• The hours. 100 to 120 hours is the most one person can sew in a season without the vintage side of the business quietly falling over.
• The space. Ten coats' worth of cut pieces, lining and pressing takes up most of my flat.
• Honesty. Fifty coats would be 500 to 600 hours. At that point it isn't a first edition, it's a second job!

So: ten. Not a scarcity tactic, just arithmetic.

What this means for slow fashion pricing

When something handmade seems expensive, it's usually priced about right, and the cheap thing next to it is subsidised by someone you'll never meet. A coat that costs over £200 to make properly can't sell for £80 unless the fabric is thinner, the sewing is faster and the person sewing it is paid less. Usually all three.

This coat is designed to be in a vintage shop in 2066, still worth buying. That's the whole point, really.

How to get one

The waitlist gets first access before the coats go public. There are ten, and the waitlist is considerably longer than ten.

Join the coat waitlist here

In the meantime, our one-off vintage outerwear is where the vintage coats live.

FAQs

How much is the handmade corduroy coat? £295. The full cost breakdown is above.

Why does a handmade coat cost so much? About £66 in materials and postage, and 10 to 12 hours of sewing per coat. Handmade clothing costs what it costs; most clothing just hides it.

Why only ten coats? Ten is what 31 metres of deadstock makes, and 100 to 120 hours is what this girl can sew without losing her mind.

Will there be more? We're working on a manufactured version for next year. Joining the waitlist is the reliable way to hear about it.