Transcripts
1. Intro: pricing handcrafted jewelry for your online shop. Retail shops, boutiques and art galleries from Skill Share and Ari North Handcrafted jewelry has always appealed to extraordinary people on with the continued growth of online markets such as etc . Shopify Store, MB, Amazon and Big Cartel. There is room for everyone to thrive. I'm Ari North. I'm an artist and art teacher. I balance my time between creating developing new projects and teaching in Toronto and designing and nurturing art art classes in my studio. Behind my little cottage in the woods being intertwined with nature and the quiet woods of Algonquin Park inspires my creativity. I'm influenced by the same natural beauty as Canada's renowned group of seven artists from the 19 twenties and thirties. In 1927 artists held the first exhibit as the group of seven. My favorite artist, Tommy Thompson and Emily Carr, were commonly associated with the Group of Seven for their remarkable paintings of Canada's landscape. These artists also spent their time between Toronto and the Canadian Shield and boreal forests. My connection to these artists deepened when I learned that bush, the sled and the iron sculpture at the entrance of my cottage was from Toronto Studio Building, where the Group of seven lived and created in the early years of the 19 hundreds. This sculpture sold the Koch to me. I knew artists had to live here. I share this story with you because this is my life that are built. It is hard work to create a business from handcrafted art, but it is also very possible in financially rewarding set clear goals, and you'll live the life you want. Surround yourself with like minded creators for support and encouragement, along with formal art business education in Montreal, Toronto, New York In Vancouver, I have over 20 years of practical, creative and creative business experience that I enjoy sharing One of my most profitable lines is designing and creating jewelry price in your hand crafted jewelry doesn't have to be difficult. Yet many artists struggled with what to charge to stay competitive and still be profitable . I will take you through a few easy steps and calculations. Yes, there's math toe pricing, your jewelry for today's online market and the retail shops and boutiques and art galleries . Skill shares the perfect place for us to meet and chat about building and maintaining your jewelry business. You already have the creativity and drive to create your own handcrafted our business. Now let's build a community of support, encouragement, motivation Here on skill share for your continued success, I look forward to meeting you online and help you navigate pricing your hand crafted jewelry. Meet you after you enroll.
2. Overview + Class Project: pricing handcrafted jewelry for your online shop. Retail shops, boutiques and art galleries from Still share and Ari North Overview and Class Project and less than one. We're gonna talk about your income bowls on less than two. We're gonna talk about full self pricing, your time, commitment and the quantity of jewelry that you're going to need to make to reach those income bulls. Lesson three. We're gonna talk about the retail market. That's those boutiques and shops and art galleries where weekend sell our jewelry on the retail level and we're gonna talk about retail pricing and Lesson four, We're going to get into the details of the class project in less than five. We have final. Here's a little peek into your class project. I want to see your jewelry and share it with my people so my people can become your people class project in three steps. Number one. Join the community. There's nothing like getting support and motivation and encouragement from like minded creative people like yourself and in the community. We can do that. We can give encouragement and get encouragement. And in number two here we're going to complete your class project and that's where you going to do your pricing, your retail pricing in your whole self race and number three post in the project gallery. I really do want to see all of your jewelry and I mean all of it. And I want to see what your retail prices are and what your wholesale prices are. Maybe some of your plans. And also we want to know where to find you online. This will create that bigger community that we're looking for for some support to give and to get. So I'm gonna meet you in lesson one, where we discuss York income goals.
