Pricing help

[enchantiz]

Hi all,
This subject has probably come up before but wondering if someone can give me some help with pricing my items. I'm just starting out making wedding bits and pieces mainly wedding bouquets made from silk flowers and wanted to know how to work out what to price my items at. If I spend about £9 on materials to make one bouquet and it takes me about 1.5 to 2 hours to make it (i'm hoping i'll get quicker) what should I be pricing it at? any help will be grateful thanks
Kelly

[blackwillow]

Hi there - if you do a search for "pricing my items" then lots of threads will come up but here's a general rule of thumb formula:

Materials plus time plus a little for overheads (glue, thread, needles, tools, lighting, heating, website, business cards etc etc) x 2 = wholesale price x 2 for retail price.

What are you going to charge for your time? Minimum wage? Less than minimum wage? £10 per hour?

I'll give you an example of something I made recently:
Materials cost £3 + £10 for my time = 13 x 20% (overheads) = 15.60 x 2 = 31.20 so I'll round that up to £33.

What I then do is spend a bit of time looking at similar items of a similar quality by other makers, see what they sell or offer theirs for and tweak the price if I need to. Maybe I'd even put the price up to £35 - there have been times when I've done this and an item has sold so don't be shy if you think your work and the market can bear the price.

This whole subject is one of the trickiest because people often under-price because they want to make a sale, which then makes those who do try and price more realistically look expensive.

I'm sure others will be along with their thoughts on this soon enough. Good luck!

Deb

[sit & fidget]

I think you should also look at what other people are selling them for. It may be that matching their price would be impossible - so you would need to make yours `special` in some way.

[blackwillow]

I think you should also look at what other people are selling them for. It may be that matching their price would be impossible - so you would need to make yours `special` in some way.

Whilst this is true you have to be wary of under-selling yourself just because someone else is. None of this is easy, making a living from your art/love/craft is hard graft when it comes down to it. You will have honed your skills, looked at the best price for material, spent hours searching for just the right items and many more hours learning the skills you need to create your beautiful items. Give yourself some credit and by all means be "special" but don't under-sell in the process.

[Handmade Lives]

Hi, I am going to copy and paste you a bit from a recent post Cardboard Box Economics which is written to simplfy the money stuff for craftspeople just starting up

There are all kinds of pricing formulae and none of them work

Pricing handmade in the UK is an art not a science

This is why :
An acceptable price depends on who you are selling to
Different products have different price ceilings
There is a soft margin around prices which means you can put them up or down and make no difference to the sale so it always makes sense to push to the upper limit and formulae don’t do that.
Your circumstances determine what you need to charge
Labour cost is always a nonsense as you don’t just make you have to spend about 70% of your time trying to sell. That has to be paid for too
None of this stuff can sit in a formula you have to price , step back and think all the way round.

Your prices are more likely to be too low than too high.

Underpricing builds in failure.

Hope that helps a bit, also Google" handmade silk flowers" and just" silk flowers "and see what prices are out there ignore the top and bottom and thats part of your thinking too.

[enchantiz]

Thanks for all the advice, i've been having a good look around it's amazing how different all the prices are, some are so cheap I don't know how they are doing it and making any money. Think i'll get there in the end, thanks again
Kelly

[Mythillogical]

i've been having a good look around it's amazing how different all the prices are, some are so cheap I don't know how they are doing it and making any money.

They're probably not making any money! I would second the urging not to under price. It's too too easy to undervalue your own worth (I'm guilty of it myself!) but with wedding bouquets, I think so long as you create a truly beautiful product people will pay what it's worth and then some.

All the best!