Somebody asked for a quote on one stool, then on six of the same stool, and was annoyed that six did not cost six times one. They cost about four. The arithmetic behind that discount is not a volume favour, it is the plain fact that roughly a third of the work on a one-off is setup — jigs, test cuts, sharpening, drawing, thinking — and setup is paid once whether you make one or twenty. Understanding which parts of a price scale and which do not makes it much easier to decide what to ask for.
The three cost buckets
Every commission splits into design, setup and per-unit work. Design is drawings, prototyping and decisions; it is paid once. Setup is jigs, machine programming, fences, templates, and the first fitting that proves the method works; also once, though it grows slightly with batch size because jigs wear. Per-unit work is everything that has to happen to each object: machining, assembly, sanding, finishing, packing. On a simple stool the split might be 20 per cent design, 25 per cent setup and 55 per cent per-unit. On a piece with complex geometry the setup share climbs above 40 per cent, which is why those pieces show the steepest discount in a batch.
Why the discount curve flattens fast
The saving between one and two is large. Between two and six it is smaller. Between six and twelve it is smaller again, and by then the dominant cost is per-unit labour that does not compress much further without different equipment. This is the ordinary shape of economies of scale, and in a small shop it flattens earlier than people expect, because a bench maker cannot buy the throughput a factory can. Anyone hoping for a factory price at a quantity of ten is asking a bench to behave like a plant, and the honest answer is that the piece should either be redesigned for volume production or accepted at bench cost.
What genuinely does not scale
Material scales linearly and sometimes worse: matching six chairs from one flitch means buying more timber than six chairs’ worth and rejecting some of it. Finishing barely scales at all beyond filling the spray booth once instead of twice. Hand fitting does not scale, and neither does quality control — the twelfth piece still has to be checked. And anything site-specific resets entirely: six identical cabinets going into six different alcoves are not a batch, they are six one-offs with a shared drawing, because each one gets scribed to its own wall.
How to use this when commissioning
Two practical moves. First, if more than one of something might be wanted eventually, say so at the drawing stage — the jigs get made once and kept, and the second piece a year later costs far less than a fresh commission. Second, look for shared setup across different objects: a dining table and a matching bench built at the same time from the same stock share material sorting, machine setups and a finishing run, which is a real saving even though they are different pieces. The opposite also holds. Adding a small variation to one unit in a batch — one drawer instead of two, one different height — deletes most of the batch benefit for that unit, so variations should be deliberate rather than casual.
Reading a batch quote
A quote that offers a per-unit price with no mention of setup is hiding something, usually the assumption that the full batch will be ordered. Worth asking explicitly: what the price is for one, what it is for the batch, and what happens if the quantity is reduced after the jigs are made. Also worth asking what the second-run price would be in a year, and for how long the templates and programs will be kept. Method choice interacts with all of this, since where machine work beats bench work is largely a question of how many of a thing exist.
Frequently asked questions
Is there a quantity at which a bench shop stops being the right maker? Broadly, somewhere past a few dozen identical units the economics favour a production shop with dedicated machinery. A bench shop can do it, but the client is paying for flexibility they are not using.
Do batch pieces vary from one another? Slightly, and in solid timber inevitably, since colour and figure differ board to board. A batch can be sorted for consistency, which costs material, or accepted as a family of related objects.
Can a batch be delivered in instalments? Usually yes, though the finishing run is most efficient in one pass, so the whole batch is often finished together and then shipped in stages by agreement.