Nobody in this industry publishes prices, and there is a reason for that. A bespoke piece can be made five different ways at five different costs, and a number without context is misleading. But refusing to say anything at all is not much help either when you are trying to work out whether to put a line in a budget.
So here is the honest version: what actually drives the cost of a bespoke build, in rough order of impact, and where the money goes.
1. Material, and specifically how hard it is to work
The raw material is rarely the biggest number. What matters is how much labour that material demands. Acrylic that has to be flame polished on every visible edge costs more in time than it does in sheet. Solid hardwood costs more than veneered board partly in material and mostly in the machining and finishing it needs. Stainless steel is not expensive to buy and is expensive to fabricate well, because welding it cleanly and then polishing the welds out is slow, skilled work.
If a budget is tight, this is the first place to look. The same design in a different material can move the price by half without looking cheaper.
2. Finish
Finish is the single most underestimated cost in bespoke work. A brushed satin surface and a mirror polish are the same object with very different amounts of hand time in them. A colour matched spray finish to a brand reference involves mixing, test panels and approval before anything is sprayed for real. A distressed or aged finish is entirely hand applied by someone who knows how.
Clients often assume the shape is the expensive part. Usually it is the surface.
3. Whether it has to come apart
A piece that is welded up solid and delivered in one go is the cheapest way to build almost anything. The moment it has to break down for transport, stack for storage, be rebuilt on site by someone who was not in the workshop, or be assembled repeatedly across a tour, you are buying engineering as well as fabrication. Hidden fixings, alignment features, keyed joints and a piece that goes together the same way every time all take design work.
That is often money well spent. A demountable piece that gets used for three seasons is cheaper per use than a welded one that gets skipped after one event. But it is a real cost and it belongs in the conversation early.
4. Quantity, and the shape of the curve
The first one carries all the design, drawing, setup and prototyping. The second one carries almost none of that. This is why the price of ten is nowhere near ten times the price of one, and why it is always worth asking about the run even if you only think you need a single piece.
It also works the other way. If you are pricing a multi site retail roll out, the per unit figure at twenty sites is a completely different conversation from the figure at two, and it is worth telling a maker the real number at the start.
5. Size, but not in the way people expect
Size drives cost in steps, not smoothly. A piece that fits on a standard machine bed, goes out on a normal van and passes through a standard doorway sits in one bracket. Cross any one of those lines and you move into another one, because you are now buying sectional construction, specialist transport or an install crew.
If a dimension is close to one of those thresholds, it is worth asking whether it can come down slightly. A few centimetres can save a category of cost.
6. Time
A normal lead time is not a premium. A compressed one can be, because it means moving other work, overtime, or paying for expedited material. Most of our projects run two to three weeks from sign-off depending on the nature of the job and how busy the workshop is at the time, and if you can work to that, you are not paying for speed.
7. The paperwork
Usually small, occasionally not. Fire rated materials and certification, structural calculation, food safe specification on contact surfaces, method statements for an install in a live venue. None of these are large costs on their own, but they are real, and they are cheaper to build in at design stage than to retrofit at the end.
What this means when you ask for a quote
The most useful thing you can do is give a range rather than ask for a number. A maker who knows you have around fifteen hundred to spend will design something for fifteen hundred. A maker who does not know will design what you described and let you find out. Both of you waste less time the first way.
The second most useful thing is to say what you are flexible on. If the shape is fixed but the material is not, or the finish matters more than the size, that tells us where to spend and where to save.
We quote fixed prices, not estimates, and the quote comes with the material specification, the finish and the lead time on it. If the design changes after that, we requote before anything is made. See how we work or send us a brief.
