I mentioned it in last week's post, so I wanted to be sure and follow up with the formula I've come up with for pricing my crochet items.
Before I get into it though, I want to be clear that I do not think this is the way to go for every artist out there. You need to do what is right for you and your business, based on your own experience and market. (This formula even only works for me 'most' of the time. Some of my items are still a crap-shoot to find the right price.)
(Total # of Hours X Hourly Rate) + Material Cost = Price
This is the basic formula. Where it gets complicated is figuring out your total number of hours. If you are like me, you don't just sit and crochet for an hour straight. You stop and stretch, or look at your phone, or have a real-life conversation with someone, etc. So to figure out ACTUAL time working, I figured out my average time-per-stitch by timing myself creating swatches of several different basic crochet stitches (I did not include chain stitches in this experiment, since they are so much faster than a regular stitch) and then dividing the time by the total number of stitches. For me, this average is 2.8 seconds per stitch.
Once I have that information, I take the total stitch count for a project (usually the stitch count for each row is listed, so you just need to add them up) and multiply it by my time per stitch. This will give me the total time in seconds. Divide this sum by 60 to get your time in minues, and then divide by 60 again to get total hours. This is only crochet time. You will need to then manually add in any time used to complete the project (i.e. weaving in ends, sewing pieces together, adding eyes, etc) to come up with the Total # of Hours.
The next piece is your hourly rate. I am not here to tell you how much you deserve to charge for this. You figure out whatever that is for you. I set mine at $20 for various reasons.
Material cost is fairly simple. Just add up what you paid for yarn and other materials. I don't charge for tools (hooks, scissors, needles, etc), unless I need to buy a special tool that I will use only for this project - and even then only after I disclose that to the customer.
Now, I know that all of this seems way more complicated than it needs to be - and it might be, for you. But it works for me, so I'll keep it. And now that I have the actual formula figured out, I've created an Excel spreadsheet that will do the work for me. I just plug in the number of stitches, and the material cost, and the rest is calculated for me.
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