Hello there! I have some exciting news to relay to all you lovely Lazy Owl followers. We’re currently working on opening a new business and launching a new brand, Paper + Spark!
Paper + Spark is the fruition of a dream I’ve always had – to create a line of paper goods specially crafted for other entrepreneurs, busy moms, and all-around creative hustlers like myself.
P+S will offer fresh, fun, and functional everyday essentials for your desktop, workspace, and home. Our goods are colorful, motivating, and inspiring…but most of all functional! We know you don’t have time or space for extra clutter in your life.
If you already follow Lazy Owl, I’d encourage you to check out some of the P+S goods that are designed just for small biz owners, like these goodies:
Give our shop a look and I’m sure you’ll love our colorful bold patterns and motivating goodies.
To sweeten the pot, we’re offering all Lazy Owl readers a 10% off discount from now until the end of 2014. Use coupon code LAZYOWL10 to receive 10% off your entire purchase.
We’re also currently offering a giveaway to win your own binder designed by you!
Also, I’d love to hear if there are any paper or office goods you’ve been dying to see as a creative biz owner. What sort of office goods would make your life easier as an entrepreneur? Let’s work together to get your idea made!
You can follow Paper+Spark on facebook, instagram, or twitter, and sign up for email updates & discounts here. And don’t worry, we’ll soon be publishing more great content, articles, and resources here on Lazy Owl too!
If you’re new to all this, how do you figure out how much you will sell in a year?
This question relates to how to calculate your overhead rate, part of your pricing formula equation, which requires an estimated number of items sold in one year. If you’re a new business, I’d come up with a very conservative (on the low side) estimate and go from there. After a month or two of business you can always adjust up or down.
Another option that I think is more appropriate for a new business (since sales usually take a while to get going) would be to base your overhead rate on an estimated number of products MADE in one year, rather than sold, since you have more control over that number and it’s easier to estimate. This concept still works because over time, all the products you make will eventually (ideally) sell and that cost will be recouped.
Your overhead rate calculation will always be a work in progress and should be continuously monitored. Remember, the goal is simply to make sure your pricing formula calculates a price that allows you to recover all the expenses your business faces.
“My crocheted items take some time to make and it kills my profit margin, so I’m not sure if there’s a realistic solution for my business other than to try a different craft or only make quick and easy items. For example, I have some small stuffed bears in my shop. They take about 45 minutes each to make and the yarn is $1. Let’s say I’m paying myself $10 an hour. ([$1+$7.50 labor]x2)+$4 overhead=$21 wholesale, $42 retail. No one would pay that much for a little stuffed bear, so it definitely gets discouraging trying to price for profit. It seems easy to use this pricing model on jewelry items and other quicker crafts but difficult on the more time consuming. Do you have any suggestions?”
This is a great question because I’m sure it’s a scenario that a lot of artists face. Certainly don’t give up on a craft or product you feel passionate about and enjoy making just because you aren’t sure how to price it. That being said, you should always strive to price for a profit if your goal is to have a successful business. You want your craft to be both profitable and enjoyable. I have several thoughts and ideas about tackling this.
Here are some questions you can ask yourself about labor-intensive products that seem to be highly priced for your comfort.
Can I make it more efficiently? First, let’s examine our labor element. $10 an hour seems reasonable; I wouldn’t suggest paying yourself any less for your skilled crocheting. Is there anyway we can improve on 45 minutes per bear? Could we create the product in an “assembly line” way to make several at once in stages? Or will we possibly become more efficient over time, and maybe as we become more experienced we’re able to crochet one bear in 30 minutes? Basically, are there any systems we can implement to reduce our labor time for this product?
Do I need to re-evaluate my overhead rate? In my original post I discussed defining different categories of overhead. You surely have general business expenses (advertising, website fees, etc.). But do you have any expenses lumped into your overhead rate calculation that maybe apply to one group of products but not all of them? Make that a separate “category” of overhead, with its own rate, and only include it in the pricing formulas for those products. More refined overhead rates can help you more accurately price your products by more accurately knowing how much they truly cost you. Another idea is to compare calculating your overhead rate based on your estimated annual products sold verses your estimated annual products made (as discussed above) and use the rate that makes more sense to you.
Should I change my profit multiplier? The profit multiplier I recommend in my previous post is x4 for retail and x2 for wholesale. If you feel like this number is consistently over-pricing your items, you could try 3.8 or 3.5, whatever feels comfortable to you. Just make sure you are still leaving plenty of cushion for profit and covering your costs. You might try using different multipliers for different product lines, which leads me to #4…
Could I shift my costs to other products? If your crocheted bears are your best seller, or your “hook” product bringing viewers into your shop and peaking interest, maybe you should price them a little lower and shift some of that missing cost to another product set that can handle a price increase and still sell. Maybe you’d price your bears at $32 and give a price bump to your crocheted baby blankets. This gets tricky, because depending on how many of each product type you sell, you might still lose out, but it’s another way to think about the issue.
Tweak and re-think your formula. Remember that this is the formula I suggested in our first post:
[(Supplies + Labor) x 2] + Overhead Rate = Wholesale Price
Wholesale Price x 2 = Retail Price
If you really think about this, for your wholesale price, you’re doubling the supplies and labor, and not your overhead, but for the retail price, you are quadrupling your supplies and labor, and doubling your overhead. If it makes more sense to you, and you want more leeway, you could not double your overhead for your retail price.
Have I lost you yet cause I’m losing myself with that statement! What I’m saying is, your formulas would look like this:
[(Supplies + Labor) x 2] + Overhead Rate = Wholesale Price (the same as above) [(Supplies + Labor) x 4] + Overhead Rate = Retail Price
Both of the methods make sense. Both cover your costs, and both give you cushion for profit. One just gives you a bit more than the other, and is quicker and easier to figure out for retail purposes. If I used this new formula, the crocheted bear would then sell for [$1+$7.50 labor]x4)+$4 overhead = $38, rather than $42.
