The Business of Handmade: Pricing Your Cast Jewelry

Pricing handmade jewelry is treated like an art, but the part people get wrong is almost always the math, not the taste.

Start by actually costing the piece

Metal, resin, investment, electricity for burnout and polishing, consumables like polishing compound and sandpaper — add all of it up per piece, not per batch. A lot of studios cost their metal and stop there, which quietly erases the margin on everything else that went into the piece.

Time is a cost, not a bonus

The most common underpricing mistake is treating your own labor as free because you enjoyed doing it. Track your actual hours on a piece — modeling, printing, casting, finishing — and price them at a real hourly rate, even if that rate feels uncomfortable at first. If the math doesn't work at a rate you'd actually accept, the piece is underpriced, not your time overvalued.

A simple formula to start from

(Materials cost + [hours × your hourly rate]) × markup multiplier = price

Markup multipliers vary by market, but 2.5–3x total cost is a common starting point for handmade goods sold direct-to-customer, higher for wholesale-then-retail chains where a retailer also needs margin.

Where studios leave money on the table

Custom and commission work is chronically underpriced relative to standard pieces, because the design and revision time rarely gets costed the same way production time does. If you're doing custom work, price the design consultation and revisions as their own line item — even if you fold it into a single quoted number, know what it actually costs you.

The uncomfortable but necessary check

If you raised every price 20% tomorrow, would you still have customers? If the honest answer is yes, that's real information — it usually means the work has been underpriced for longer than you'd guess.