Price your piece
Fill in materials, labour, consumables and overheads below. The results update as you type, so you can see cost, wholesale and retail together and understand exactly how each figure is built.
Materials
| Description | Qty | Unit cost | Line total |
|---|
Labour
Pay yourself a real wage. UK bench rates commonly sit between 20 and 40 per hour; do not price your time at zero.
Consumables and wastage
Solder, saw blades, polishing compounds, metal loss.
Overheads
Rent, tools, insurance, software, marketing.
Multipliers
2.0 to 2.5 is a common range in both steps.
VAT
Display currency
Cosmetic only. It does not convert the numbers.
Guidance
Why two multipliers
A single markup on materials alone hides your labour, overheads and risk inside a number that looks like profit but is not. The wholesale step covers your true cost of making; the retail step covers the cost of selling, whether that is your own shop time, a stockist's margin, or the marketing that brings a customer to you. Two steps also give you a defensible wholesale price if a gallery or retailer ever wants to stock your work.
The mistake of pricing at material cost
Pricing a piece at materials plus a small margin ignores the hours you spent designing, making, finishing and packing it, which is the actual scarce resource in a handmade business. Over time this trains customers to expect handmade work at factory prices and leaves you working for less than minimum wage once every hour is counted. If the sums here feel uncomfortably high, that discomfort is usually a sign that past pricing was too low, not that this formula is wrong.
When to break the formula
A formula is a floor, not a ceiling: one-off commissions, rush turnarounds and pieces with unusual technical risk are worth a premium on top of the calculated price. Set a minimum piece price below which you will not sell regardless of what the sums say, since very small jobs often carry fixed costs (postage, admin, a listing) that a pure percentage model understates. Trust your judgement on scarcity and demand; the calculator gives you a defensible starting point, not the final word.