Silver moved again. Do you know what that did to your prices?
Jewelry has two material costs, and no general-purpose pricing template models either one. The first is metal — bought by weight, at a price that changes while you sleep. A pendant you costed in March is quietly a different pendant in September, and nothing on your bench tells you so.
The second is the drawer. Clasps, ear wires, jump rings, head pins, chain by the inch, a parcel of cabochons, solder chips, flux, pickle, a saw blade, an earring card, a polishing cloth, a mailer. Each is a few cents to a few dollars, none of them feels worth writing down, and together they can outweigh the metal entirely — in the worked example the moonstone studs carry $22.52 of drawer components against $4.57 of silver.
This workbook closes both gaps — and then asks the question that actually settles an argument.
What does this piece pay you per bench hour?
Not margin. Margin lies to you: a 60% margin on a piece that takes three hours is a worse business than a 45% margin on one that takes twenty minutes.
The Price Ladder puts the same piece at three counters — your own, a shop’s, and a gallery’s — and shows what each genuinely pays your hands per bench hour, once the materials and the studio are paid for. Then it gives every piece a verdict:
- All channels — you could stock a shop tomorrow without quietly working for less.
- Direct + wholesale — a stockist works, but a gallery’s commission leaves too little.
- Direct + consign — it works at your table and a gallery’s, but a wholesale keystone leaves too little.
- Direct only — a big fixed material cost (a long gold-filled chain, an expensive stone) means only you can sell it.
- Underpriced — it doesn’t clear your target hourly even when you keep the whole price.
Most makers have never seen that column. It reorders a catalog in ways the price tags never suggest.
One cell reprices the whole catalog
This is the thing a per-piece calculator structurally cannot do.
Metal lives in exactly one place. Enter what your invoice actually says — per troy ounce, pennyweight, gram or kilogram — plus any mill markup for having it rolled or drawn, and the workbook returns your cost per gram. Change it, and every piece built from that metal recosts: through its total cost, through the suggested retail, through all three dollars-per-hour columns, and through to which channels it can still afford to stand at.
Twenty-one metals ship pre-loaded, from sterling sheet and fine-silver bezel strip to 14k, 18k and 22k gold, gold-filled, platinum, palladium, brass and copper.
And the conversion is right: a troy ounce is 31.1034768 grams, not the 28.3495 on your kitchen scale. Swap the two and every metal cost you calculate is about 10% wrong, in the same direction, forever.
The drawer, written down
The Materials Inventory takes each component as the lot you actually bought — a pack of 100 jump rings, a five-foot spool of chain, a parcel of six cabochons, a bottle of flux — and how many usable units it holds. Out comes:
- a cost per unit that every piece build multiplies against,
- on-hand quantities and a reorder point,
- a Stock flag that turns red before a sold-out clasp stops an order you’ve already taken money for,
- and the total value sitting in your drawer, which is usually more than makers expect.
Thirty-six components ship pre-loaded, with the units you actually spend: chain by the inch, solder by the join, pickle by the piece.
The tenth one is not the first one
Making ten pairs for a wholesale order is not ten times the work of making one — you anneal, saw, solder, tumble and clean up once. Set the batch size you genuinely work in and a run-rate curve costs the piece honestly.
In the worked example a batch of ten turns a piece paying $23/hour at wholesale into one paying $32/hour — the difference between “wholesale never works” and a standing order.
What’s in the workbook
Ten tabs, all connected:
- Read Me — how the tabs fit together, and the one rule that keeps the math honest
- Metal Prices — your invoice price ÷ 31.1034768 = your cost per gram
- Materials Inventory — lot price ÷ usable units = cost per unit, plus stock and reorder
- Piece Build — the bill of materials behind every price
- Piece Catalog — metal + components + studio + your hour, with a batch run-rate
- Price Ladder — retail, wholesale and consignment, each as dollars per bench hour
- Studio Overhead — your bills ÷ real bench hours = your studio cost per hour
- Custom Order Quotes — commissions priced from today’s metal, with deposit and rush
- Sales Log — one line per sale across five counters, with the costs filled in
- Collection Summary — take-home, margin by collection and by channel, drawer value, and how much of your bench actually sold
Plus five PDF guides, including a bench reference you’ll keep near the scale: troy ounces, pennyweight and carats; silver and gold fineness; metal densities for estimating a piece from a sketch; wire gauge with sterling weight per inch; and what gold-filled, vermeil and plated are actually allowed to mean.
Who it’s for
Silversmiths and metalsmiths who buy sheet and wire by weight. Bench jewelers and bezel setters. Beaders and wire-wrappers with a drawer full of findings. Market and online sellers who need to reprice a catalog when silver moves. Anyone weighing up wholesale — and anyone who takes commissions and would like to stop quoting from last quarter’s gold price.
Works in Excel and Google Sheets
You get the .xlsx file and a one-click Google Sheets copy — a ready-made native version, already set up and tested, with every dropdown and formula working. No importing, no broken formatting. It opens in LibreOffice Calc too. Everything ships pre-filled with a worked example of fourteen pieces across five collections, so nothing is blank when you open it.
Own it, don’t rent it
This is a file you keep, not a subscription you feed. No monthly fee, no account, and no one else holding your costs or your price list. It sits between a blank spreadsheet — free, but you build it all yourself — and studio software you probably don’t need yet.
If the bench outgrows the file, Ardent Seller (opens in new tab) is the living version: inventory, manufacturing and sales in one connected place, with your components counting themselves down as pieces are made, on the same own-it ethic and with a free plan to start.
Costing just one piece?
Ardent Seller gives away a free Excel Jewelry Maker’s Cost-Per-Piece Calculator (opens in new tab) — metals by the gram, stones by the carat, findings and labor, no email required. It’s genuinely good, and it answers one piece at a time.
This workbook is what turns that one answer into a priced catalog, a stocked drawer, a channel strategy, and a month you can read.
A business reference — not tax, accounting, legal, or appraisal advice. Every figure in the examples is illustrative; the metal prices especially are placeholders that move daily, so enter your own. This helps you set aside for taxes but does not file or calculate them. It is not an appraisal tool, and it is not legal guidance on hallmarking or product description — in the United States what you may stamp and what you may call a piece are governed by the FTC’s Jewelry Guides at 16 CFR Part 23 and the federal stamping statutes, and equivalent rules apply elsewhere.
