Tools of the Trade: Price Your Crafts Right

Who says you can’t make money out of your hobby? It doesn’t really matter if it’s knitting, beading, candle and soapmaking, or even scrapbooking, there’s money in them. However, one of the greatest challenges when you pursue this so-called business route is how to actually price your items. Do you charge by the hour or per piece? What do I need to include as cost? First of all, you need to make up your mind. You need to choose the most convenient way to price. You can start with being paid by the hour.

Nevertheless, if you want to ensure that you are not paying the times when your employees could be slacking off, then you settle for per piece. If you go for an hourly rate, you need to set your base fee and you multiply it by the total number of hours that they have worked during the week. When you are judging as to how much to give them, always think of proportion: difficult jobs means higher pay. When you are going to calculate for your total cost, you have to obtain all of the materials that you have used to produce a single product. Add all of them, including your labor expenses, to get the total cost.  Markup prices usually fall between 10 to 20 percent. You can also choose to do that to make your product competitive enough. Otherwise, your products won’t sell that much no matter how good they are.