It can be hard to know how much to sell an item you painstakingly made by hand. You don’t want to sell yourself short, but you also want to get your value’s worth.
This calculator uses several different calculations to give you a range of values to help you decide what the right price is for you.
The Basics
The base of all pricing calculations is as follows
(Material Cost + Measured Value * Value Price) * Profit Margin
Measured Value is either hours worked or yards used.
Value Price is the multiplier dollars per your chosen value (hours or yards)
Profit Margin is a multiplier used to help offset overhead expenses or take into account experience or artisan value.
Hours vs Yards
There are 2 main ways to calculate sales price: by hours work or by yards used.
Hourly rate is a common way for artisans to determine the price for their art. This is a good way to value your time compared to market rates. It helps your rates reflect complex or intricate patterns.
However, some people don’t prefer this method because as you get better (and faster) at your craft, that means your prices would go down when they should be going up.
One way people account for this is by using rates per yard of yarn used. Yardage rates are a popular choice for pricing as it often corresponds to the size and intricacy of your project. It does not penalize you for being a faster fiber artist, but still accounts for the size of the project and intricacy.
One thing to keep in mind here is that Crochet is faster than Knitting but takes less yarn. That means a crochet project will have a lower hourly cost but a higher yardage cost compared to a similar object that was knitted.
Profit Margin
There is a lot of work that and money goes into a crocheted or knitted object beyond actually crocheting/knitting the piece.
- Choosing & sourcing your materials
- Writing the pattern
- Gauge swatches
- Weaving in ends
- Washing
- Blocking
- Taking photos
- Posting it on your website or social media
- Website fees
- Tending a market table
- Market Fee
- Cost of Crochet Hooks/Knitting Needles
- Cost of Notions
While you may be able to account for some of these things hourly or in your material cost, some of them you may not want to or may be too cumbersome to figure out how to calculate. Imagine:
5 hours at a market divided by 20 pieces made for the market is 15 minutes per piece, so add that to the time I spent making the items. Wait does that include set up and tear down? What about driving to and from? Should I include gas cost in that too?
That’s a lot of decisions to make and a lot of details that would be hard to keep track of and allocate properly across pieces. Instead, we lump it all into a “profit margin” to cover all that other stuff.
Not only does a profit margin cover overhead, but it also takes into account your experience. If you have been a fiber artist for 20 years and have worked to hone your craft, you would understandably want to charge more than someone why just picked up a hook for the first time this year.
Typically a profit margin multiplier is between 1 and 2 where 1 means no profit margin is being added and 2 means you are doubling the cost of raw calculation.
Determining a Final Price
The calculator gives you several values to consider:
- Hourly rates at minimum wage, $20, $25, and $30 per hour
- Yardage cost at $0.10, $0.20, and $0.30 per yard used
- Minimum recommended amount to charge which does not include any profit margin
- Maximum recommended amount to charge which includes the maximum profit margin
- The Median between the minimum and maximum
- The average between the calculated hourly and yardage rates
Overall the recommended price is somewhere between the average and the median price, but ultimately it’s up to you what you charge for your items.
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