I had a great conversation with Kate from dash robin yesterday about pricing hand-made/unique items. Both of us had just finished doing our tax returns, and were both pretty upset to work out how much profit (or lack of) we had made over the year, especially after taking into account how many gazillion hours of hard work we’d put in over the year.
We’d both love to make a living from our creative practice, but the number crunching brought home the truth … we’d really need to make some changes for that to actually happen.
We discussed how, like so many other people creating hand-made items out of a labour of love; we’ve been pricing our works according to what we think people like us could afford – and not taking into account any of the business savvy tips, like – err – having a profit margin at all or covering our own costs. I think that’s primarily because so many costs are hidden, as are our own personal goals … purely because we love what we do and we like to make our work accessible.
That’s fine if we were doing it just as a hobby, but like so many creative people, we actually rely on it and make it our JOB.
We realised that, for example, even if we wanted to make, say $20 000 a year from our hand-made ventures, how many $20 items would we really need to make and sell in that year? About 1000?! Surely there’s a better way?
So many things had come into pricing our items -- not just the costs of our materials -- but also the time we spend on making each unique item, packaging them, electricity, stationery costs, fees .. yada yada, the list goes on.
One of the seemingly small ‘hidden’ costs I hadn’t really taken into account was the fees I was paying just to sell my artworks. 20 cents + 3.5% to list an item on etsy might not seem like much, but if you take into account the additional Paypal fee that comes along with each sale, plus any item you relist more than once + your other overheads (or alternatively the high stall fees to sell work at markets), it’s so easy to think you’re making a profit when you’re actually not.
Minus these costs from your one thousand $20 items per year and you get the idea.
If you’re selling your work on etsy, I’ve just stumbled across a simple calculator for working out your fees for etsy and paypal combined. You can check it out here
There’s also a few great articles here about working out how to price your hand-made/unique items here
I don’t pretend to know what the answer is to all this, but surely it has something to do with valuing ourselves and our unique products individually. Or maybe being more realistic or creative with our products. I know that with a baby on the way, there’s no way I’ll have time to make a thousand unique items a year, so I’m rethinking how I’ll approach my work again after I come back from maternity leave next year.
All a bit of food for thought, I guess
C x
