Most handmade jewellery is priced by guesswork. A maker adds up the cost of the metal and the stone, rounds up a bit for “time”, and lists it. Then a customer says it’s too expensive, or a sale barely covers the material, and the maker assumes the market is the problem. Usually it isn’t. The price was never built properly in the first place.
Below is a method, not a formula to memorise: five components, added in order, with two worked examples so you can see where your own numbers go.
- Price materials at true cost, including waste and findings, not just the metal weight quoted on a supplier invoice.
- Set an hourly labour rate deliberately. If you don’t, you are the one absorbing every underpriced piece.
- Add consumables and bench overhead, even in small amounts, because they are real costs that disappear into “general expenses” otherwise.
- The wholesale and retail multiplier exists to fund stock, risk and the retailer’s own costs. It is not a margin you’re adding for yourself twice.
- If a piece only prices sensibly at a number nobody will pay, the fix is usually the design or the process, not longer hours.
Start with the true cost of materials
Take the actual weight of the finished piece, not the weight of the sheet or wire you started with. Every piece loses metal to filing, sawing, and polishing, and every casting has sprues and buttons that don’t become the finished object. If you don’t weigh the actual result and compare it to what you bought, you are pricing the piece you started with, not the one you sold.
Add a waste allowance on top of the finished weight. A simple way to find your own figure: weigh your metal before you start a piece, weigh the finished piece, and track the difference over several jobs. Some of that difference is recoverable scrap, some isn’t, and only your own bench tells you the real ratio.
Findings, clasps, jump rings, ear wires, chain, and stone-setting components all have a cost, however small each one looks on its own. Add them individually rather than folding them into “materials, roughly”. Small components are the easiest cost to lose, because no single one looks worth tracking.
Price your own labour, on purpose
This is the step most UK makers skip, and it’s the one that decides whether the business survives. Set an hourly rate for your own time, deliberately, as a number you choose rather than whatever is left over after the sale. It should reflect your skill, not just minimum wage, because you are not doing unskilled work.
Then time yourself. Not a guess, an actual timed record across a few pieces of a similar kind: cutting, filing, soldering, setting, polishing, finishing. Multiply that time by your hourly rate. This is the labour cost, and it goes into the price as a real line item, not as whatever margin happens to be left after everything else.
If a considered, hand-finished piece takes four hours and you price your time at nothing, you have effectively paid a customer to let you make it.
Add consumables and bench overhead
Polishing compounds, saw blades, files, flux, pickle, gas, electricity for the kiln or the polishing motor: none of these are free, and none of them show up on a materials invoice for a single piece. Work out a rough per-hour or per-piece overhead figure by looking at what you spend on consumables over a month and dividing it across your output. It doesn’t need to be exact. It needs to exist as a line, not be absorbed silently into your labour time.
The wholesale and retail multiplier, and what it’s actually for
Once you have materials, labour, and overhead added together, that’s your cost price. If you plan to sell wholesale, to a shop or a stockist, the wholesale price is typically a multiple of that cost, and if the piece goes on to retail, the retail price is a further multiple of the wholesale price.
That multiplier is not padding. It funds things the maker doesn’t see directly: the retailer’s rent, staff, insurance, and the stock they are holding on their own money while it waits to sell, plus your own need to hold materials and finished stock rather than making everything to order. A multiplier that looks generous to a customer is usually the reason the business making the piece is still open next year.
Treat the exact multiplier as something you set for your own business, not a fixed industry rule. A common working pattern is cost multiplied by roughly two to two and a half for a wholesale price, with retail sitting above that again. Use that as a starting point to test against your own costs, not as a number to copy.
Worked example: a silver pendant
Numbers below are illustrative. Replace every one with your own.
- Silver weight in the finished piece: 12g at your supplier’s price on the day, not a spot chart (you pay a fabrication margin over spot). For this example, assume £0.65/g: £7.80
- Waste allowance (15% of metal cost): £1.17
- Findings (chain, jump ring, clasp): £3.50
- Labour: 1.5 hours at an hourly rate of £25: £37.50
- Consumables and bench overhead: £2.00
- Cost price: £52.00 (rounded)
- Wholesale, at 2.2x cost: £114
- Retail, at roughly 2x wholesale: £228
That retail figure will look high next to a mass-produced silver pendant on a fashion site. It’s not the same object. A mass-produced piece has none of the labour cost above spread across one unit, because it’s spread across thousands.
