Last week I opened a jute price quote and immediately forwarded it to my team with one line:
“Have we seen this before?”
We hadn’t.
Jute fabric is up over 30% from what we were paying twelve months ago. Raw jute climbed from around $607 per metric ton at the start of 2025 to over $820 by Q3 — tight supply, rising minimum support prices, export constraints from Bangladesh. The market is bullish, which is another way of saying: expensive, and not showing signs of reversing soon.
Cotton tells a different story but lands in the same place.
Futures markets will tell you cotton is cheap — hovering near 64 cents a pound. That’s not the price I’m buying fabric at. At the mill level, in Tiruppur and Mumbai, cotton yarn is up 15 to 20% from last year. Mills are passing on their own input costs. The gap between what a futures chart shows and what’s happening on the ground is real, and it’s why a supplier’s quote can go up even when the headline cotton price hasn’t moved.
Then there’s freight. An estimated 30% of Asia-Europe air cargo normally routes through the Middle East. The Iran conflict has made that effectively unavailable. Kerosene prices more than doubled after the escalation. Air cargo between Asia and Europe is up close to 30% year on year. Sea freight is more predictable, but the Red Sea rerouting hasn’t gone away — most Asia-Europe shipments are still running 10 to 14 days longer than they were two years ago.
All of this is going to show up in quotes. From us and from everyone else sourcing from this part of the world.
Here’s the part that bothers me, though.
When costs rise across the supply chain, the companies running on razor-thin margins — the ones competing purely on who can go lowest — are the most exposed. And they respond the same way every time: the fabric gets thinner, the stitching gets lighter, the handle gets narrower. You don’t always notice until the order arrives. Sometimes you don’t notice until the bag starts falling apart in someone’s hands three weeks after the event.
I wrote a few months ago about asking the question: will someone take it home?
It’s still the right question. And it becomes even more important when costs are climbing.
Because if you’re responding to higher input costs by pushing a supplier to cut their margin to zero, you’re not saving money. You’re just shifting where the compromise happens — from your budget to the quality of what gets made. The bag gets cheaper. And then it gets thrown away. And then you’ve spent more than you saved.
The companies I’ve seen navigate this kind of market well aren’t the ones who went hunting for the lowest quote. They’re the ones who had a supplier they trusted enough to pick up the phone and say: here’s what’s happening, here’s what it means for your order, here’s what we can do about it.
That kind of relationship doesn’t happen overnight. But it also doesn’t cost anything to start.
Warmly,
Deven
Founder, Bag Studio
