Ask a fashion founder how much warehouse space their stock needs and you usually get a weight. Three hundred kilos, say, or "about twenty boxes".
Neither answer helps, because a warehouse does not charge for weight and does not think in boxes. It charges for the space your range occupies and the number of places it has to be kept in. For clothing those two numbers diverge more than in almost any other category.
Why clothing costs more space than it weighs
A pallet of winter coats and a pallet of bricks cost the same to store. The pallet is a footprint, and the footprint does not care what is on it.
That surprises people because garments feel cheap to hold. Per kilogram they are. Per cubic metre they are ordinary. The problem is that a clothing range converts into cubic metres badly:
- Garments are soft and do not stack into neat cubes, so usable space is always less than measured space
- Bagged items trap air, and poly bags do not compress under their own weight the way cartons do
- Anything hanging occupies a completely different shape of space from anything folded
- A range that spans jackets and t-shirts cannot be stored at a single density
None of that is unusual or a problem. It just means the estimate you carry in your head is usually low.
The number that actually drives your bill
Here is the part most cost guides skip.
For a wide clothing range, the binding constraint is not volume, it is locations.
A brand holding 250 SKUs needs somewhere around 250 pick locations, whether each one holds twelve units or two. The warehouse cannot mix size 10 and size 12 of the same style in one bin, because that is exactly how the wrong garment ends up in a parcel. Each variant needs its own place.
So two brands can hold the same total cubic metres and cost very different amounts to store:
| Brand A | Brand B | |
|---|---|---|
| Total units | 3,000 | 3,000 |
| SKUs | 15 | 250 |
| Cubic metres | ~12 | ~12 |
| Pick locations needed | 15 | 250 |
Brand B is more expensive to store and slower to pick, on identical volume. That is not a penalty; it is the actual cost of a size and colour grid. But it explains why a quote built on cubic metres alone will be wrong for a fashion brand, and why a provider who only asks for your volume has not understood your range.
How to estimate your own footprint
You can do this in about ten minutes and it will make every quote you receive more useful.
Step one: measure three garments. Pick your smallest, your largest and something typical, folded and bagged the way they would be stored. Multiply length by width by height in metres.
As a rough guide from typical ranges:
- Folded t-shirt, bagged: around 0.0015 m³
- Folded jeans or knitwear: around 0.0045 m³
- Bulky outerwear: 0.015 m³ and up
Step two: work out your average. Weight your three figures by roughly how much of your range each represents. A mixed apparel range often lands somewhere near 0.004 m³ per unit.
Step three: multiply by peak units. Peak, not average. The number that matters is the most stock you will hold at once, which for most fashion brands is late October when new season has landed and last season has not cleared.
Step four: add access. Stock has to be reachable. Add roughly forty per cent for aisles, shelf clearance and the space above and around the units themselves.
A worked example: 3,000 units at 0.004 m³ is 12 m³, plus forty per cent is around 17 m³. At roughly two cubic metres to a pallet, that is eight to nine pallet equivalents.
⚠️ That is an estimate to argue with, not a quote. It is there so that when a provider tells you a number, you know whether to believe it.
How storage gets charged
Three units are common in Australia, and they are not comparable to each other.
Per pallet. Published Australian ranges sit at roughly A$3 to A$7 per pallet per week, which is about A$13 to A$30 per pallet per month. Suits stock that arrives and moves in pallet quantities. Suits a 250-SKU clothing range badly — you can pay for a full pallet while using a third of it.
Per shelf, bin or location. Better for wide ranges, because you pay for the space each SKU actually occupies rather than rounding up. Usually more per cubic metre than pallet rates, and fairly so: shelving is more work to set up and pick from.
Per cubic metre. The easiest to compare between providers because it removes the packing question entirely.
Before comparing two quotes, ask which unit each is using. A provider quoting A$25 and one quoting A$45 may be charging the same amount for the same stock.
How storage is charged covers the mechanics in more detail.
The season overlap nobody budgets for
For several weeks a year you hold two ranges at once. New season has landed; last season has not sold through.
Your peak storage bill is therefore not your average bill plus a bit. It is close to double, for as long as the overlap lasts, and it usually coincides with the quarter when cash is tightest anyway.
Two things reduce it, and neither is a rate negotiation. Clearing last season earlier, and landing new season closer to when you actually need it rather than as early as the factory can ship. Both are planning decisions made months before the storage invoice arrives.
What to bring to a quote conversation
- SKU count, counting each size and colour separately. This is the number that drives locations.
- Peak units held, not average.
- Your estimated cubic metres, using the method above.
- Whether anything hangs. It changes the storage type entirely.
- How long stock typically sits before it sells through.
Give a provider those five and you get a rate card built on your range. Give them a weight and you get a band.
Working out what your range costs to hold? The calculator will run your volumes against published Australian market ranges, and fashion fulfilment covers what happens to the stock once it is being picked rather than stored.