How to Price Handmade Jewelry

Most handmade jewelry is priced one of two ways: from what the maker down the table charges, or from a number that felt right the year the shop opened. Neither survives two metal-price increases.

The trouble is that jewelry has two material costs, and they behave in opposite ways. Metal is bought by weight at a price that changes daily. Everything else — findings, stones, chain, solder, packaging — is bought in lots and spent one piece at a time. A price built on a guess about either one is a guess.

Here is a real piece, costed line by line. Every figure below comes from the same worked example that ships inside the Jewelry-Maker Pricing & Materials Workbook.

The piece: a Tidepool labradorite pendant. Sterling sheet, bezel-set 8×10 mm labradorite cabochon, on an 18-inch sterling cable chain. 6.2 g finished. 75 minutes at the bench.

Step 1 — Turn your invoice into a cost per gram

Not spot. Spot is what a bullion bar trades at, and you are not buying bullion bars — you are buying rolled sheet and drawn wire in small quantities, which carry a fabrication premium over spot.

Take what your invoice says and convert it:

• Sterling sheet quoted at $46.00 per troy ounce
• A troy ounce is 31.1034768 g → $1.4789 per gram
• Plus a 12% mill and shipping markup → $1.6564 per gram

That conversion is where most homemade cost sheets go wrong. The ounce on a kitchen scale is 28.3495 g. Swap the two and every metal cost you calculate comes out about 10% wrong, in the same direction, on every piece you will ever make.

If your caster or refiner quotes per pennyweight instead, that is 1/20 of a troy ounce — 1.55517384 g.

Step 2 — Weigh the finished piece, then add scrap

Weigh the piece after finishing, before packaging, on a scale that reads to 0.01 g. Then gross it up for the metal that never reached it: sawn edges, filings, the one you scrapped on the third try. Ten to fifteen percent is a common working allowance for fabrication.

You paid for the whole sheet, so the allowance belongs in the price. When you eventually send your lemel back to a refiner, treat the credit as income — not as a reason to have skipped the allowance.

Step 3 — Cost the drawer, by the unit you spend

This is the step that gets skipped, and it is usually the larger of the two material costs on a small piece.

Enter each component as the lot you actually bought and divide by the usable units it holds. Then use the unit you genuinely spend: chain by the inch, solder by the join, pickle by the piece.

Two things worth noticing. The chain alone is $10.20 — very nearly as much as the $11.81 of silver in the pendant body, and it is a component you buy rather than metal you weigh. And the packaging comes to $1.34, more than the metal in the brass and copper pieces in the same catalog.

Materials so far: $11.81 metal + $24.49 components = $36.30.

Step 4 — Work out what an hour at your bench costs

Your bench costs money whether you are at it or not. Add up one period of overhead and divide by the hours you can realistically work.

One rule keeps this honest: never put solder, flux, pickle, saw blades, findings, stones or packaging on this list. They are already costed per piece in step 3. Listing them again as overhead charges every piece for them twice, makes your whole catalog look unprofitable, and sends you raising prices you did not need to raise.

Be pessimistic about the hours. An inflated number makes your overhead per hour look cheap and quietly underprices everything.

Step 5 — Add the time, and get to total cost

At 75 minutes:

(Totals are computed unrounded, so the displayed lines can differ by a cent.)

Those middle and bottom lines each have a job. Cost before your time is everything that must be paid before your hands earn a cent — every dollars-per-hour figure below is measured after it. Total cost already contains your wage, which makes it your wholesale floor: sell below it and you are paying yourself less than you decided to.

Step 6 — Multiply, but know what the multiple is for

The handmade convention is about 2× total cost for a direct retail price. $88.72 × 2 ≈ $178.

That multiple is not arbitrary. At 2×, a shop can buy the piece from you at half your retail price — keystone, which is what a stockist will expect — and double it on their own shelf, and both of you still work. Price below 2× and the arithmetic quietly closes the wholesale door. That is a legitimate choice; it should just be a choice. There is more on the multiple itself in what is a jewelry markup.

Step 7 — Test the price against all three counters

Here is the step almost nobody does, and the one that changes decisions. Take what is left after the materials and the studio, and divide it by the bench hours — separately for each channel.

This pendant clears at all three — which is exactly what pricing at 2× total cost is supposed to buy you.

Run the same test across a catalog and it sorts itself into four groups: pieces that work everywhere, pieces that work direct and on consignment, pieces that only work when you keep the whole price (usually ones with a big fixed material cost, like a long gold-filled chain), and pieces that do not clear your hourly at all.

That last group is worth finding. In the same example catalog, a hand-hammered sterling cuff priced at $96 — a price that felt fine at a craft fair — returns $31 an hour at your own counter against a $32 target, because 14.5 g of silver and 95 minutes went into it. Almost every real catalog has one.

A note on batches

Making ten pairs of earrings is not ten times the work of making one. You anneal, saw, solder, tumble and clean up once.

If you price a batch at the one-off rate you will conclude that wholesale can never work. In the example catalog a pair of moonstone studs pays $23 an hour at wholesale when costed one at a time — and $32 an hour when costed at a batch of ten. Same piece, same price, two different ways of making it.

Do this again next month

A price is a multiple of a cost, and one of those costs moves on its own. Re-enter your metal prices from your latest invoice on the first of the month, then read the channel verdicts again. Some pieces will have quietly moved down a rung, and there is no other way you would ever feel it happen.

Weighing a workbook against dedicated software? That trade-off is laid out in jewelry pricing spreadsheet vs jewelry pricing app, and every tool for makers sits on the templates for craft sellers hub.

Costing a single piece to try the method? Ardent Seller gives away a free Excel Jewelry Maker’s Cost-Per-Piece Calculator (opens in new tab) — no email required. The Jewelry-Maker Pricing & Materials Workbook is what turns that one answer into a priced catalog, a stocked drawer and a channel strategy — and it reprices all of it from one cell when the metal moves.

Every figure above is illustrative, and the metal prices in particular are placeholders that change daily — run your own. This is a business reference, not tax, accounting, legal or appraisal advice.