Materials
Let's start with the one thing you need to do handmade crafts.Your materials.
You must always find out the price of the materials you used to make the item and put that into your final price.
Stringing Materials: Find the amount of each inch of your string/tigertail/chain etc that you've strung your beads/pendants on. Take the total amount you paid for the item and divide this by the number of inches total to get per inch.Take inches used in peice times $ per inch.
Wire: Do the same thing as above the get the price for each inch of wire you used,especially if it's precious metal wire which can cost up to 0.20 per inch.Make sure you measure the amount of wire used before using it on your peice. Keep a record of it on a peice of paper or on your computer. Different guages are also different prices,keep this in mind.
Beads- Make sure to find out the price of EACH individual bead from a strand. Count how may beads are on an inch of the strand, then mulitply that by the number of inches on the strand. Take the final cost and divide that by the final tally of beads. Voila, a very easy way to find bead price instead of counting every single bead! EniOken.com has a bead price calculator for free if you want to download it.
Headpins/Jumprings/Spacer beads/Krimp Beads: These are some small or sometimes not as noticeable parts of your jewelry that might get missed. Make sure you get the price of each one you used in your entire peice of jewelry.
Use a calculator or a computer program to calculate your material costs.
I use Microsoft Excel as my pricing program. You can easily put your material costs in with =(blank)+(blank) as an equation and it will add it right up for you. Or simply use your calculator and put the final number in the slot.
Getting to best price for your materials: By wholesale or in large lots as much as you can. The lower your material costs mean the better priced your jewelry is going to be in the end.You can also resell any supplies you can't use or don't need at a small profit. If you can't afford buying in big lots,try and get another jewelry maker to join with you and split the cost of some of your materials with them.
Using higher quality materials: Higher quality materials means that your jewelry will last longer,stand up to more wear and more people will be willing to puchase it due to it's higher standard. Your jewelry will cost more with higher priced/quality materials but the trade off may be that more people will buy the jewelry if it'll last longer and not tarnish or wreck as easily. Note: Metal allergies are becoming more and more common. Making jewelry with prcious metals,nickle free and sergical steel wire/metals means that those with metal allergies can fully enjoy your jewelry.
Last note: Alot of jewelry sellers take the price of materials then multiply it by 1, 2, or even up to 5 times the amount they paid for it.
I personally do not do this. I pay myself properly for my time and overhead to create my price (wholesale) first. Why get paid for twice the number of materials? It seems silly to me. It's for abosolutely no reason whatsoever that this is done,and if you ever had to explain why you did this to someone..what would you say? Think about this when you decide to up the material tally or to just leave it the same.Pay yourself properly,add meterials, and add your overhead,and that SHOULD be good enough.If it's not good enough for wholesale,then ask yourself why not.
You're welcome to price your materials by multiplying or not. Your choice!
(I'll explain wholesale versus retail pricing perhaps some other time.)
