Does Your Bestseller Earn Anything? Pricing Handmade Work

2026-10-14

The queue at the supermarket is five people long, and you are standing in it with a basket of oat milk and a bag of rice, doing sums in your head.

The ceramic mugs sold well on Saturday. Twelve of them. Your phone buzzes with another Etsy order, and for a second you feel that small lift. Then the other thought arrives, right behind it: but did I actually make anything on those?

You don't know. That is the strange part. You have been selling for two years, and you still don't know.

The two notebooks

There is a notebook for the market. It lives in the cash box, a little bent at the corners, with tally marks and a coffee ring on the cover.

There is a second record for the online shop. It is a mix of order emails, a dashboard you check when you are bored, and a spreadsheet you started in March and stopped updating in May.

The two have never met.

So when someone asks, kindly, over a Sunday lunch, "And is it going well? Is it paying for itself?", you say, "Yes, it's going really well." You say it warmly, because the shelves are full and people do buy.

But your stomach tightens a little, because you are answering with a feeling, not a number.

What you quietly carry

You remember what the clay cost. Roughly. You remember the glaze, though not which batch. You know the platform takes a fee, and then there is a payment fee, and the postage you sometimes absorb because the customer seemed so nice.

You do not count the little paper bags. Or the stall fee, divided across the day. Or the hour you spent photographing the mugs on the windowsill when the light was right.

Prices were set the way most makers set them. You looked at what others charge, felt a bit shy, and picked something that seemed fair. Maybe a little less than fair, just in case.

The cost is not only money. It is a low hum of doubt that follows you into the studio. It is the reluctance to look at the numbers, because looking might confirm something you would rather not know. It is the feeling that you are a hobbyist who happens to have a card reader.

You are not. You make real things that people carry home and use every morning.

The Saturday that turned it

Imagine a market day in October. Grey sky, a gas heater humming behind the stall, your breath showing a little.

A woman picks up one of your bestselling mugs, turns it over in both hands, and says, "Oh, this is lovely. It's so reasonable, too."

She means it as a compliment. And you smile and thank her.

But for the rest of the afternoon, the word reasonable sits in your chest like a stone. Reasonable for whom? For her, obviously. For you, you honestly do not know.

That evening, packing the unsold stock into crates, you realise that the problem is not that your prices might be too low. The problem is that you have never been able to see it. You have been guessing, kindly and nervously, for two years.

And guessing is tiring in a way that making is not.

It doesn't have to be a guess

Here is the gentle thing you can take from this: the not-knowing is not a flaw in you. It is simply what happens when costs live in one place, fees in another, and sales in two notebooks that never speak.

When the numbers sit side by side, one product at a time, something shifts. You can see what a mug really costs to make, what the platform and the card reader take, and what is left. You can see which item quietly carries the others, and which one has been costing you a little every time it sells.

No drama. No scolding. Just a plain picture you can look at with a cup of tea.

A different Monday

Picture the next Monday morning instead.

The studio is cold for the first ten minutes, then the kiln room warms up. Last week's market sales and online orders are in one place. You typed them in on Sunday evening in about ten minutes, between the washing-up and the news.

You know that the small mugs earn well. You know that the large planter, the one you love making, needs a higher price, and you know roughly what that price could be. It is not a leap of faith anymore. It is a number you can say out loud.

The next time someone says "reasonable," you will still smile. But you will smile because you chose that price, not because you hoped it was alright.

And in the supermarket queue, your mind is free to wonder about oat milk and what to glaze next, instead of doing sums it cannot finish.

If you recognise yourself

If this sounds like your stall, your shop, or your two notebooks, there is a calm way to start. We made Price Your Handmade Work Right – Cost, Fees & Profit Calculator, an Excel workbook for makers. It shows cost, fees and profit per product, suggests a price, and keeps your market and online sales in one place. It comes with a 30-day money-back promise: if it doesn't help, you get a full refund, no questions.

You can look at it here, whenever it suits you: Price Your Handmade Work Right

It is a tool for organising your own numbers. It does not replace a tax professional, and the decisions stay with you.

An illustrative story, written with AI assistance.