Worked example: a gold ring
- 9ct gold weight in the finished ring: 4g at your supplier’s price on the day. For this example, assume £22/g: £88.00
- Waste allowance (10%, gold waste is more recoverable than silver): £8.80
- Stone (illustrative cost, not a market quote): £40.00
- Findings and setting components: £6.00
- Labour: 3 hours at £25/hour: £75.00
- Consumables and bench overhead: £4.00
- Hallmarking fee per item: check your Assay Office’s current schedule. It is charged per item, so it lands far harder on a slim stacking ring than on a heavy one, and it is the cost most makers forget entirely
- Cost price: roughly £222 plus the hallmarking fee
- Wholesale, at 2.2x cost: £488
- Retail, at roughly 2x wholesale: £976
If you would rather not do this on paper every time, the handmade jewellery pricing calculator runs exactly this method: materials and labour in, overhead and multipliers set by you, wholesale and retail out. It is free and there is nothing to sign up for.
Notice how much of the final price is labour and process, not metal. On a ring this size, the gold is under half the cost price before any multiplier is applied.
The mistakes that keep UK makers underpriced
Pricing off materials only. Metal and stone cost is the easiest number to find and the smallest part of what a handmade piece should cost. Leaving out labour is the single most common reason handmade jewellery is underpriced.
Pricing against the cheapest listing on Etsy. A £12 stamped pendant and your hand-fabricated equivalent are not the same object even if they look similar in a thumbnail. Matching that price means matching that maker’s costs, which usually means matching an hourly rate you would not accept.
Not paying yourself a real hourly rate. Covered above, and worth repeating: if your labour line is zero or nominal, every sale is subsidised by your own unpaid time.
Forgetting selling fees. Marketplace listing fees, transaction fees, and payment processing fees all take a percentage before you see the money. A price that looks fine before fees can be a loss after them.
Forgetting postage and packaging. Boxes, tissue, protective packaging, and postage (especially insured postage on anything of real value) are real costs per order, not incidental extras.
Pricing a one-off as though it were production. A piece you’ll only ever make once carries its full design and prototyping time in that single sale. A piece you’ll make fifty times spreads that time across all fifty. Pricing them the same way undercharges the one-off badly.
Two UK-specific costs that are easy to miss
Hallmarking. In the UK, gold jewellery over 1g, silver over 7.78g, platinum over 0.5g, and palladium over 1g must be hallmarked before sale. The Assay Office charges a fee per item submitted, so on a small piece this is a genuine per-piece cost, not a rounding error. Check current fees and submission routes directly with your chosen Assay Office before pricing anything close to those weight thresholds.
VAT registration. Compulsory once your VAT-taxable turnover passes £90,000 in a rolling 12 months (gov.uk). It changes the maths rather than simply costing you: you charge VAT on what you sell, and you reclaim it on metal, stones, tools and fees. For a maker selling to the public, the sting is that your prices effectively rise by a fifth unless you absorb it, whilst a maker selling wholesale to VAT-registered shops barely notices. Which side of that you are on should inform the price you set well before you get near the threshold. This is a rule, not advice: talk to an accountant before you act on it.
If the sums only work at a price nobody will pay
Sometimes you run this whole method honestly and the retail price that comes out is one your market plainly won’t pay. When that happens, the answer is rarely “work more hours” or “cut my rate to nothing”. Both just move the underpricing problem rather than solving it.
The more durable fix is usually to change what you make or how you make it: a design that uses less metal or setting time, a process that reduces the hours per piece, or a smaller, more considered range instead of one that competes on volume. A price built honestly is a piece of information. If it says the current design doesn’t work commercially, that’s worth knowing before you make fifty of them, not after.
If you want more of this kind of working-through, the Bench Journal covers the practical side of running a jewellery bench, not just the making of it.