Finally, you know it’s worth mentioning…are you completely sure $42 is not a reasonable price for your item? When I look at crocheted animals on Etsy, I see prices ranging anywhere from $15 to $100. Just because it feels like it’s priced too high to you doesn’t mean your target audience will feel that way. Remember you are offering more than just a crocheted bear. You’re selling your brand, your awesome customer service, the story behind your amazing little bear, and the whole handcrafted experience, which has emotion and value all on it’s own
Remind yourself of this – if your pricing formula determines what price you really need to sell this bear at to make a livable, decent profit, then that is what you need to sell it at. It’s better to sell fewer bears at a good profit and have a sustainable business, than to sell tons of bears at a loss, and eventually have to shutter your business.
Do you sell an item for the same price both on Etsy and at a craft show?
My answer here depends a lot on your products and your tolerance for tedious tasks.
First, I’ll tell you what I personally do for craft shows. As you may know, I sell handcrafted jewelry. I have a lot of items; I generally end up bringing about 250 or so items to a show with me. Online, I have the luxury of using my pricing formula spreadsheet to individually calculate the price for every item I list for sale. I have a lot of different prices there! A craft show requires physically displaying all my jewelry on one or two tables, and thus I’m faced with the decision to either individually label 250 items with their already-calculated Etsy prices, or group them and make price signs for each group. It’s a lot less time consuming to just make signage to the effect of “all crystal earrings – $24” rather than tying tiny taggies with individual prices on 50 pairs of crystal earrings.
my early days of practicing my craft show set up. I gathered all my crystal earrings on one tray and labeled them with a single sign, rather than individually tagging each pair.
This “grouping” method requires a little bit of math work upfront to calculate the different pricing levels I want to use. I usually categorize my jewelry into different groups – studs, crystal earrings, pendant necklaces, painted earrings, adjustable rings, wire-wrapped rings, etc. I’ll have a list of what those items are priced on on Etsy, then I’ll decide on the best price point for each category. If I have a wide price range in one category, I might make 2 or 3 levels. For example, let’s say I sell crystal earrings on Etsy ranging from $15-$30. If I price all of them at a craft show for $25, my customers might shy away from buying the ones that seem to be way overpriced. So I might break out price points of $18, $22, and $28, or something like that. That helps me make more of the profit I need, encourages sales because things seem fairly priced, and makes the labeling situation a bit less time-consuming.
different price levels of earrings are grouped on different displays, with simple signage to label them
It takes some time for me to determine my price points, and then I make the signage and set up my display accordingly. But I find this to be a lot less work than keeping the same prices as on Etsy and having to individually label every piece. Plus, it’s a lot easier when I sell something because I’m likely to know the price off the top of my head.
And don’t forget about sales tax. I like to include sales taxes in the price of my goods already (this is ok to do in Texas as long as you have signage stating that you are doing this). This way customers can pay me a flat amount (I don’t like dealing with coins), and there are no additional surprises for them when they pay. This is another reason I don’t price the same at a show as on Etsy.
Finally (again just speaking about what I personally do), jewelry (and many products probably) sells differently at a show than online. I like to offer deals at shows, like buy 2 rings get a 3rd ring free, or buy 2 pairs of studs and get the third pair half off, to encourage people to buy more. These sort of promos are harder to do on Etsy, but are very successful at a show in person.
So, that’s the methodology I use. Your system really depends on your product and how much work you want to put into it. It also depends a lot on how easy your products are to label and tag. Jewelry is difficult, things like prints or cards that just require a sticker are much easier.
If you had fewer products to sell, especially ones that are easier to tag or label, it might be less work for you to just use your Etsy prices, without having to re-invent the wheel and recalculate all your prices or group your products into pricing levels.
That being said, remember what goes into your pricing formula. Do you have costs going into your Etsy pricing formula that don’t apply anymore for craft show items (for example, packaging costs that only apply if you’re shipping your products)? Might you have costs you should include in your formula that apply only to items you sell at the craft show (like the fee to participate)? Remember to price your items to recover all your costs.
As you can see, my answer is pretty complex and pricing is a complex topic. I hope my thought process makes sense to you.
Do you have anymore questions about pricing your handmade goodies? We’d love to hear them! We also want to thank everyone for participating in our pricing series and hope it was helpful to you.
To refresh, here’s the formula we discussed last time: This pricing formula is just a suggestion and can be tailored to meet your business needs, as long as you are leaving room for profit. Remember, you want those profit multipliers to be cushioning for profit, not covering the expenses you forgot to include.
If your price seems too high…
If the price seems too high there are several pieces of the equation you can examine, and then decide to tweak one, some, or all of the parts.
Look at your current supply costs. Is there a way to find less expensive supplies? Can you buy at a discount in bulk? Can you only shop sales or use discount codes? Is there a less expensive supplier around? Have you compared suppliers online vs. locally? Finding the cheapest source of quality supplies is one of the most challenging parts of being a creative entrepreneur, but once you’ve found one, it’s a gold mine that can help you keep costs under control and your prices at a reasonable level.
You can also try refining your overhead rates. Recall that your overhead rate is a little chunk of all the business expenses that aren’t directly traceable to a specific product. You include this in your price formula so that every time you sell something, you get reimbursed for a tiny chunk of those expenses. Sometimes, depending on the product, using multiple overhead rates can help refine your price. For example, with my products, I have a glue overhead rate and a jump-ring overhead rate. These are for expenses I have that I can’t trace the exact amount used to a specific product. Since I don’t use glue and/or jump rings in every product I make, I only need to use these rates in products that use them. I can leave that overhead amount out of my other products to get a more accurate picture of the expenses used to make that product. Another (perhaps better) example – let’s say I build an advertising campaign around one set of products. I might make an overhead rate for just those ad expenses and only apply them to that product group, rather than spread out that cost over all my products.
Think about your pricing in relation to all of the products you sell. You might have different “levels” of products. The market for rosette studs is very saturated. Maybe I want to have a really low price on those earrings to attract viewers and sales, so I am going to adjust by either giving them a lower overhead rate, or using a profit multiplier of 3 instead of 4. To make up for that, I’m going to shift some of those costs to my higher-priced rhinestone necklaces. This might lead to a situation where I’d sell lots of low-priced earrings with a lower profit margin, but also a few necklaces with a higher profit margin to balance it out.
