Craft costing is harder than baking, for one reason: your materials are many, small, and bought at different times.
A baker has six ingredients. A jeweller might use four bead types, wire, clasps, thread, findings and a card to mount it on — bought across three shops and two months. Working out the cost of one bracelet feels like an accounting exercise, so most people guess.
The guess is nearly always low. People remember the beads and forget the clasp, the thread, the card, the little bag and the postage label.
The way through is the same as baking, once you stop thinking about single pieces. Make in runs, and cost the run.
Sit down and make twelve bracelets. Add up what that sitting consumed — including the fiddly bits — and divide by twelve. You have a cost per bracelet that is genuinely close, arrived at in two minutes.
| A run of 12 bracelets | Amount |
|---|---|
| Beads (about half a R240 mixed pack) | R120 |
| Wire and thread | R35 |
| Clasps and findings, 12 sets | R84 |
| Cards and organza bags | R48 |
| Total for the run | R287 |
R287 ÷ 12 = about R24 a bracelet. Sold at R70, each one leaves R46.
Most people costing that bracelet from memory would have said “about R15”, because the clasps, cards and bags — R11 of the R24 — are exactly the things that vanish from memory.
Craft work is time-heavy and the time is uneven. A bracelet takes twenty minutes. A commissioned piece takes a whole Saturday and three conversations.
Keep your cost per item as materials only, then judge the profit against the hours. Twelve bracelets at R46 profit is R552 for a five-hour sitting — about R110 an hour. That is a real number you can compare against a commission that pays R900 but eats a weekend and a week of messages.
Crafters routinely discover their quick repeatable products pay better per hour than their impressive ones. That is not a reason to stop making the impressive ones. It is a reason to price them like the luxury they are.
Most makers sell several things and have a feeling about which is best. The feeling is usually about which is most popular, not which is most profitable.
Once each product has a cost per item and a selling price, you can see profit per item beside how many you actually sell. The combination is what matters: a R12 profit item you sell forty of beats a R60 profit item you sell three of, and the reverse is also often true. Neither is obvious until both numbers sit next to each other.
Estimate the share a run consumed. Half a pack is half its price. You are not doing formal stock accounting, you are getting close enough to price with confidence and catch the small items people forget.
The small consumables: clasps, findings, thread, glue, cards, bags, labels and postage packaging. In the worked example above they were R11 of a R24 item — nearly half.
A multiple is a starting point, not an answer. It ignores how long the piece took. Work out cost per item, set a price, then check what it pays you per hour and adjust the price rather than the arithmetic.
Treat it as a run of one. Add up everything it consumed and compare the profit against the hours, including the messages and the shopping trip. One-off pieces are where unpaid time hides.
Little-Till is a small web app for people who sell what they make. You record a batch and what it cost, record your sales, and it keeps the cost per item, what is left in stock and your real profit up to date. It is built for a phone, works when the signal drops, and shows amounts in Rand.
R49 a month or R495 a year, with 14 days free and no card needed to start.
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