Tuesday, November 2, 2010

Pricing bead sets

I have recently decided to try making and selling sets of beads on etsy. Mostly small sets of spacers at this point. I made several sets, timed myself and my bead cleaning buddy, and then tried to figure a price. Who ever thought that would be the hard part.

I figured that, with the time involved, expenses, etc., I would need to charge about $4-5 a bead. Hmm, that meant a set of five small spacers would be about $25. That sounded a little high, so I did some searching on etsy to see what other folks were charging. Surprise! Spacer beads for $1 to $2.

Now I'm not exactly a math whiz, but when a set of beads takes about 25 minutes to make and you charge $12 for it, that doesn't seem like it could be cost effective in any way. Sounds like a lot of money? $24 an hour? Are you considering supplies, gas, paypal and etsy fees, income tax, and the time it takes to photograph and list those beads? If you look at all of that, I'd say you might just as well cut that income in half- $12 an hour is really not that great a wage. And that wage only applies if you can sell every bead you make at the price you set.
So my bead sets are priced in between what I feel they should cost and what others might sell for. They are a bit more complex than those beads that are less, so I'm hoping that will be a good selling point. Guess I'll just have to sit here on my hands and wait to see what happens!