Consider changing your profit multiplier for your retail pricing formula to a slightly lower number. Remember that your labor charge means you’re already paying yourself for your skilled work and time, and then your profit multiplier is (obviously) for profit. How much profit do you want and what are you doing with it? Are you saving for a vacation, or are you reinvesting your profits back into your business for an expansion? If you feel comfortable having a little less profit cushion, you can always multiply your wholesale price by 1.5 or 1.75 (or whatever) rather than 2.
You might also consider tweaking the retail pricing formula to look like this, to more truly mirror the wholesale formula you used:
This way you are just using the x4 multiplier on your supplies and labor, and not your whole overhead rate as well. Make sense? Clear as mud right. Just another suggestion that you can try out to see if it works better for you.
Are you paying yourself enough for your skilled labor and time?
Make sure you’re including all your estimated expenses (did you think of everything?) and be conservative when estimating your annual product sales when calculating your overhead rate.
Don’t be afraid to use a larger profit multiplier. You are the dictator of your prices. If you believe the market will support a higher price, do it. Don’t price your items lower just because that’s what the equation says. Who DOESN’T want more profit?!
Monitoring Your Pricing Strategy
Don’t hesitate to re-examine and re-tweak your pricing formula from time to time. Periodically re-examine the overhead rate you’re using. As you become a more experienced entrepreneur, you’ll have a better idea of the non-product expenses your business incurs every year. Ideally, you’ll be able to calculate a more refined and accurate rate over time. Your business expenses are going to change over time as well. The overhead rate you calculated 2 years ago probably isn’t still a reliable estimate now.
Always be on the look out for ways to save on supplies. If your supply cost for the same product goes down, you then have the enviable decision of keeping your price the same and bagging more profit, or reducing your price and maybe getting some more sales. Your labor rate might also need tweaking. You might want to pay yourself more per hour as you become more experienced, or you might be able to spend less time making one item now that you’re more experienced.
But What about the Competition?
Your product, brand, and shop are unique to you. A lot of your competition is probably under-pricing themselves; this is a chronic problem in the Etsy marketplace and puts pressure on everyone else. Your under-priced competition might be making lots of sales but still losing money at the end of the day. They might not still be in business next year. Don’t worry so much about competing with everybody else. Even if a higher price means fewer sales, you’d rather fewer sales and more bottom line profit than lots of sales but a negative bank account balance.
You want your business to be sustainable, and that means covering your expenses AND still having some money to put in your bank account at the end of the day. Why are you in business? To be able to quit your day job? To finance your supply purchases? To have extra vacation money? It’s likely that you won’t achieve your goals without making some money from this venture.
Think about pricing for your target market, not for the competition. Pricing is also about value, and value can be defined by the qualitative (your brand, customer service, etc.), not the quantitative. Your ideal customer is someone who values your product at the price you’ve calculated. You don’t need to be the Wal Mart of handmade goods. Don’t feel like you need to have the lowest price in town.
Here’s an honest story from my own experience. I sell rosette studs, which sometimes seems like the most common thing sold on Etsy. I sell mine for about $11-$13, which is what I’ve calculated as a profitable sales price for me. I believe that they are worth this price based on not only the inputs of my pricing formula, but also the quality of the materials, the customer service I provide, and the work put into each piece. But I see other Etsy shops selling them for as low as $3. Three dollars! Does it keep me up at night knowing my potential customer might not buy from me when they could get earrings elsewhere for $3? No. You might think I’m crazy, but my rosette studs are still, by far, my best-selling products. I might not sell as many as my competitor selling them at $3 a pop, but I can sell a lot fewer pairs and make the same amount of profit at the end of the day as a competing shop selling more for less. Make sense?
Pricing Too Low – Working Harder for the Same Amount of Money
Am I beating a dead horse yet? I apologize. Let’s use a lovely hand-lettered calligraphy print as a very, very simplified example.
a pretty handlettered calligraphy print by The Lettering Studio on etsy (please note this lovely item has nothing to do with my totally hypothetical example below)
My high-quality archival paper costs me 75 cents per sheet. It takes me 30 minutes to letter one print and I pay myself $12 an hour. My pretty black ink costs me $10 a jar, and the calligraphy pen costs me $20. I have $600 of other business expenses. I’m estimating that I will sell 250 prints this year, giving me an overhead rate of $2.40 ($630/250).
[(Supplies + Labor) x 2] + Overhead Rate = Wholesale Price
[($.75 + $6) x 2] + $2.40 = $15.19 for my wholesale price, x 2 = $31.80 for my retail price, or $32 flat.
Maybe I feel a bit hesitant to charge $32 for a hand-lettered print. I do an Etsy search and it seems like everybody else is selling their prints for about $20. So, I’m going to try to compete with that and just sell it for my wholesale price of $15, that way I’m even lower than my competition.
What if my goal is to make $1000 in profit this year? Then, this is what I’m going to be dealing with.
Scenario 1– I sell my prints for $15 a pop. After doing a nice little equation ($15x -.75x – $630 = $1000) and solving for x, I’d have to sell about 115 prints this year to make a profit of $1000 (meaning money I get after covering 75 cents of supply expense per item sold, and $630 of overhead expenses).
Scenario 2 – I sell my prints for $32 a pop. To cover same said expenses, I’d have to sell only 53 (that’s less than HALF as many in Scenario 1) prints to make the same $1000 of profit.
[Yes, there are a lot of assumptions and simplifications here (for example, you probably bought your paper in bulk and not by the piece for each sale, so you’d have to cover that bulk purchase regardless of how many items you sold, plus I didn’t include labor in any of this), but the gist of it is still important.]
To sum up that discovery – you can work twice as many hours and make 115 prints that sell for $15 each and make $1000 net income, or you can work for half as many hours and make 53 prints that sell for $32 each, still make $1000 in net income, and have loads more free time to make other products, spend on other business tasks, go the beach, drink tea, whatever. You might be afraid to set your price higher because that might decrease your sales…but you can sell fewer items and still make the same profit as if you had a lower price. You can even sell fewer items and make MORE profit than if you sold more items at a lower price. With the higher price, each piece you sell generates more profit. I’d rather work to make half as many prints, than do twice the work for the same amount of profit, wouldn’t you?
