How to Price Crochet Correctly

And you thought the age-old question was ‘Is there life after death?’? Ah, no. The age-old question is ‘How much should I charge for my crochet?’ Once and for all you will get an easy answer and finally know how to price crochet items with the click of a button!

The reason this one question trips up so many crochet creators is that there are several different ways to determine how to price crochet items. Ask four different crotcheters how they price their crochet and you’re likely to receive four different answers.

Materials X 3

Many (most?) crochet sellers go with the easiest method and charge the cost of materials times three. Crochet sellers who use this method feel it is a fair price that most customers are “willing” to pay. It’s a fast, easy calculation and the customer usually walks away happy. However, is this really a fair price for the maker?

Let’s use an example of a finished crochet garment, a crochet vintage style hat.

We’ll assume you spent $4 on yarn and it took you 3 hours to work up a crochet hat. Since you don’t charge for your time, it’s irrelevant for this calculation and you probably didn’t track your time accurately, if at all. The price for the hat comes in at $12 ($4 x 3). Oh yes, that hat will easily sell for that price. You pocket the $12 but something in the back of your mind tells you this doesn’t sound quite fair. You think you spent about 3 hours working on it. When you subtract the $4 cost of the yarn that leaves $8. Eight divided by 3 is $2.67. You worked 3 hours for $2.67 an hour. OUCH.

When you look at it that way you can see how 3x the cost of materials is not the most equitable method to price crochet pieces. Additionally, where in this scenario do you account for the cost of doing business?

Cost of doing Business

Are you shipping items? You’ll need to include fees and packaging and possibly insurance. Are you paying fees to Etsy? Are you paying for Facebook or Pinterest ads? Do you buy tags and bags to price and package craft fair crochet items? Are you factoring in the cost of your tools (crochet hooks, markers, etc.) There are so many miscellaneous costs that you may not even think about because they have become routine or feel insignificant. But add everything up and multiply by the number of items you sell, it can become a significant number that must be accounted for.

Maybe you are simply looking for a basic price for crochet pieces that you are going to sell informally to friends, family, co-workers, and are not running an actual crochet business? You still want to charge a fair price and not cheat yourself and end up losing money.

So what is the best way to price crochet? Ah, well, there may not be a “best” answer here. There are a few other methods, however, and we will cover some of them here. And as if that wasn’t cool enough in itself, I’m going to bring you the EASIEST method of all! Keep reading to get to the Life-Saving option…ok that’s a bit much. Scroll down to get to the “You just made my life so much easier!” option.

Wholesale/Retail

Another popular pricing method is wholesale times two. You take the price of materials plus labor hours include overhead and multiply by two and you get a retail price.

Our vintage style crochet hat would now retail for $74.80 ($4 + 3hrs @$10 x .10 x 2). Ok, that doesn’t look right either. Remember, retail pricing typically takes into account a retail establishment’s overhead which is entirely different from YOUR overhead. But we’re talking about YOUR retail price, not necessarily a physical boutique’s price (MY head is spinning!). Let’s try another method and see if there’s a good price here somewhere.

Standard Pricing

Honestly, I’m not sure there even is a standard name for what I’m calling standard pricing. This is why it is so difficult to find a good price for our crochet!

For the purpose of this post I’m calling this method standard because it’s really the most fair and square method. Maybe we should call it the fair and square method? (I’m not sure our international crochet friends would understand that cowboy lingo.

Now we will take the same cost of materials plus labor hours plus a profit markup to get a fairer price. Are you pulling your hair out? Don’t worry. I’ve got you covered and will make this absolutely painless with an easy to use tool. I’ll just get to the price of the hat and move on. We are now at $51. Ok, you need to start crocheting faster and buying cheaper yarn. LOL. Sorry. I’m being snarky. (I have another post here that details how to improve your profit margins.)

I don’t know about you, but I’m getting a splitting headache coming on from all these numbers. Don’t despair. Relief is on the way!

Image by Robin Higgins from Pixabay

Crochet Pricing Tool

This is all beyond crazy. And not in a crazy cool way! Is it any wonder at all that the answer to the question of HOW do we price our crochet remains open ended?

To end all the insanity I’ve developed a plug and play (if you will) crochet pricing spreadsheet calculator that does the work and calculations for you. The formulas have been pre-calculated and populated into the calculator! You just need to enter the cost of materials and labor hours (how long it took you to work up the crochet item and your hourly rate) and BOOM! The worksheet brings back 4 (!) pricing options. You choose the option that works best for your selling situation (retail shop, craft fair, Facebook shop, etc) and community norms.

You’re welcome! LOL

Click here to see this magical little crochet pricing tool:

Crazy Cool Crochet Calculator