Selling your handmade items? Here’s how to figure a fair price.
If you sew, sooner or later someone is going to suggest you sell your handmade items. It’s a compliment for someone to say that things you make are nice enough for someone to spend money to have them. But what is a fair price for your handmade items? You’ve got to factor in your materials, your time, and other less obvious expenses. Deby from So Sew Easy has some advice in her post on pricing your handmade items. She is talking about items you’ve sewn, but her reasoning holds for any handmade item. She also includes a handy calculator to help you set a price when selling your work.
Click below to go to her post:
Selling What You Sew – How To Price Your Work, by So Sew Easy
[photo from So Sew Easy]
Why is it critical to get the pricing right? You will not earn a profit if your handcrafted product is not priced correctly. Without a solid profit margin, it will be difficult to keep your firm going and surely impossible to earn a living from it.
Many professional craftsmen base their labor expenditures on a figure of $12 to $20 per hour. Many people propose multiplying the base price by 2.5 or 3 to determine the retail price. Do you want to offer your handcrafted craft product on a wholesale basis? Then, for pricing, use this formula. 2 x Supplies = Wholesale Price
Wholesale Price x 2 Equals Retail Price (or, in other words, Supplies x 4).
But wait you are not done yet! Remember to provide your hourly pay rate – how much do you wish to be paid each hour?
Simply multiply the number of hours it took you to create the product by your hourly rate to determine how much you should charge for labor charges (on top of the supplies cost).
One last thing to calculate is your overhead costs, this is not supplies but other little things like Electricity, fuel to the market, tools you have bought to product the crafts, etc, If you don’t account for everything you will run at a loss.
Etsy is our preferred online seller for handmade items and crafts, Etsy is a familiar shopfront that makes buyers comfortable and confident in making purchases. Looking for other options to sell your crafts than Etsy? Check out this article – Alternative places to sell your crafts online .
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