Another Downfall of Under-Pricing…Wholesale
Yet another problem you might face if you’re under-pricing your goods – selling wholesale and remaining profitable will be nearly impossible. At some point in your creative journey, you will hopefully get the opportunity to sell your goods to other retail businesses at wholesale. These other business owners will expect a lower (wholesale) price in exchange for buying in bulk upfront. You might face a similar price ratio if you sell consignment. Wholesale prices are usually around (give or take) 50% of your retail price. If you’re selling at retail on Etsy for less than what you should be, then making a profit at even lower wholesale prices will be a challenge. This is yet another reason why it’s important to start out with well thought out prices to begin with.
Bottom Line – Be Sensible & Find a Formula That Works for YOU.
Obviously, if this formula is giving you a price that you feel uncomfortable about it, then you should adjust it. If you are hesitant to price your item as high as the formula is calculating, make sure you aren’t selling yourself short. Price your product as close to that number as you’re willing to go, and see how customers respond to that price. You might be surprised.
A lot of us under-price and under-value our goods. Don’t let the fear of not making sales due to a higher price and/or trying to compete with other shops keep your prices too low. Remember the reasons why you started your creative business. Chances are, being financially successful was probably on that list. You will feel so much more energized, encouraged, and productive if, at the end of the day, you see that your business is thriving and making money.
Keeping all this in mind, I challenge you today to take a hard look at your pricing strategy. Your prices will determine whether or not your business is able to make a profit, no matter how many sales you’re making. So it’s really important for you to hunker down, examine your expenses, and make sure you’re pricing yourself for profit. Again, please let us know what questions about pricing we can answer for you in our reader Q&A post.
Today we’ll begin to delve into the topic of pricing your products. Pricing your handcrafted products can be one of the most challenging tasks for a creative entrepreneur. You can have an awesome product, a cohesive brand, a great webpage…you can even have amazing sales. But if your product isn’t priced right, you won’t make a profit and it will be hard to keep running your creative biz.
Please note, before you read this post, I suggest you read our articles on tracking expenses and overhead first to better understand the concepts we discuss below.
We could write a whole novel on this topic, so we’ll divide it into a series of posts. Please feel free to comment with any questions! This is a tricky, but important, concept that we owe it to ourselves to get educated about and get it right!
The Unprofitable Pricing Formula
Browsing the interwebs, you’ll frequently see a pricing formula that looks a lot like this:
Supplies x 2 = Wholesale Price Wholesale Price x 2 = Retail Price (or Supplies x 4)
I’m hesitant to even type that one on here because I don’t want you to just see it, use it, and then leave. A pricing formula like this might be simple, but it most likely will not get you a profit. Why? Because it leaves out a whole bunch of other fees and expenses that you’re probably incurring. Sure, the “x2” or “x4” multiplier is probably helping you cover part of that, but it’s better to come up with a more exact measure of all your expenses and include them.
Pricing for Profit – A Better Formula
Here’s what I suggest:
My pricing formula also includes labor and what I’m calling an overhead rate. Yes, my formula is a little more complicated. Let me explain my reasoning by defining each piece of the formula. Then, I’ll give an example of pricing two hypothetical products, a wire-wrapped ring and a pair of stud earrings.
Supplies: As I explained in this post, your supplies expense is the cost of whatever materials went directly into your product. You should always have a record of what you pay for your materials (don’t forget what you paid for shipping too). You should be recording this at the per unit level, unless it is cost-prohibitive (basically, too time-consuming) to do so.
For example, if you bought 100 beads, you should take the price and divide it by 100 to get the price per bead. If you bought a bunch of fabric, you’d calculate the price per foot or yard. This will help you determine how much a product you made with 1 bead or 1 yard of fabric cost you.
Being able to come up with an exact supply cost for a product implies that you are tracking this data somewhere in your bookkeeping system, whether it be some accounting software, a giant shoe box of receipts, an email folder, or a nicely organized spreadsheet. So…I hope you’re doing that!
Labor: Just like with a “real” job, you must pay yourself an hourly rate. Decide what you want your hourly rate to be (please, at least pay yourself more than minimum wage!), and determine how long it took you to make the product. Labor cost should equal Time x Wage, so if you’re paying yourself $10 an hour and it took you half an hour to make it, pay yourself $5 for that product. Keep in mind that you spend lots of time working on your business that isn’t necessarily spent making products, and you don’t get paid for that. When in doubt, I suggest you round up your time to more make sure you’re paying yourself what you’re worth.
Overhead Rate: We’ve previously discussed what overhead is, so check out this article to get the full rundown. Basically, overhead is all the other expenses you have that 1) go into your product, but you can’t get the exact amount per product (the cost of the thread you used in your apron, the ink you used to write the calligraphy, etc.), plus 2) all of the other business expenses you pay that don’t have directly go into a product (advertising costs, a web domain, your crafting tools, etc.).
The best way to include these expenses in your pricing formula is to come up with a rate. You are basically putting a little chunk of these expenses into the price of everything you sell. Please refer to our other article on how to calculate your overhead rate. I suggest calculating your rate based on your estimated products sold in a year.
To refine your formula further, you can even have multiple categories of overhead with their own rates. In my own practice, I don’t have the time or energy to count how many jump rings I have, or how much adhesive went into a specific item, so I just have separate overhead rates for those categories that I use for the applicable products. Then I have a “general business” overhead rate that I use to price all my products.
Don’t forget that your fees should be included in your overhead rate calculation. These are the fees that you pay to Etsy, Paypal, Square, etc. to list and sell your products. Examples include Etsy’s 20 cent listing fee, their percentage of your sale, Paypal’s percentage of your sale, etc. To complicate things further, your total fee might vary based on whether you sell it via Paypal or Etsy’s Direct Checkout. Currently, Paypal fees are 2.9% plus 30 cents. Etsy fees are 3.5% of the sales price (this is their cut no matter which method it sells via), and their Direct Checkout takes a 3% cut and a 25 cents transaction fee. Whew, confusing!
