When you have a yarn related business, it’s important that you are making a fair wage while pursuing your passion. You need to know what your personal fair wage is so that you can properly price your finished handcrafted items or patterns.
Most articles written about pricing handcrafted items mention using an hourly rate of $10 to $20 per hour, but these numbers are vague and to me feel like they’ve been pulled out of thin air, as if by magic – as none of the articles indicate WHERE these amounts came from.
When I first started researching how to price my own handmade items for my yarn related business, I was totally confused by all of the different thoughts on pricing and felt that they were all missing several key pieces involved in owning a business.
Honestly, I felt that many of these pricing methods were geared more toward a hobbyist instead of a professional yarnpreneur or crafter. Especially those pricing methods that say you should price your finished items at cost of supplies x 3!
How much time are you spending on your business?
As a business owner, your fair wage should take into consideration all of the “time” that you spend on everything that involves running your business – not just the time you spend making a finished item or writing a pattern. When you run a yarn related business (or any other business, for that matter) your time is spent doing all sorts of things, including:
- Marketing
- Packaging
- Social media
- Photo shoots of finished items
- Updating your website, Etsy shop, etc.
- Ordering/buying supplies
- Education/webinars
- the “dreaded bookkeeping” and other administrative tasks
- AND FINALLY you get time to do what you love to do – create something lovely or design a pattern.
If you only count the time you spend actually working on a project, then all of the other things you do for your yarn related business are done essentially for free – and who the heck wants to work for free?
Time to crunch some numbers
The number crunching yarnpreneur in me says that there probably isn’t any perfect or universal method of pricing handcrafted items – BUT I do think that when it comes to determining a fair hourly wage for yourself to use in those pricing methods that you should look at your own needs and include the following things:
- how much money you need/want to make either per month or per year
- how many hours per week you are available to work on (or in) your yarn business – NOT just how many hours you have to spend making handcrafted items or designing patterns
- how much your monthly and/or annual business expenses are
- how much money you should set aside for income taxes on the money you earn – so that you won’t be “surprised” at tax time
- how much in sales you have to have in order to cover everything
All of those things taken into consideration will provide you with a fair hourly wage for YOUR yarn related business.
Hate math and need some help crunching your numbers?
I’ve designed a Fair Wage Calculator, that can easily help you to determine what your fair hourly wage should be – based on your own yarn related business. This will be your very own “magic number” that you can then plug into any of the other pricing methods.
I’ve teamed up with Jess Mason from The Yarnpreneur Society to offer an exclusive live 1 hour Master Class on Wednesday, March 29 at 7 p.m. EST. Each attendee will receive a copy of my “Fair Wage Calculator” for their own use as well as detailed information on how to use it. This is really a very valuable tool.
The Yarnpreneur Society is a monthly membership website – designed for professional yarnpreneurs – offering exclusive training designed for yarn related businesses via live monthly MasterClasses and pre-recorded Studio Hours, Strategy Sessions, Stitch-N-Click tutorials, private Facebook group and more. The cost is $9.97 per month – click here to join today and attend the Beyond Fair Wage Masterclass later this month!