Dressmaker: How to Make Money Fast

Here's how to make money fast in Dressmaker.

Every fabric, embellishment, and accessory costs money in Dressmaker, and that's honestly one of the bigger hurdles early on if you want to go all out on a design. Between commissions with strict budgets and off-the-rack designs that let you spend freely, it's easy to burn through your gold faster than you can earn it back.

Knowing where the smart shortcuts are makes a real difference in how quickly you can afford your next ambitious project.

Understanding How Money Works

There are two main ways to earn money: Commissions, which you pick up naturally as you play through the story and make dresses for customers, and Off-the-Rack dresses, which open up once you finish the third quest and let you design however you want with zero restrictions.

Selling an Off-the-Rack dress breaks its price down into four factors: Materials used, Labor, Quality (tied to things like staying on track while sewing and cutting on the grain), and Prestige, your overall rank in Dressmaker. 

The exact mechanics behind Labor aren't officially confirmed, but a common community theory is that it's tied to how many stitches a dress requires, based on players noticing patchwork-style skirts with lots of small pieces paying out noticeably more for Labor than simpler designs. Both Quality and Prestige carry multipliers, meaning your earning potential increases as your skill and reputation grow.

Use Burlap for Free Profit

Burlap's sitting in the fabric shop completely free, which makes it one of the best ways to make quick cash early on. Since it doesn't cost you anything, whatever you sell it for is pure profit.

Not every design is going to sell for much, so expect to experiment a bit. Simple stuff tends to sell low, but more detailed designs, especially skirts with a bunch of layers, go for noticeably more. Toss on some accessories and that price climbs even higher.

Turn Fabric Leftovers Into Patchwork Dresses

You're not always going to be able to avoid leftover fabric, especially with skirt-heavy designs that leave behind little unused scraps. Instead of tossing those out, try building a design around tiers and layers so you can actually place patterns into those leftover gaps.

The result won't always be the prettiest design, but it turns fabric that would otherwise go to waste into sellable profit instead of throwing away money in Dressmaker. As a bonus, patchwork-style designs with lots of small pieces may also pay out more through the Labor pricing factor.

Stack Accessories for Bigger Profit Margins

Buying a large batch of accessories and loading a simple dress design with as many as possible can produce a strong profit margin, provided you already have some starting capital. In one example, 1,700 gold spent on 46 Brooches resulted in a dress selling for over 3,000 gold, a roughly 50% profit, a result other players have echoed as well.

This method does get repetitive, but reinvesting the profit into buying even more accessories creates a compounding cycle that can steadily build toward funding a genuinely extravagant, detail-heavy design. Holding Shift while placing accessories lets you place multiples at once instead of dragging each one individually from your inventory, which speeds up a process like this considerably.

Use Cheaper Fabric on Hidden Pattern Pieces

Certain patterns, like the Odette skirt, include pieces that end up hidden inside the finished dress rather than visible from the outside. On Commissions specifically, using a cheaper fabric on these hidden pieces and saving the expensive fabric for visible sections can stretch a costly fabric much further without affecting how the dress looks.

Maximize Fabric Use on Off-the-Rack Dresses

Since Off-the-Rack dresses don't require hitting a specific quality threshold, cutting pattern pieces more aggressively to squeeze extra use out of expensive fabric is a viable way to stretch your materials further. Designs with lots of smaller pattern pieces, like bodices and peplums, tend to work especially well for this, since there's more flexibility in how the pieces are laid out in Dressmaker.

Saving Money Matters Too

Making more money isn't the only way to stay ahead - not wasting what you've already got stretches your gold a lot further too. Using the Recycle option instead of cutting a pattern piece directly restores the fabric to its original state if a mistake is made, rather than losing that fabric permanently. Pay close attention to material sliders during quests too, since required amounts don't update automatically when purchasing.

For Commissions specifically, avoid spending more than what the commission actually pays out, since going overboard turns a paying job into a loss. Save the lavish, detail-heavy spending for Off-the-Rack dresses instead, where there's no requirement to stay within a budget.

Which Method to Prioritize

Start out with free Burlap designs to build up some starting cash with zero risk, then once you've got enough gold, reinvest it into accessory-heavy Off-the-Rack dresses. Don't sleep on the Recycle option, hidden pattern pieces, or fabric leftovers either, since all three helps stretch your materials further without spending extra gold.

Making steady money in Dressmaker really just comes down to leaning on free resources early, reinvesting your profit, and not wasting fabric.

FAQ

Q. Fastest way to make money early on? 

A. Grab some free Burlap and turn it into Off-the-Rack dresses. Since the fabric's free, whatever it sells for is straight profit.

Q. Can leftover fabric scraps be used for anything?

A. Yeah, don't toss them. Build a patchwork-style design with tiers and layers and you can actually put those scraps to use.

Q. Does the Recycle option actually restore fabric?

A. It does. Pop a cut pattern piece back into Recycle and it restores the fabric to how it was before you cut it.

Q. Should accessories be added to Commission dresses?

A. Better to keep Commission spending within what the commission actually pays. Save the heavier accessory spending for Off-the-Rack dresses instead.