Wait a Minute, What’s That “Multiplier” for?
The “x2” and “x4” is what I shall call your profit multiplier. It’s basically what’s ensuring you a profit at the end of the day. You’re taking your costs, multiplying them by the profit multiplier, and getting your sales price. Your sales price means you are getting paid back enough to first cover all your costs, then actually make some money on top of that.
Supplies – That’s the cost of the wire and the druzy stone. The druzy stone cost me $3. I buy the wire in 30 feet spools. One spool costs me $8. So, I can either measure exactly how much wire I used for this ring, or I can make an estimated cost based on an average for each ring. Let’s say I use an average of 2.5 feet for each ring, so that gets me about 67 cents of wire in 1 ring ($8 per spool / 30 feet = $.267 per foot x 2.5 feet = $.67). Am I confusing you yet? So, my supplies expense for this one ring is $3.67.
Labor – This ring takes me 10 minutes to make, and I want to earn $12 an hour. So 1/6th of an hour x $12 = $2 in labor for this ring
Overhead Rate – In my hypothetical situation, let’s say these are my estimated overhead expenses for the year:
$800 – Etsy fees
$250 – Paypal fees
$250 – Advertising & printing expenses
$300 – Craft show fees
$50 – Photo props
$100 – Editing software
$75 – Tools
$275 – Indirect product costs
$15 – Website costs
= $2,115
Wow! That’s a lot of overhead! These costs add up, that’s why it’s important to include them in your pricing strategy somehow.
I’m going to calculate my overhead rate based on an estimated annual number of products sold. Last year, let’s say I sold 400 items. This year, I’m estimating that I will sell 500 pieces. $2,115 / 500 = $4.23 per item for overhead. So, my formula would look like this:
[(Supplies + Labor) x 2] + Overhead Rate = Wholesale Price
[($3.67 + $2) x 2] + $4.23 = $15.57 for my wholesale price, x 2 = $31.14 for my retail price. If this were me I’d probably do some rounding and sell it for $31 flat.
Remember, there’s several ways you can calculate your overhead rate and incorporate it in your pricing strategy.
Supplies – Let’s say the rosettes cost me 20 cents a pair, 20 cents for the studs, and 5 cents for the earnuts. That means my supply expense is 45 cents.
Labor – I make a bunch of earrings at once, so each pair doesn’t take me too long. Let’s say I pay myself 50 cents for each pair.
Overhead rate – $4.23 as I calculated it in the above example, and you can use that same overhead rate across the board for all your products.
So, my formula would look like this:
[(Supplies + Labor) x 2] + Overhead Rate = Wholesale Price
[($.45 + $.50) x 2] + $4.23 = $6.13 for my wholesale price, x 2 = $12.26 for my retail price. Again, that’d be $12 flat for me.
The Big Picture
Does it seem crazy that a ring that cost you less than $4 to make should be priced at $31? Or a pair of earrings that cost you less than $1 could sell for 12 times that amount? That is why soooo many artisans underprice their goods, or make awesome sales but never turn a profit. It all boils down to two things when coming up with a pricing formula that works:
Covering all of your costs – find a reasonable, doable way to include all your business costs in your pricing formula, not just the obvious ones, whether this is by using an overhead rate, a percentage markup, or something else that works for you.
Making a profit – here’s the kicker. If all your business expenses are represented somewhere in your pricing formula, that little “x2” or “x4” profit multiplier is what will allow you to be profitable (duh!). Too many entrepreneurs forget to include all their true costs in their formula, and profit multiplier that should be giving them a profit is really just covering all those forgotten expenses instead.
Trust me, it’s a lot easier to price your product for a profit now, even if it feels too high, and lower your price later for whatever reason, than to be in business for a while with prices that are too low, realize you aren’t going to have a sustainable business, and have to raise your prices later to stay open.
kraft price tags, from wishdesignstudio on etsy
Next time we’ll continue the conversation about pricing your creative goods and discuss tweaking the formula to fit your business, checking out (or not) your competitors’ prices, and why it’s so important to not under-price yourself. We might even be feeling really generous and include a little downloadable freebie spreadsheet with the pricing formulas already embedded for you!
In the meantime, if there’s any specific things you’d like us to talk about or any pricing questions you may have, feel free to hit us up in the comments.
UPDATE: Check out part 2 of our series, which discusses the pitfalls of under-pricing, tweaking the formula to fit your needs, and competing with other shops, here.
So, I’ve made it no secret that last September, I added “mama” to my resume. Today I’m going to take a break from churning out my usual business-y fare and give you a little peek into the nursery we created for our little one, Hazel. I hope you enjoy!
Hazel is 8 months old now, and it’s slightly humorous to look back on my preggo days and how frantic I was about getting her room ready. I really wanted everything to look perfect and fit the color scheme and yada yada. I had the diaper station ready to go, the sheets washed…everything in its place. Little did I realize that Hazel wouldn’t be sleeping, or barely even hanging out, in this room until she was like 6 months old. But oh well. You have to keep the crazy pregnant lady busy doing something, am I right?
I wasn’t really feeling having a set “theme” for her room, so I just went with a cohesive color scheme of mint and pint, with touches of gold. I didn’t want anything to blatantly girly, so we went with mint. Obviously there’s lots of white too.
shelf wall close up
We’ve got a nice sturdy bookshelf with baskets full of toys. I had some little 4×4 inch canvases hanging around and painted them in ombre shades of pink, then glued some cute little doilies to them. The white wooden rocking horse was made long ago by my grandfather, who passed away when I was just a kid. My husband had the great idea to let Hazel paint it when she’s a little older, so for now it chills on a little wall shelf we got from Target. I re-covered an ikea lampshade in some cute fabric, and most of the other objects I found thrifting. I purposely went out and tried to find some nice gold-colored vintage pieces to add some character to the space.
I got the lovely little golden mirror from the Etsy shop Secret Window Mirrors. Her white crib is from PBK’s Larkin collection. I absolutely adore her owl & hot air balloon mobile from Drops of Color, also found on Etsy.
