How to Price My Art or Craft Show Product

January 3rd, 2009

by Shasta McLaughlin
The Extravaganza Craft Productions
copyright 2009

Pricing an art or craft show product is more of a science than an art. You can’t just set a price that you think is okay and expect to sell a lot of your product for a profit.

First of all you need to know what it costs you to produce your product. You want to include the costs of the goods used to create your product plus a little more to buy extra supplies.

Second you need to include your wages. What price per hour would you like to make? How many hours did it take to create your product?

Third you need to add in the price of your other expenses. Don’t forget to include things like the cost of your studio, electricity, advertising, cost of travel, cost of shows, in this figure. Then spread these costs out over the price of all your products.

NOTE: You will recover a small portion of these miscellaneous costs each time one of your products sell. For example your miscellaneous costs add up to $2000 a year and you sell approximately 1000 products a year that means that you need to add $2 to the price of each product to recover those costs.

Last and definitely not least you need to know what price the market will support. What this means is that your price can’t be higher than the amount the people who buy your product are willing to pay for it. IF you sell a product that is similar to a retail product you can go to the stores and see what price products like yours are selling for.

Then you need to decide if you can make your product for that price.

Here is a formula to help!

A. Cost of goods used x 1.5 = cost to replace supplies used + costs of new supplies

B. $dollars per hour I would like x #number of hours it took me to create product = my wages

C. Miscellaneous expenses for the year divided by approximate number of products I can sell a year = cost of miscellaneous expenses per product

D. Add A + B + C =Total cost of product

Compare the answer you go in D to retail prices in the area to know if your price is inline with market expectations.

It may take some adjustment to find the price point that sells the most product at the best profit.

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