The Cheapest Route to a Denim Wash

How to read this sheet

A word on the two warnings about your own recipe. They are held to half a per cent of the look and of the tensile budget, because a recipe re-entered from a rounded card will always miss by a hundredth and a warning that fires on a hundredth is noise rather than a finding. The two columns to read are cost per point and tensile per point. Every process in a laundry sits somewhere on that pair and almost nobody has ever written them down together: the cheap ways to take indigo off a garment are the harsh ones, and the gentle ways are dear. The answer is always a blend of one cheap harsh process and one expensive gentle one, in whatever proportion spends the tensile budget exactly, and that is why a recipe built by adding another ten minutes of stone every time the shade came up short is so far from the cheapest route to the same place. What the comparison is against. The cheapest route is costed to the wash-down your recipe actually reaches, not to the look it was written for, because a recipe that overshoots must not be credited with a saving it never offered. The look as specified is priced separately, and if your recipe is reaching further than the card asks then the overshoot is itself part of what it costs. On the restricted list. A forbidden process is not used at any price, and what the refusal costs is reported on its own rather than folded into the answer. That figure is worth having in the open: it is a real cost, it is generally worth paying, and a brand and a laundry that both know the number can have a different conversation from the one they have when neither does. Do not read it as an argument for using the process. What a point of tensile is worth. The tensile budget is what binds on almost every real look, and the sheet reports what one more point would save. That is the number to hand a spinning mill or a weaver when they ask why a stronger warp is worth paying for - it is worth precisely that, a garment, and no more. What is not modelled. Processes are treated as additive and independent, which is a working approximation and not the truth: enzyme after bleach does not do what enzyme before bleach does, and stone and enzyme together are not the sum of the two. Where a plant knows its interactions, the honest use of this sheet is to price the routes it already knows how to run rather than to trust a blend it has never made. Nothing here models the look beyond a single number - contrast, cast, the appearance of the wear pattern and the hand are all why a laundry exists and none of them is a percentage. And a process may be restricted for a reason that has nothing to do with what it does to the garment, which is a matter for the brand and not for arithmetic.