Here’s a close up of the collage/art wall above her crib. I searched for items that would match the color scheme and be appropriate for our baby girl and our family. I am absolutely Disney-obsessed, so I knew I had to have some sort of Disney shout-out included! I made the yarn-wrapped H initial myself and added some cute little flowers made of canvas ribbon, lace, and vintage buttons. So fun!
I’ve since had to take down the mobile (for now) because it turns out mobiles keep babies awake, instead of sleeping peacefully! Haha. I covered two corkboards from Ikea with coordinating fabric, and the rest of the artwork I ordered from Etsy.
Carnival swings photo – SSC Photography
Life is Beautiful print & Do You Suppose She’s a Wildflower print – The Wheatfield (all time fave shop!)
Typewritter photo – CarolineMint
Cinderella’s castle photo – PhotoReverie
view of the nursery from the doorway
I was so obsessed with everything matching that I made my poor husband replace the previously dark wooden ceiling fan with an all white one. Here you can also see the gold curtains that I searched forever to find (we settled on gold blackout shades from Overstock.com), and our Larkin PBK diaper changing station and dresser. This corner also now houses our tan Lazy boy recliner (which I love). Nursing took so long the first few months that we kept it downstairs in the living room…so I could watch TV while nursing of course.
Here’s Hazel’s bathroom. It used to be painted beige, but I convinced my husband to paint it white. Which I think was sort of a mistake, since all the cabinets and counter tops in here are cream. So now it’s sort of like mismatched white/cream overload. But oh well…we’ve made it work.
I found the awesome pink & mint frames from Homegoods (love that store, who doesn’t?). The prints are also from Etsy shop CarolineMint. The embroidered bear art used to hang in my nursery when I was a petite bebe, and my mom handed it down to me. It happened to already match our mint scheme, so I just painted the frame gold and voila!
The masterpiece of the bathroom is my DIY heart made of buttons. This was fun and easy to make, just a question of finding lots of pink buttons, and Hazel LOVES it. Anytime she’s having a cranky moment I can just bring her up to it and she loves poking and pointing at all the tiny buttons. I call that a handmade success.
DIY heart button art
Thanks for joining me on a little tour of Hazel’s mint & pink nursery! Now back to our regularly scheduled content 🙂
Hi there! Welcome to our fifth and final article in this Marketing Magic series on effective ways to use and interpret your Etsy shop stats. I hope you’ve found this helpful thus far! Here are the links to the previous articles for a recap:
In Test #3, we discussed analyzing the various sources that generate traffic to your Etsy shop. On a similar note, today we’ll discuss traffic sources from within Etsy.com that lead viewers to your shop. So we’re not talking about people doing a Google search, we’re talking about people that are either already browsing Etsy.com or already somewhere in your Etsy shop.
#4. Review Your Traffic Sources FROM ETSY
The Thought Process
Once a viewer finds your shop or listing, however they found it, you want to keep them there (by “there” I mean within your shop) as long as possible. Think about if you owned a brick & mortar shop. Customers would come in and browse, see an item they like, possibly add it to their cart, move on and see another item they liked, and keep browsing on and on. Your internet shop is different. They might land on a listing page from a Google or Etsy search and never see the rest of your shop other than that one listing. It’s up to you to help them browse.
The longer a viewer spends browsing your listings, the likelier you will be to make a sale, or at least get some items favorited. There are several things you can do to keep a viewer browsing within your shop, and you can use your Etsy shop stats to monitor your progress.
The Testing Procedure
Once again, filter to a weekly or monthly view of your stats. Check out the other box below your graph, titled “traffic sources on Etsy”. This is basically giving you a drilldown of the “etsy.com” number listed under the “traffic sources” box to the left. Examine where your inner-Etsy views are coming from. Possible traffic sources from within Etsy can include the following:
Your Shop – when a viewer clicks on a listing from the home page of your shop
Your Listings – when a viewer clicks on a link (to another listing, to your shop home page, to a category section, etc.) from a link within another one of your listings
Search – a viewer searches for something from the Etsy.com home page
Search within your shop – a viewer searches for something from the search bar on your Etsy shop page
Other possible traffic sources include the Etsy home page (score!), treasuries, favorites, convos, Etsy’s browse sections, teams, or another shop’s listing.
Questions to Ask Yourself Now
Where is most of my inner-Etsy traffic coming from?
Do I have a substantial amount of views coming from within my shop, like from listings and shop sections?
Are there steps I can take to increase the links and connectivity within my shop to increase a viewer’s browse time?
Are there steps I can take to increase my page ranking in Etsy search results?
Have treasuries and my participation in Etsy teams or forums been a good way to drive traffic to my shop?
What can I do to increase my chances of being featured in treasuries and on the Etsy front page?
Lessons Learned
Unless you were featured on the front page, you want most of your traffic to be coming from Your Shop and Your Listings. Yes, search traffic from Etsy.com is great, that means your tags are doing their job. However, lots of views from your shop, listings, and section pages means that people are sticking around after they found you via search or whatever other method. It means they like your shop!
To boost these views, make sure your listings have helpful links included in them. You can link to other relevant listings or categories. Here are some examples of effective listing linking:
“If you like this style of ____ check out my other _____ here.”
“Check out my entire line of _______s or my shop section of _____ here.”
“If you’d like this _____ but in another color/size, see my _______ here.”
“Back to our shop here _______”
“Check out the _______ that matches this listing.”
another example from my turquoise rose studs listing – see all the links to other places in my shop that I have sloppily circled
The idea is to think like your target customer and provide them little links and breadcrumbs to other parts of your shop that will make their lives easier and increase your chances of making a sale. The good news is that these days, Etsy does a pretty good job of adding a lot of links for you already. On each listing page, they will automatically add links to other listings in that same section, a link to convo you, and a link to your about page.
Don’t forget to monitor your progress after you’ve tweaked your listing links and any other keyword or tagging work. Check your traffic stats on at least a monthly basis to see if your views from Etsy searches or inner-shop browsing has paid off!
