Pricing Your Crafts

Pricing your crafts doesn't have to be a complex issue.

Learning a few basic techniques and strategies for pricing crafts will help ensure your home craft business is profitable with room to grow.

From the customer's perception of the value of your work, to the price of similar pieces by other artists working in the same medium, to your own self confidence about the value and quality of your work, there are plenty of factors that can impact the decisions you make when pricing your crafts. Under-pricing crafts is probably one of the most common mistakes that people make when they are initially establishing a home craft business.

Doing a little research on craft pricing strategies and issues will help to ensure that you are pricing your art or crafts in a way that allows you to make a fair profit and have room to grow your home craft business for the future. In addition to reading the craft pricing tips on this site, I would also recommend downloading a copy of the free e-book Make Your Price Sell.

***The link above will open a PDF file (Adobe Acrobat) containing the free e-book Make Your Price Sell! in a new window. Once you click on the link, if you'd like to save the file to your computer to read at your leisure, simply click on the save icon in the top left, choose the folder where you'd like to save the file and click on save.

Craft Pricing Formula
Some people will debate the value of using a craft pricing formula when pricing crafts. They say that a formula for setting craft prices oversimplifies the complexities of craft pricing issues. I believe that simplifying the complexities of pricing can be exactly what is needed, particularly in the early days of your home craft business. A craft pricing formula can help you to eliminate a lot of emotion and insecurity related to setting your craft prices and help to ensure you are accounting for all of the costs of making and selling your craft.

Consider the Real Cost of Selling Crafts
Take the time to assess the real cost of selling crafts, as well as the future direction of your home craft business. Particularly when your home craft business is new, you may tend to underestimate all of the costs involved in selling crafts. For example, you may look at a purse that you made using $5.00 worth of material and feel uncomfortable selling it for $40.00 or more. However, once you think through all of the costs that went into making that purse, you'll see that in order to profit from your home craft business, you'll need to consider a lot more than the cost of materials in order to build a profitable business. It will be important to take a really honest look at all of your costs when you're making decisions about craft pricing.

Price Your Crafts to Match Your Business Strategies
It's important to have a clear vision of your business strategies and goals when you're pricing your crafts. Is your goal to reach a very broad market, or a small, specialized market? How do your price points compare with your competition? What is your target market, and what price range will that market accept? Once you've considered your costs and needs for business growth and basic profit, the ideal price range for your products lies somewhere in the answers to these questions.

Craft Pricing and Emotions
Creating any kind of art can be extremely personal. A lot of yourself goes into the work, and most professional crafters or artists feel a real connection to their work. How do you attach an objective, strategy based price to your crafts when the work is so personal?

For many artists and professional crafters, the answer to that question is not always easy. In fact, emotional issues, particularly lack of confidence, can be one of the biggest factors leading to under-pricing crafts. It's important to have a good understanding of how your own sense of worth and skill as an artist impacts the way you price your crafts and the image you project to your customers as a result of those prices.

Starting with a basic pricing formula and developing an understanding of the costs involved in making and selling crafts gives you a foundation for pricing your crafts effectively. Beyond that, understanding the ways in which business strategies and goals, self confidence, image and your craft prices all act to impact the growth of your business will help you to develop effective, strategic pricing strategies to grow your business.

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