Order size
Half of Peru knitwear leaves in shipments of 25 garments or fewer
Those small orders earn more per garment than the container loads do, and the same exporters take both. A sample run sits in the price book on its own terms.
Key takeaways
- A first order of a dozen garments is an ordinary transaction here, not a favour: nearly four in ten shipments are twelve pieces or fewer.
- The small door averages $46 a garment against $17 at container scale, and inside the same company the small shipment still earns more.
- 471 of 735 exporters use the small door, so most of the industry can be tested with one box.
The numbers behind this
| Measure | Value |
|---|---|
| Shipments of 25 garments or fewer | half of all traffic |
| Average price, small door | $46 a garment |
| Average price, container door | $17 a garment |
| Price gradient by shipment size | $49, then $37, then $24, then $17 a garment |
| Share of value carried by shipments of 1,000+ | 59.9% |
| Companies shipping through both doors | 88, of which 74 charge more in the small one |
| Median alpaca shipment | 8 garments |
| Exporters using the small door | 471 of 735 |
| Median shipment to Europe | 13 garments |
| Median shipment to Japan, Korea and China | 12 garments |
| Median shipment to the United States | 54 garments |
| Median shipment, cotton knitwear | 60 garments |
| Median shipment, synthetic knitwear | 27 garments |
| Median shipment, fine animal hair | 8 garments |
Every buyer who has looked at Peru asks the same thing first, and almost nobody asks it out loud. How small can a first order be before a decent company stops answering the phone?
The answer sits in the shipping pattern, so I counted it.
Half the traffic moves in dozens
Over the last eighteen months, knitwear left Peru just under ten million garments in total.
Half of those shipments were 25 garments or fewer.
Nearly four in ten were twelve or fewer. A shipment of alpaca knitwear runs eight garments at the median, across thousands of shipments.
Those small shipments are almost invisible in any total. Everything at 25 garments and below adds up to a rounding error in the country figure. Read the market by volume and half its traffic disappears.
The volume sits at the far end, in shipments of a thousand garments and up.
Price per garment falls as the shipment grows
Average export price by shipment size band
The small door is the expensive door
What makes the two ends worth separating is the price. The small door averages $46 a garment. The container door averages $17.
The gradient in between is unbroken. Every step down in shipment size is a step up in price per piece.
My first read was that this is sampling. Small shipments are samples, samples come from expensive companies, and the average price is high because of who ships them rather than how much they ship.
That read did not survive the check.
The same company charges more for the smaller box
I took the companies that shipped through both doors in the same period and compared each one against itself.
In 74 of them the small shipments earned more per garment. Same company, same year, same product line, and the small shipment carries a higher price per piece.
Which is what you would expect from a factory floor rather than from a sampling department. A short run pays for the setup, the yarn changes and the hand finishing across a dozen pieces instead of a container.
That gap is the arithmetic of a short run, and it is stable enough to plan around.
The Twelve-Garment Door, then, since twelve is about where it sits. Most of the active companies used it in the last eighteen months, and only a minority shipped anything at container scale. For most of the industry that door is the main entrance.
The finer the fibre, the smaller the box
Median shipment size by fibre, from the tariff classification
Order size sorts the map better than geography does
A shipment to Europe runs about a dozen garments at the median, and so does one to Japan, Korea or China. A shipment to the United States runs four times that.
Sorted by price the order barely changes. Asia pays the most per garment, then Europe, then the United States, and the neighbouring Latin American markets pay the least.
The buyers who work in dozens are paying the most per piece and taking the least volume. That is the shape of a specialty trade rather than a wholesale one.
The fibre splits along the same line
Here I used the tariff classification rather than the product descriptions, so that the two methods stay independent.
Cotton knitwear moves in the largest shipments of the three. Synthetic sits in the middle. Fine animal hair, which is where the alpaca lives, moves in the smallest boxes of all, and the exact medians are in the table above.
The heavier a fibre leans towards craft, the smaller the shipment and the higher the price per piece.
So the answer to the buyer's question is small, and it is not a favour anyone is doing you. A dozen garments is an ordinary transaction here, priced accordingly, executed by companies that also load containers.
A limit on all of this. A short run is priced as a short run, so the cost per garment in a first order will not survive scale. It should not be used to model a season.
What it buys is information about the company on the other side, which at twelve garments is the cheapest information in this trade.
Common questions
What is a realistic minimum order for Peruvian knitwear?
A dozen garments. Nearly four in ten shipments out of Peru are twelve garments or fewer, and half are 25 or fewer, so a small first order is an ordinary transaction rather than a special request.
Does a small order cost more per garment?
Yes. The small door averages $46 a garment against $17 for shipments of a thousand and up, and the gradient in between is unbroken.
Is that just because small shipments are samples?
No. Of the 88 companies that ship through both doors, 74 charge more per garment in the small one, with a median gap of about one and a half times. It is the arithmetic of a short run.
How many Peruvian exporters accept small orders?
471 of the 735 active exporters used the small door in the last eighteen months, and 118 companies work both ends.
Does a first order price predict what a season will cost?
No. A short run is priced as a short run. What a first order buys is information about the supplier, not a price to model a season on.
Tell us the spec. We come back with whether a real supplier base exists for it.
We work only in camelid fibre, on the ground in Peru. You get the companies that already ship what you are asking for, at the size and the grade you are asking for.
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A short read on how the Peruvian fine fibre market actually behaves. No calendar, no filler.