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We hope you’ve enjoyed our series on how to analyze and interpret your Etsy shop stats! We’ve discussed just some of the many processes you can perform to effectively utilize and analyze your Etsy Shop Stats. After running through these tests, remember to continue checking your stats to see if your efforts have improved your traffic. Our goal is to get more people to your shop and increase your sales. Happy selling!
Hi guys. It’s me here today! After I converted this blog over to WordPress from Blogger back in 2012, I gave it a much more refined and defined feel and revamped it as a place where other creative entrepreneurs could access business resources, download free printables, and learn about relevant topics to improve their business skills.
I’ve really enjoyed growing this site, writing about all these fun business topics, and learning as I go along. The journey has been great thus far! But I’ve gone through a lot of changes in my own journey as a creative entrepreneur and in my personal life as well. I’ve gone from working as a full-time CPA to a work/stay-at-home mom of an 8-month-old baby girl.
I’ve never really enjoyed writing too much about my personal life or myself, it just doesn’t come very naturally to me, but it’s been challenging and a bit confusing for me to have this website, a pretty public forum, and NOT share any pieces of my life other than only the tiny corner of the me that is Lazy Owl Boutique. Thus, I’ve decided to add a new periodic series of posts, which for now I’m calling Work/Life Balance, that will serve as a more personal outlet for me.
If you’re like me, you probably follow a handful of really awesome lifestyle blogs, and if you have kids, maybe even some mom blogs too. I know you don’t come to our site here to learn about makeup, cupcake baking, or parenting,… you come for the business resources and tips (I hope)! My goal is not to turn this into a lifestyle blog or spend days chronicling my baby girl’s motor skill development. However, I do think (and hope) that it’ll be refreshing and interesting to add a personal touch to my site, and that you can relate to the challenges of running an at-home office and business alongside a household and a family. Even if you aren’t a parent or working from home, I think we can all relate to the constant hustle and juggling of trying to make it as a creative entrepreneur.
My hope is that this new article series will reconcile my innate need to include a more personal side to this site (which before everything else, is really simply a blog!) with the helpful educational tidbits you’ve already come to expect from Lazy Owl. A lot of my favorite blogs in the handmade business realm are written by ladies that do a wonderful job of giving their readers a peek into their home/personal lives as well. I think this is what makes them relatable, interesting, and successful. I find that I trust their business advice and experience more since I feel like I know them a bit better as a well-rounded person, and not just an entrepreneur or a faceless blogger.
I hope you agree, and I’m really looking forward to this new venture! If you find the new article series boring or pointless, I also don’t mind if you skip them and just read all the free business goodies 🙂
Exciting news! Lazy Owl will soon be releasing our very first Crafting a Business 101 e-book and e-course, Creating a Business Plan. The e-book will be a thorough expansion of our popular Business Plan blog series, with lots more printable worksheets and valuable content added. It’ll also include some inspirational info and links to other resources and goodies. Since this will be the first release of our first e-course ever, for a limited time, we’ll be offering it for a very special rate to our email subscribers. Enter your email address below to be added to our subscription list, and be the very first to know as soon as the Creating a Business Plan e-book is released (and get it for a very special low price)!
coming soon!
We’re offering so much more than just a simple, boring, static business plan! Completing our e-course will help you…
Hone in on why you became a creative entrepreneur in the first place, and inspire you to keep on trucking through any bumps in the road
Research and define your ideal customer and your target audience
Determine the best outlets to both sell and promote your creative business
Spend your marketing time more effectively
Craft the best message and language to sell and market your products across all platforms
Stand out from your competition
Build a solid foundation for your creative business
Create a simple, usable business plan that you can use and get inspiration from both now and as your business grows
Our Crafting a Business Plan e-course and workbook will include:
An in-depth guide on how to create a usable and effective business plan for your creative business, whether you’re new to being an entrepreneur or just want to re-tool your current plan (or lack thereof!)
Printable worksheets and prompts for each step of your new business plan
Over 50+ pages of helpful content, printable worksheets, inspirational quotes, and other resources
As they say, those that don’t plan, plan to fail. A solid business plan is essential to succeeding in today’s competitive handmade industry. Enter your email address below to receive our newsletter and learn more about our upcoming e-course!
We’re now moving on to test #3, reviewing the sources that lead traffic to your Etsy shop.
#3. Review Your Traffic Sources
The Thought Process
How are viewers and potential customers finding you? Are they searching for a keyword or phrase on Etsy or Google that eventually brings them to you? Are they clicking on a pin on Pinterest, or were they reading a blog article about your product? There are so many ways customers can find you; it’s essential to monitor how viewers are and are not finding your products. This is especially true if you are participating in any sort of marketing campaign, like using a Facebook business page, participating in a giveaway, or pinning your items. You want to know if you are using your time effectively or wasting energy.
The Testing Procedure
Let’s take some time to check the traffic sources listed on our Etsy shop stats page to see how viewers are finding you. Once again, filter to a monthly or weekly view and check out the “traffic sources” box just below the graph. This box lists all the places that your views are coming from.
“Etsy.com” means traffic that came from “within” Etsy, via search or other internal Etsy links. Note that these views are further broken down in the box to the right, “Traffic Sources on Etsy”.
Direct traffic generally means someone who typed in your Etsy shop URL, clicked on a bookmark, or clicked on a link in an email or on their phone.
This box will include third party search engines (like Google or Yahoo), Pinterest, Facebook, blog URLS, and other social media sites as sources as well if they are applicable. You also might see traffic from Google Product Listing Ads that Etsy has placed on your shop’s behalf.
Questions to Ask Yourself Now
While looking at your list of traffic sources, think about the following questions:
Did I perform any marketing or promoting efforts this month to generate traffic to my shop? Do I see an increase in views from a previous month due to this?
How much traffic do I see resulting from my social media sites (like from Facebook, Pinterest, your tweets, etc.)?
What social media outlet seems to be working the best for me this month and bringing in the most traffic?
Do I have any traffic coming from an unexpected source, like a blog or site I didn’t know about? You’ll want to be sure to check these sources out, if anything, to say thank you!
How much direct traffic do I have? This is potentially from people with your business card or who have heard about you via word of mouth.
