If you hand-make the stuff you sell in your business then you should read this fab article. Lex makes quirky clothes with cute names like ‘Nightshade dress” and “Fairytale coat”.

In the article she works out how long it takes for her to make a dress – 218 minutes – and the cost of material – $18. She sells the piece for $75. That’s cheap. Very cheap (She’s getting less than $18 per hour)

But some of her ‘customers’ have been telling her that her stuff is too expensive. (In fact one said “I could make that for $5”)

When you make hand-made stuff and you hear people say it is ‘expensive’ you naturally want to drop the price.  But please don’t! You need to be paid fairly for the work you do.

Your main cost is your time, and you’ve only got a limited supply of that. Drop your prices and you’ll be paid next to nothing for your time. You can’t afford to do it.

So what can you do instead?

When people say something is expensive what they are really saying is that it costs more than they would like to pay for it. And that’s very much an individual point of view.  After all, expensive for one person is another person’s ‘cheap’.

So if people are saying your stuff is expensive you are selling to the wrong people. These people don’t care about your hard work and they don’t value what you do. Knocking a few dollars off isn’t the answer; they want a product mass-made in China, not hand-made at yours.

Instead you should go looking for the customers who love hand-made quirky, individual pieces. These are the people who will happily pay for the privilege of owning your craft.

Do you sell hand-made? Got any customer tips to share?!

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