Reading a lacquer quote: the four things that actually set the price
Send the same drawing to five workshops and the quotes will not be close. The spread is not usually dishonesty — it is four different answers to four questions nobody put in writing.
A lacquer quotation is almost never a single number with a single meaning. It is the sum of four decisions, and most quotes do not tell you which ones were made. That is why a buyer compares two numbers, picks the lower one, and then discovers at inspection that the "lacquer" is sprayed resin on MDF.
These are the four variables, in the order they move the price.
1. What is underneath
Before anything is coated, there is a body. It can be solid wood, plywood, MDF, or a cloth-and-paper core built up over a mould. Wood has to be seasoned and jointed so it will not move; MDF is stable and cheap and dead; a cloth core is how very light, thin-walled boxes are made.
A quote that does not name the substrate is not a quote you can compare. Two boxes can look identical in a photograph and differ by a factor of three on this variable alone.
2. What is on top
Real lacquer is the filtered sap of the lacquer tree, applied thin and cured in a warm, humid room. It is slow, it is an allergen for the people applying it, and it takes weeks.
Resin — polyurethane or a similar two-part coating — is sprayed on in one pass and is dry in hours. It can be made to look convincing in a photograph. This is the single largest source of the price spread, and the one buyers most often get wrong.
3. How many coats
Coat count is the labour multiplier, and it is invisible unless you ask. A workable piece might carry twenty to forty coats. A carved piece needs many more, because the carving cuts down through the built-up layers — the depth of the carving is literally the number of coats you paid for.
Ask for the coat count. A workshop that has been building lacquer for twenty years will answer immediately. A trading company relaying a factory's number will go quiet.
4. How the decoration was made
Three different processes, three different price points, one shared vocabulary:
Carved — the pattern is cut by hand through the cured layers. Months of work, and it cannot be faked because the cut edges show the layer structure.
Moulded or pressed — the pattern is formed in a die, then coated. Fast, consistent, and what most "carved look" product actually is.
Painted or printed — the cheapest, and often on a resin body. Sometimes described as inlaid or hand-painted.
What a quote should state
If you take one thing from this page: a comparable lacquer quotation names all four of these in writing. Not a brochure, not a WhatsApp voice note — the quote.
The four lines to insist on. Body material and joinery · coating type (tree lacquer or resin) · number of coats · decoration method (carved, moulded or printed). A quote missing any of the four is not a price, it is a starting position.
Three questions that sort a workshop from a reseller
"How long does one coat take to cure, and where do you cure it?" A workshop with a curing room answers with a room and a humidity figure. A reseller answers with a delivery date.
"Can I see the cut edge on a sample?" Carved lacquer shows layers at the cut. Moulded does not. This question is hard to answer convincingly if the answer is no.
"What happens to the price if I halve the coat count?" A workshop will give you a real number, because it is a real labour input. A reseller cannot, because they never knew.
Why the spread is not automatically a scam
It is worth saying plainly: the expensive quote is not always the honest one, and the cheap quote is not always the fake. A workshop quoting high may be pricing a slow, small-batch process you did not ask for. A workshop quoting low may be quoting resin because that is what your reference photograph actually showed — and you never said the word "lacquer".
The point of naming the four variables is not to find the cheapest or the most expensive. It is to make sure all five workshops are quoting the same object.
How we use this
Every lacquer brief we send out goes with these four lines specified, and every quotation we bring back is normalised to them before it reaches a client. If a workshop will not state the coat count, we do not shortlist it — not because we assume it is dishonest, but because a price without it cannot be compared to anything.
If you are currently holding two lacquer quotes and cannot work out why they differ, send them over. We will tell you which of the four variables is doing the work.
Holding two quotes that do not match?
Send both. We will tell you which of the four variables is driving the difference — and whether either quote is for the object you think you are buying.
Send a sourcing request