I do wholesale several items for under $30 and they are the bread
and butter of my business. This is where casting comes in and
literally saves my butt!. I had sculpt a beautiful object and cast
it. All of my less expensive items are cast. Sometimes I will
hammer the piece after casting or work on it some more with files to
give each piece a slightly different home spun look. I think if you
work in silver or “less expensive” materials its a great way to break
into the business by offering less expensive items in your
collection as well as those beautiful handcrafted pieces that takes
us hours to make. Sometimes you have to blend art and commerce to
eat. Nothing wrong with that! Another friend of mine takes some of
her more expensive work and casts it now in brass then plates them in
14K. Pieces that once hardly ever sold are now flying out the door
since she did this. THe pieces are still just as gorgeous but they
are not 18K gold anymore. This literally saved her business.
With regards to Karin’s question “What would I charge for an item
that costs me $10.00 in materials and 1 hour in labour”.
My pricing system is quite simple. I have a home based business so
I do not have high overheads Wholesale Price = materials + shop
consumables + packaging + labour + studio overhead + business profit
Materials - you already said $10.00 Shop consumables - I am assuming
that this is a simple silver project. I use a standard of $2.00 for
shop supplies such as fuel, solder, flux, cleaning solutions etc
Packaging - I box my jewellery at a cost of about $1.50/box Labour -
I pay myself $45.00/hr for studio time. I should pay myself for
marketing time, but I don’t Studio Overhead - since my studio is in
the home, I actually do not have any real overhead so I don’t charge
for this Business profit - I consider the $45/hr to be my business
profit and do not charge anything for this. My total would be
10+2+1.5+45+0+0 = $58.50 If I can’t sell the item at $58.50, then I
would stop making it as I am not interested in anything less than
$45/hr. If it sells well at $58.50 and I felt that it could sell for
more, I would increase my wholesale price to what I thought the
market would bear and end up with a greater hourly profit.
While the above formula does not cover all bases for jewelers that
operate out of rented space, I find it works well for me in my home
studio and provides me with the level of profit that I am looking
for.
I think I am the person who was referred to by the poster who said
“she would be paying herself less than minimum wage” based on the
pricing formula, so I just wanted to clarify what I was trying to
say.
If I were going to wholesale a piece that took a full hour to make
and $10 worth of materials, it would be more than $30. My intent in
the orignal post was to show that a $30 price basically pays for an
hour’s labor, because once you figure in materials and overhead,
you’d have to be using really inexpensive materials to still pay
yourself $20/ hour. If you spent an hour and used $10 worth of
materials, labor plus materials would give a base of $40, which
doesn’t include overhead or profit.
Of course, I’ve never used a sales rep, so I hadn’t calculated in
the 15% that many reps charge. And, from what I hear, some reps
charge even more than that…so the formula I used as an example
would be too low.
For what it’s worth, I’ve never wholesaled anything that took more
than about 10 minutes to make - I do make some handmade pieces, but
for wholesale, I’ve only done “assembled by hand from manufactured
components” i.e. french hooks or a chain with some pretty beads on
headpins, or some simple wirework.