When starting a crochet business it’s normal to ask “How much can I get paid selling crochet?” You want to be sure you aren’t wasting your time. To answer the question you need to ask yourself “How much do you want to make?” Unlike a job where you are subject to what your employer can pay you, in your business you can set your wage or your profit by how hard you work.

Let’s Get Specific

Let’s say you want to make $15 per hour and only have 20 hours a week to work your business – that’s $300 per week. Assuming you want this to be profit only, you’ll have to do a bit of math. You’ll first need to know the actual cost of materials. Materials include yarn, fabric labels, shipping, fees, insurance, and anything else that goes into producing and shipping your product.

Once you’ve got this figured out you can use a simple formula to figure out your asking price. For this example we’ll use the standard formula of (materials x3) + cost of labor = price. Input what you want to make in the “cost of labor” and add it to the “materials x 3”. This is how much you charge your customer. Sometimes this’ll be an outrageous sum to charge your customer so the next step is to cut your labor cost.

i.e. ($7.50 x 3 = $22.50) + $15.00 {x 3 hours labor} = $67.50 (see DesigninganMBA)

Your next step is to identify which products you can make that would sell at that price. One more thing you’ll need to consider is state taxes and business expenses like computer access, web hosting, printing invoices, and anything else that goes into running your business. You’ll pay those expenses out of your labor costs ($15/hour). That’s your actual pay, however, it might not be a profit.

Remember most businesses – close to 90% maybe even more – do not earn a profit in the first year and sometimes don’t profit until the third year. Business is tough – just because you make a sale does not mean you’re making a profit, unless you figure your profit into the sale price of your item.

How Much Can You Make?

Back to our original question of how much can you make selling crochet if your goal is to make $15/hour for 20 hours of labor?

Let’s say our $15/hour is our profit. To meet your goal of $300/week you’ll need to produce between 4 – 5 items to sell. There’s a flaw to this example because you spend your working hours doing other behind the scenes work like bookkeeping, customer service, shipping, designing, listing items in your shop, etc.

All your behind the scenes work is unpaid labor unless you figure out a sum to add-on to the total price of your product. As it stands now, your product is close to $70 and depending on what you sell, not many people will spend that much.

What’s the answer to our question? Rethink how you get paid. Consider all work done in producing your product including the behind the scenes stuff. You may even need to add-on an additional labor cost for that.

There’s no easy answer to give you but to encourage you to set the labor cost you want. It is your business.  Make sure you’re offering your customers quality products and services. Give beyond what the market expects and develop a loyal following. Over time you’ll see whether you can make your desired income producing your crocheted items.

Author Bio:

This article came to us from Sara Duggan aka Momwithahook, she writes about crochet business at Crochet Business Blog. If you want more great articles on selling your crochet or blogging about crochet?  Subscribe to her updates via email.

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