If a saucer is glued to the pot, the planter cannot be repotted without breaking the base, which is why one of our buyers rejected an entire shipment over it. He was selling into garden centres; the pots were flawless and the product was still wrong. Custom planter work is decided by details like that, and this is the specification buyers should write before tooling anything.
What Custom Planter Actually Means
There are three routes and they cost very differently. A stock pot with a custom glaze colour or a printed logo runs from 500 pieces with no tooling. A modified stock pot — added drainage holes, a matching saucer, a different rim profile — usually needs a new working mould at $150-400 because the profile changes. A completely new shape means a master and working moulds at $300-900, and the MOQ rises to 1,000-3,000 pieces. Buyers who ask for “custom planters” expecting the first route and get quoted the third have usually described a shape that already exists in the factory catalogue.The Sizes That Sell
Garden centre and retail ranges cluster around 10, 12, 14, 16, 18 and 22 cm top diameter, with 28 cm and above sitting in the statement and hospitality segment. Weight scales steeply: a 10 cm pot comes in around 350-500 g, a 16 cm around 900 g-1.3 kg, and a 28 cm around 2.2-3.2 kg because the wall has to thicken to survive firing at that size. One distinction worth writing into the spec: a planter has drainage and a saucer, a cachepot has neither and hides a plastic nursery pot inside. They are sold in different aisles and should not share a mould.Drainage and Saucer Engineering
The drainage hole runs 8-12 mm; below 8 mm it clogs with soil and above 12 mm the pot drains so fast that indoor plants dry out. Most European ranges specify a single centred hole for pots under 14 cm and three to five holes above that. Saucer depth matters as much as diameter: 5-10 mm of clearance below the pot base is enough, and a saucer more than 15 mm deep looks like part of the design rather than an accessory. Gluing the saucer to the pot is the single most common mistake we are asked to undo, because it triples the breakage rate in transit and removes the repotting function entirely.Outdoor Glazes: Frost, UV and Why Indoor Specs Fail Outside
Indoor pots are commonly fired to 1,100-1,200C with a water absorption of 3-6%, which is fine on a windowsill. Outdoors, that same body absorbs water, freezes, and spalls within one winter in any market with hard frost. Outdoor planters need full vitrification at 1,200-1,260C with water absorption under 1%, and we run a freeze-thaw test at -15C for 25 cycles before approving a body for that use. UV stability is the second issue: some reactive glazes shift to a washed-out tone after a season of direct sun, which is invisible in a warehouse and obvious in a customer’s garden. Ask for both test results before you commit to an outdoor range.Packing Planters Without Paying for Breakage
Planters are heavy and top-heavy, which is a bad combination in a carton. A 20 cm pot shipped four to a master carton of roughly 300 x 300 x 320 mm, or 0.029 CBM, needs moulded pulp or corrugated dividers; with a single-wall carton and paper interleaving the breakage rate on LCL routes runs 6-10%. With proper dividers the same route runs under 1%. A 20GP holds around 28 CBM usable, so that carton yields roughly 960 cartons, or 3,840 pots. At 28 cm the carton grows to about 0.06 CBM and the same container carries under 1,900 pieces, which is why large planters are usually sold as a separate freight decision rather than a line extension.Costs and MOQ in 2026
FOB pricing for a plain-glazed planter sits around $0.90-1.80 for 10-12 cm, $2.20-3.80 for 16-18 cm, and $5.50-9.00 for 28 cm and above. Reactive or hand-applied finishes add $0.40-1.20 depending on size. A new shape needs $300-900 in tooling plus a sample cycle of 10-15 days, and MOQ is normally 500 pieces for a stock shape with custom decoration versus 1,000-3,000 for a new one. If your range is four sizes in three glazes, price it as twelve SKUs, because that is how the MOQ is applied.Where Custom Planter Orders Go Wrong
Four failures cover most of it. Selling an indoor-absorption body as frost-proof, which produces a spalling claim in the first hard winter. Sizing the saucer to the pot’s outer diameter instead of allowing 3-5 mm of clearance, so the two pieces fuse together in the kiln. Specifying the logo on the inside wall of the pot, where it is invisible except to the plant. And ordering 500 pieces of a 28 cm floor planter before testing freight, because the carton cost per unit on that size can exceed the difference in FOB price between two suppliers.Three Sizes, One Glaze Family
A planter range works best as three sizes — 12, 16 and 22 cm — in a single glaze family, with drainage and a loose saucer, and an outdoor body only if you can show the freeze-thaw result. Everything else is a variant you can add once the first container sells. Send us your pot spec and we will tell you which sizes we hold moulds for and what a new profile would cost.