The first price you put on a piece is rarely the right one. It is usually the number that felt least frightening to say out loud, and that is how underpricing takes hold — quietly, one order at a time. The comforting part is that the mistakes new makers make are remarkably predictable. They are not about talent or taste. They are about arithmetic, habit, and the awkwardness of asking to be paid properly.
Here are the seven that come up most often, with the fix for each.
A jeweller buys £12 of silver, spends an afternoon at the bench, and charges £40. It feels like a decent margin until the afternoon is counted. That £40 is a materials reimbursement plus a few pounds an hour — and some of it will go straight back out on solder, saw blades and replacement drill bits.
Underpricing nearly always traces back to the same gap: nobody ever decided what an hour of your time is worth. Work it backwards. Choose the income you need from the business across a year, estimate how many hours you can genuinely spend on paid work, then divide. Most makers find the honest figure is higher than they expected and lower than they feared.
The fix is a simple order of operations: materials, then hours at your rate, then overheads. If the total looks too high for your market, change how the piece is made — simplify the design, batch the process, use a faster finish — rather than quietly deleting your own wages from the sum.
Overheads are everything you pay for that isn't physically in the finished piece. They are the reason two makers can charge the same price for the same item and only one of them is running a business.
Add these up for a typical month, then divide by the number of pieces you realistically sell in a typical month. That is your per-piece overhead. If the figure stings, remember it is real money leaving your account whether or not you have priced for it.
Set a percentage instead. Many makers work with a fixed uplift on materials plus labour — enough to cover overheads without renegotiating every price. The percentage matters far less than applying it consistently.
A cushion is £45 to a stranger at a fair, £35 to a friend of a friend, and £50 to the customer who asks a lot of questions. You are not being generous; you are improvising. Inconsistent rates make you dread the next enquiry, because you cannot remember what you said last time.
Write a rate card and keep it somewhere you can see it. Decide, in advance, what wholesale looks like, what a commissioned piece costs compared with a ready-made one, and what the policy is for friends and family — a set percentage off, or nothing at all. Both are fine. Winging it is not.
Making is roughly half the job. The other half is photographing work, editing those photographs, answering emails, quoting, packing, invoicing, chasing payments, restocking, setting up at markets and standing behind a table for eight hours. None of it appears in a price based on bench time alone.
Track one ordinary week and write down everything. Most makers are startled by how much unpaid administration sits behind each sale. The fix is either to raise your hourly rate to absorb it, or to add a stated percentage to every quote for "business time" and treat it as a cost line, not a windfall.
Competitors are useful as a market check and useless as a cost base. You cannot see whether another maker has a partner subsidising the studio, bought clay in bulk years ago, inherited their tools, or is quietly losing money on every sale.
Use other makers to find out what your market will bear. Use your own numbers to find out what you can afford to accept.
Know your floor: the price below which a piece is not worth making. Then set your prices somewhere between that floor and what the market supports. If those two figures don't overlap, the work — not the price — needs to change.
Materials rise. Rent rises. Your skill rises. A price set in your first year and never revisited is quietly shrinking in value, and it is usually the most experienced makers who are most guilty of leaving it alone.
Put a review in the diary once a year and treat it as admin, not a confrontation. If you raise prices, tell people plainly and briefly: the new prices apply from a stated date, and anything already quoted or commissioned stays at the agreed figure. That single sentence removes most of the anxiety.
Offering a discount before anyone has asked for one tells the customer the original price was invented. So does adding "but I could do it for less" to the end of a quote. Say the number, then stop talking.
"That one is £85. I take a deposit and the balance on collection." No hedging, no smiling apology, no immediate markdown. If someone says it is more than they expected, you can talk about a smaller piece, a payment plan, or a waiting list — not about lowering the price for that person on that afternoon.
None of this needs new software. It needs twenty minutes, once, and then a review every year.
Do that and pricing stops being a source of dread. You will still flinch occasionally when you say the number out loud — that is normal, and it fades. The important thing is that the figure is one you can explain, defend and repeat to the next customer.
If you are unsure about tax, VAT thresholds, or what counts as a legitimate business expense, speak to an accountant who works with small creative businesses. It is a small cost that prevents an expensive surprise.
Photo: Quang Nguyen Vinh / Pexels