Did I buy any online advertising space this month? If so, how much traffic am I seeing from this?
What social media sites or other sources seem to be missing from my list this month?
This analysis helps you determine whether your marketing and promotion efforts are effective. It can also help you decide where to allocate your precious time. For example, is Pinterest bringing in twice as much traffic as Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram? then spend more time pinning.
This test is also helpful if you compare your results and traffic sources to past time periods. If you’ve ramped up your Facebook marketing efforts or started a new blog, you can see whether traffic from those sites are increasing over time.
This process can also be particularly educational if done following a specific marketing effort on your part. For instance…
Did you just do a craft show and hand out lots of business cards? Monitor to see if handing out all those cards helped increase your direct traffic.
Are you selling on a group deals site or participating in a giveaway on a blog? Monitor to see if you’re getting traffic from that source to make your participation worthwhile.
Did you just write a blog article about your product or brand, or start a new blog recently? Keep an eye on your traffic to see if your new work is affecting traffic.
This analysis will tell you what’s working, and you can obviously capitalize on that. But don’t forget to look for what sources are missing from your list. Are you tweeting all the time and not seeing any incoming traffic from Twitter? Then you may need to reallocate your time or adjust your Twitter marketing plan to be more effective. Did you pay for ad space or participate in a giveaway and see hardly any incoming traffic from that? Now you’re armed with more info before participating in something similar next time.
How are your traffic numbers for Etsy.com and Google/Yahoo/Bing searches? Monitor these stats over time to see if you’re doing well with SEO/keyword tagging or if it’s time to adjust and boost your page rankings.
The general idea behind this test is two-fold: 1) You are learning how to use your time wisely. Spend your marketing time on the venues that are driving the most of your traffic. 2) You want people to find your shop and products from a healthy mix of searches and links around the interwebs. You need lots of both types of traffic to be truly successful. We recommend a site like IFTTT.com to set up automated processes on your social media outlets to help increase traffic from these sources.
Check back soon for our fourth test with your Etsy shop stats. We hope you’re enjoying this series! What questions do you have about reading and analyzing your Etsy shop stats?
Our latest series of Marketing Magic articles discusses how to analyze your Etsy Shop Stats to help increase your views and boost sales. Read the intro to the series here to get started. Test #1, reviewing your keywords, was discussed here last week.
This week, we’re discussing another easy analysis you can perform while looking at your Etsy shop stats.
#2. Separate Your Super Star Listings from the Duds
The Thought Process
Your shop’s listings are your selling points. Whether you have a ton or only a few listings, you’ve probably noticed over time that some listings seem to be getting a lot of views and favorites, while others are barely seen. The discrepancy could be caused by many things; maybe you’re selling a mixture of more popular (and thus more viewed) and less popular (and less viewed) items. That makes sense and probably applies to you to some degree. However, it could also be due to some other factors.
The Testing Procedure
Again, I suggest looking at your stats in chunks of at least 1 month’s time (like “last month”’s view for example) for this analysis. After filtering your dates to this view, scroll down to your “pages viewed” area. check out your top 2 or 3 viewed items (that are not pages or categories), we’ll call these your superstar listings…along with your least viewed 2 or 3 items (you will have to click to the very last page), or your duds.
You can click on the listing’s link in your stats and get individual stats for just that item, but it’s also helpful to look at the actual listing so you can view the keyword tags, title, and description you used.
Open the listing pages and the individual stat pages for your superstar listings and your duds, and get ready to do some thorough examination.
Questions to Ask Yourself
What do your superstar items have in common? Try to think of every possibility, especially beyond the obvious ones (like they’re all Halloween-related and it’s October). Here are some starters:
Do they all have great photographs on pristine white backgrounds?
Do they all use the same keywords or tags?
Were they all renewed that month?
Did they all get traffic from a similar source, like treasuries, Twitter, or a recent ad campaign?
Did they get more views from within your shop or from keyword searches (this tells you if someone spotted it whilst already in your shop or came directly to it after searching on Etsy)?
This was my superstar listing last month. Great clean and clear photo, good tag and title usage, and being featured in a handful of treasuries helped make this listing popular.
Now for those dud listings. What’s wrong with these guys? More questions to ponder regarding your least viewed items:
Is it my pictures? Could I use better, more appealing photographs?
Should I refine or retool my listing title and keyword tags to make it more searchable and SEO-friendly? Maybe your product is awesome, but people just aren’t finding it.
Should I refine the item’s description to make it more appealing to my viewer? Does my description answer the most common questions a buyer might have? This might not really affect your views (since someone would click on the item before even seeing the description), but it can’t hurt!
Could it be a problem with the item’s price? Does it seem too cheap or too expensive at first glance?
Does this item not fit in with the rest of my shop’s inventory?
Is this a seasonal item that I should think about not renewing until the right time of year?
Lessons Learned
Note what you learned from this exercise. Are certain keywords or tags really popular right now? Maybe you could apply these to more of your listings. Do listings with a certain look or feel seem to be doing better? If you figure out some secret ingredient that seems to be boosting your superstar listings, try to incorporate it throughout the rest of your shop. Or maybe you need to be making more items that are similar to your superstars!
Take time also to analyze what sources are bringing the views in for your superstars. Are they being found from keyword searches, from links within your Etsy shop, or from a social media blast? Take note of what you’ve been doing that’s working and what’s missing.
There are also probably some steps you can take to improve your dud listings’ chances of being found and seen. At the very least, you have little to lose by sprucing up their tags, titles, or photos to breathe a little new life into them. However, if you notice some of the same listings showing up in the dud section each time you perform this test, you might consider not renewing them next time to save yourself a few cents.
Periodically monitoring your superstar and dud listings for patterns is just another way of using your Etsy shop stats to boost your views and sales. Come back soon for test #3, and don’t forget to read back on test #1, reviewing your keywords, if you missed it last week. Also, check out our step-by-step guide on how to easily download your Etsy sales spreadsheet!
Hello there! I have some exciting news to relay to all you lovely Lazy Owl followers. We’re currently working on opening a new business and launching a new brand, Paper + Spark! 
