I well remember my sticker shock when, eight years ago, I walked into a Utilikilts booth after seeing Mike McMullen of Tempest, wearing one on stage. At the time I thought..."I don't know about those plaid things, but I could wear a black kilt like Mike's". Then I saw the price. It was my reaction to that price that sent me hunting online to less expensive alternatives, and that, actually is when I joined X Marks.

$175 is not an unreasonable price for the work that goes into making a "production" contemporary kilt, made in the USA. But as we've all noted a million times, until the price gets down to something vaguely comparable to a pair of casual pants, a whole, whole lot of guys will never buy one. To do that, the economies of scale come into play. The company has to buy hundreds to thousands of bolts of material from China and have it sewn up by the tens of thousands in a third world country, for the end product to land on a shelf in the USA at $50.

Marketing studies and clothing trends have to prove to a potential company that they can make money on this. Who are the possible companies? Dickies...Carhart... Columbia...Patagonia... North Face....companies like that. It's been 7-8 years and nobody has made the move. At this point, I don't think that any company WILL make the move.

Chicken and egg, eh?

I looked into buying a couple of bolts of cloth from China and having kilts made in El Salvador a few years ago. Upshot was, with the scale of *hundreds* of units that I might have done, not *tens of thousands* I couldn't significantly beat UK's prices. I was pretty thorough in my research, too. I'm not Patagonia,and neither is Utilikilt. So.... Here's my guess.

We will never see the $50 contemporary kilt..... At least not in the next 10 years.

I used to think that McElmurrys idea, that DIY was such a tiny drop it the bucket that it had no effect. I'm slowly changing my mind. The other day I did a google search on "X-Kilt" (I've done this before) and I'm astounded at how many sites have links to the manual. I'm starting to think that the number of X Kilts made by people NOT on X Marks significantly outnumbers the ones from X Marks. The last time I added it up, about 3+ years ago, over 200 X Kilts had been made by X Markers. That number is probably up to 350 or more, now. I'm guessing that triple that number have been made by people who never visited X Marks for any reason but to find the link. That's 1,000+ kilts.

Whoah. Believe me, when I wrote the manual I had NO idea this was going to happen. Also, that's just X Kilts. How about the umpty-ump other, non-X-kilt DIY kilts that have been made?

But here's the thing....even with the X kilt, that's more or less, vaguely 1,000+ kilts that Utilikilt didn't sell in the past 5 years. That's no joke. So in fact I think that maybe McElmurry might be right, that the DIY market for kilts has impacted the overall market, because the overall market is so small. You can be flippin' sure that the overwhelming majority of the people who made kilts would never in a million years attempt to make a pair of pants.