5 Factors that Effect Fashion Designer Salary

Bilal Qayyum
3 min readMay 18, 2022

Introduction

The fashion industry is one of the biggest industries in monetary terms. With a projected market volume of US312bn$, most of its revenue comes from China. Fashion designer forms the basis of this industry and uses their creative flair to come up with new ideas and designs.

Major Factors Of Salary

The means, salary of a fashion designer worldwide is around $74,410 per year. These numbers all sound good, but if we look past them, we will find out that various factors dramatically affect designer pay. 5 of the most important factors are listed below:

  1. Location

The Pay scale of any job differs according to the region. In developing countries like Pakistan, the maximum salary of a designer is 2m which turns out to be only $11,000. . Even in the US, there is a considerable difference in pay scale, like the state of Ohio, which pays 3,526$ monthly as opposed to the state of Pennsylvania which pays 6,607$ per month.

2. Industry

The fashion industry encompasses much more just clothes, like the arts and graphic industries. Although both come under the banner of this industry, they have highly varied pay scales. The average base salary of a designer working in the art world is $53,270, while a graphic designer earns around $92,850 per year.

3. Qualification

If someone wants to work as a designer in today’s highly competitive market, educational qualifications are important. That is why most firms have made it mandatory for the applicant to have at least a bachelor’s degree in the related field. The more qualified you are, the higher your salary will be.

4. Experience

This is a universal phenomenon that the more experience you have, the more like you are to get hired for a higher-paying job. Experience brings efficiency and ideas, and new firms crave that. In contrast to the numbers mentioned above, an entry-level fashion designer might only make $30,000 per annum.

5. Supplementary Skills

People like to work as freelancers and get paid on a task-to-task basis, especially after the pandemic. So if a designer has various skills that means they can handle a diverse variety of tasks which increases their pay scale. For example, a designer who knows how to work on CAD will get paid more than someone who does not possess the same skills.

Conclusion

Fashion designers play an important in this world; they tend to be artistic, intuitive, and expressive people. They work in different parts of the industry and have distinct roles, which may affect a fashion designer’s salary. But at the end of the day, fashion designing is all about innovation and creativity. Tycoons of the industry like Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein did not become billionaires overnight or by copying other people; it was years of struggles, failures, and most importantly, an innovation that allowed them to etch their name in history.

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