The formula
Price = (materials + labor + overhead) × a profit markup. That is the whole thing. The work is in being honest about each part.
Materials is what one item uses: the clay, the glaze, the wick, the jar, the label, the bag it goes home in. Labor is your hours on one item times an hourly wage you would actually accept. Overhead is your share of everything else: booth fees, tools, the kiln’s electricity, gas to the fair, card fees. The markup is profit: the money that lets you buy better tools, survive a rainy show, or pay yourself more next year.
Materials: count everything that leaves with the item
Take what you paid for a batch and divide by how many items it makes. A $36 bag of soy wax that fills 24 candles is $1.50 a candle. Do the same for wicks, jars, fragrance, labels, tissue and the shopping bag.
Add a little for waste. Glazes run, yarn knots, a jar cracks. Five to ten percent on top of materials is a common allowance.
Labor: pay yourself a real wage
Time one item from start to finish, including the boring parts: cutting, sanding, packaging, photographing. If you make in batches, time the batch and divide.
Then pick an hourly rate. Many makers start at their area’s minimum wage and raise it as they get faster and better known. Whatever you choose, use the same number every time, so you can tell which products actually pay.
Labor is the part most people skip. If you leave it out, the price only covers supplies, and every hour at the bench is free work.
Overhead: spread the fixed costs
Add up a season’s costs that don’t belong to one item: booth fees, a canopy and table, tools, display props, insurance, gas, website or shop fees, and card processing (about 3% of card sales). Divide by how many items you expect to sell that season.
If that feels like guesswork, a common shortcut is to add 10 to 20 percent of materials plus labor. Revisit it after a few shows when you know your real numbers.
Markup: the wholesale and retail question
Cost (materials + labor + overhead) is your break-even. A common rule is wholesale = cost × 2 and retail = wholesale × 2, so retail ends up around 4× materials-plus-labor for many makers. At a fair you are selling retail, so price at retail even if you never sell wholesale. If a shop ever asks to carry your work, you will have room to give them their half.
Not every product fits that rule. Big pieces with a lot of labor often land at 1.5× to 2× cost because the number gets too high. Small, quick items can go higher. The point is to know your break-even, so you never go below it by accident.
A worked example: a hand-poured candle
Materials: wax $1.50, jar $2.10, wick and sticker $0.40, fragrance $1.20, label and bag $0.50. Total $5.70, plus 5% waste is about $6.00.
Labor: a batch of 24 takes three hours, so 7.5 minutes each. At $20 an hour that is $2.50 a candle.
Overhead: 15% of $8.50 is about $1.30. Cost is $9.80. At 2× that is $19.60 wholesale. A full 4× would be almost $40, which is high for a candle at most fairs, so this maker settles on $24 retail and knows every sale clears cost by about $14.
Check the number against the fair
Walk the fair, or look up last year’s vendors online, and see what similar work sells for. If yours is far above, either your work is clearly better (say so on the sign), or your process needs to get faster. If yours is far below, you are leaving money on the table and probably signaling lower quality.
Shoppers like a spread: a few small items under $15 that sell on impulse, a middle range, and one or two showpieces. The showpiece makes everything else look reasonable even if it rarely sells.
Round to clean numbers. $24 is easier to say, sign and pay than $23.60, and with QR checkout or Venmo there is no change to make anyway.
After the fair: look at what sold
Write down what sold at each price, or let your checkout keep the list. Items that sell out by noon are underpriced. Items that never move may need a lower price, a better photo or a different fair.
A SnapCart shop is free to start: photos, prices and stock on one link, and shoppers pay with Apple Pay, a card, Venmo, PayPal, Cash App or cash. Sales are listed by item, so after each show you can see what to raise, what to drop, and what to make more of.