Nobody who buys a handmade piece asks how it's made. They just see the number. Fine. So here it is. Not a defence, not an apology. Just the actual bill behind every piece that leaves our studio in Turin, because apparently it needs saying.
Why does a handmade piece from Maison Guida cost what it costs?
Because there is a real bill behind it. A long one. And none of it is optional, none of it pauses when things are quiet, and none of it cares whether we sold one piece this month or twenty. Maison Guida is an independent atelier at Piazza Vittorio 14 and Lungo Po in Turin (Torino), Italy, founded in 2005 by Marika Guida.
What does the studio cost?
Maison Guida operates from an atelier at Lungo Po in the Vanchiglia neighbourhood of Turin, Italy. Marika has been cutting, sewing, and finishing there for years. The rent is every month. The electricity running the machines all day, the heating in winter that keeps the fabric workable, the maintenance when something breaks at the wrong moment. Every month. It doesn't know it's the slow season. The bill arrives anyway.
What does the shop cost?
There is also a retail space at Piazza Vittorio 14 in Turin. Central location. Which means high rent for a small space where people walk in, try things on, talk to Marika and John, and sometimes leave without buying anything. That's fine. That's how it works. But the rent doesn't adjust for the days when nobody comes in. It's on the bill. Every month. Regardless.
Who makes each piece and what does that actually cost?
Marika Guida studied design. She has been making clothes since before most of our customers started buying them. Every single pattern from scratch. Every piece by hand. The trench coat on the site right now came off her cutting table, through her machine, finished by her. That's not a story we tell for marketing purposes. That's the production process. It takes hours. CLO3D for the digital design. Prototypes. Samples. Sometimes an entire development run that doesn't make it to the shop. All of it costs. And behind all of it are two decades of practice. Marika holds the Certificato di Eccellenza Artigiana, the formal Italian recognition of master craft status. That's in the price too. It should be.
Where does the fabric come from and what does that cost?
Italian mills. The kind that supply the labels you actually respect. Getting to those fabrics means trips and time and decisions that take longer than they look, because the wrong fabric at the wrong weight is a wasted collection. You buy by the metre. The offcuts don't come back. The fabric that was wrong for the pattern is still a cost. There is no economy of scale when you make one piece at a time. No volume discount. No safety net. Just the price per metre and the bill getting longer.
What does the photography cost?
Before anyone sees a piece, John photographs it. A real model, because the clothes need to be on a real person. A makeup artist. A location or a studio. Half a day at minimum, often more. Then hours of post-production: colour correction, retouching, resizing for every format every platform needs. The photos that make someone stop scrolling are not free. They are not quick. They are not happening by accident. They are on the bill.
What does running the business cost?
The website was built from scratch by John. It is maintained and improved constantly. The ads cost money to run. The emails, the campaigns, the orders, the technical infrastructure, the customer service, the packaging, the shipping, the insurance, the Stripe fee on every transaction, the software subscriptions that keep everything working. All of it is a job. All of it has a cost. Every month. On the bill.
What do Italian taxes add?
Everyone in Italy knows. The IVA. The INPS contributions. The IRPEF. The IRAP. Every time money moves through this business a percentage disappears before it gets within reach of thread or fabric or a sewing machine. And then there is the commercialista, the accountant you absolutely need just to navigate the obligations, because nobody survives Italian business administration alone and stays functional. You finish one thing and there is another. A small business in Italy is a continuous act of stubbornness against a system that appears designed to make you give up. The bill doesn't notice. It just keeps arriving.
So that's the number. An atelier at Lungo Po in Vanchiglia. A shop at Piazza Vittorio 14. Marika's twenty years of practice and her formal recognition as a master artisan. Italian fabric sourced by hand. A proper shoot. A website and a marketing operation built from nothing. And a state that takes its cut before we take ours.
The price is not what we would like it to be. It is what it has to be. Every piece we make is the cheapest it can honestly be while still being worth making.
If you want it cheaper, someone somewhere is paying the difference. Right now, that someone is being replaced by a machine, and the brands doing it are calling it progress.
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