Pricing guides
The questions that come up once the calculator has given you a number. Wholesale, retail, fees, and what to do when the answer is not what you hoped.
For candle makers
For soap makers
- How to price soap for craft fairsYou've got a table booked, a crate of soap, and about four hours to make back the stall fee before you can start actually earning. Here's how to set prices that survive the day, and how to work out afterwards whether it was worth giving up your Saturday.
- How to price soap for wholesaleSoap wholesale has a problem candles do not: the bars a shop wants in November have to be poured in September, and they will weigh less by the time they get there. This is how to price for that, and how to keep a cheap bar profitable once the flat costs pile on.
For resin makers
For bakers
- How to price decorated sugar cookiesSomebody has asked what you charge for a dozen decorated cookies, and every number you can think of feels too high to say out loud. Here is the arithmetic that gets you to a real figure, and why the ingredients were never the point.
- What to charge friends and familySomebody you love has asked for a cake. You want to say yes, you do not want to hand over a hundred and sixty dollars of your own money to do it, and now you're rewriting a text message for the fourth time. This one is about getting out of that loop.
For every maker
- What to pay yourself per hourEvery pricing calculator asks for your hourly rate, and it is the one box people leave at whatever it came with. It is also the number with the most leverage over what you earn, so it is worth ten minutes of proper thought, not a guess you never revisit.
- Markup and margin are not the same thingTwo words that sound interchangeable, describe the same money, and produce different prices. Mixing them up is the most common arithmetic mistake in handmade pricing, and it always errs in the same direction: you charge less than you meant to.
- Etsy fees, added up properlyEtsy's fees are not one number, which is exactly why they are so easy to underestimate. There are three you always pay, one you might not have agreed to, and a quiet detail about shipping that catches nearly everyone. This adds them all up on a real order so you can see what actually lands in your account.
- What to charge for shippingPostage is the part of shipping everyone counts and the smallest part of what it costs. Boxes, filler, tape and twelve minutes at the kitchen table are all real money, and a flat rate picked to look competitive can quietly turn a good order into a bad one.
If there is a pricing question you keep running into that none of these answer, tell us at hello@honest-penny.com. The guides above all started as questions like that.