3. Lesson 1: Income Goals: pricing. Handcrafted jewelry for your online shop, retail shops, boutiques and art galleries from Skill Share and Ari North. Lesson one income goal. It's a lesson one. We're gonna talk about your income goals. So that means how much money do you need to live on items to consider rent or mortgage? Or if you need an amount for a future renter future mortgage? If a move is imminent, you got to take that in consideration. If you think you're gonna be moving in a year, then maybe used those new numbers that you're going to need for your income goals, home maintenance, maintenance fees, land taxes and insurance. So that's just, you know, you might be in a condo where you're paying, um, some homeowner association fees or dues maintenance fees. If you own your home, you know, we always gotta look at we need a new roof. Do we need a lawnmower? Things like that. If you're renting, then you need to look at contents, insurance and that sort of thing, and then you gotta look at your monthly bills. How much are your monthly bills? If you're going to take an average kind of go on the high side because you always want to kind of look at your income goals on the high side. You don't want to be surprised if you know you have a power bill that's usually $75 but for three months of the year goes toe 1 50 kind of calculate a little bit on that higher side. So looking at those power bills, cable bills, water, life insurance, your phones, cellphones, Internet and, of course, taxes. Another expense that you might have is a car. Car needs gas. It needs maintenance and needs insurance and needs license plates and your license that you have to renew. Or if you don't have a car. You got a budget in there for your city transit. The bus passed the train pass, uh, those type of things. And also, do you have any bank loans? Maybe there's still student loans, and we usually have. These bank charges are increasingly coming up is that we have these bank charges that we have to calculate as an expenditure. Also, medical insurance, dental insurance? Are you taking physio that you have to pay for? Are there any other treatments or some prescriptions that has to go into the expense column and also food. So what are your grocery bills like and dining out? You gotta look at those type of expenses. And then, of course, you've got to calculate in four vacation childcare, clothing, housewares, personal care, pets cost a lot of money. Gifts you got to give your Given. Nan is gonna want her gift books, museums, movies, theater and education and classes. So here's Justin example that we're going Teoh to use throughout this class, and this is an example of monthly expenses for just a particular person. I use $1400 for rent because around here this is just sort of outside of Toronto, that is, you know, kind of a typical rent. So when we calculate this fictitious persons expenses, she needs to make $3500 a month to pay for all of her bills. So now we're going to kind of look at what this is about our income goal. So now we know how much money has to go out every month. We know that $3500 pays for us to live the way that we're living now. So let's take that $3500 multiplied by 12 months, and we get a net annual amount of $42,000. Now the government wants its amount of taxes, too, so we're gonna add 30% to that number to 42,000 to get what our gross annual income goaless . So in this particular case, an example, the income goal that were looking at is $55,000 that we spend every year. So that's the amount of money that we want to make. I'm going to meet you and lesson to where we talk about how to make that income goal by wholesale, the time and the quantities that you'll need to be making to reach that income goal.
4. Lesson 2: Wholesale + Time + Quantity: pricing handcrafted jewelry for your online shop, retail shops, boutiques and art galleries from skill sharing, Ari North Lesson two, Wholesale and Time and Quantity. How much jewelry do you have to make to earn $55,000 a year? For the rest of this lesson? We're going to use this example. We're gonna take this ring and price it out. So this is an AM a fist nesting ring. It's made of silver wire. It's non tarnishing, copper underneath and its wire wrapped. We're gonna look at this formula to create the wholesale price. We're gonna look at the labour, how much it costs to make this ring the materials overhead and profit, and that will get us our wholesale price. And that will multiply that by 2.5 for the retail price. But we'll chat about that in the next lesson. Labour cost designing and making jewelry is a skill. If you investigate skilled labor, you will find that $25 an hour is a fair and reasonable wage. Look at your lifestyle and how figure out how many hours that you can work in a day to make your jewelry take into consideration that you will need some time to develop your creative business. Marketing, branding, make connections, build your online boutique and design new items. You are creative. You need time for inspiration. Time for your family and friends, a vacation time for taking classes and hobbies. Keeping with our am a festering example. A reasonable amount of time for making is approximately five hours a day, five days a week, and in this calculation, we're going to say three weeks per month. That extra fourth week in the month is for you to exercise your inspiration and spend time with your loved ones. You don't have to take off one week per month. You can spread that time over the year anyway you like. But what I'm getting at is about an average of 75 hours of making your jewelry per month is a good balance. Okay, let's go back to our equation. So we're gonna look at our labor costs were going to give ourselves $25 an hour for making , and our material costs is just but a meter of wire and three AM A theist beats. We know it takes about 15 minutes to make this ring so the labour costs that goes into this ring is $6.25. The material cost is about 75 cents. So just the labour and material, the cost to produce this ring is $7 But we have to take into consideration or overhead. So that's money that we put out there that is directly to support our business. That's maybe you have a website, Definitely. You're gonna have some office supplies, your PayPal account and fees, maybe some listing fees. If you have ah in Etsy account and you might want to put a little bit of advertising budget in, maybe you do some Facebook ads for about $50 a month. So our overhead per month is $150. We have to get that $150 into the production costs of the ring. So let's look at our time now. So we're gonna work about five hours a day making jewelry, making this ring, so that means we conduce Oh, about 20 rings per day. If you take that 20 rings per day over the 15 days per month that we think that we're going toe work on just making That means we can make 300 rings per month. Our overhead is $150. So we're gonna put that into the 300 rings per month, which means that each ring that we make we have to put 50 cents in to account for overhead . So the costs have produced the ring with labour materials and overhead. It's now up to $7.50 But we need to look at profit. Profit is the money that goes back into your business. So that's going to be money like classes that you might take to improve your skills or business classes or social media classes. Also development, you know, you might want to add to your repertoire of jewelry, so you're gonna need some time, maybe some different materials. So that is the profit that we're talking about. So what I've done for this case is add 20% and that can go up and down depending on you. But 20% in this case is that is a good percentage to add for profit. So that means we're adding the 20% of our $7.50 is a dollar 50. So we're gonna add that to our 7 50 So that makes our total wholesale price is $9 to produce this ring now if you plan to sell directly to customers, so an example would be if you sell at craft fairs and craft festivals, or if you sell online of directly to your customer that this $9 is your minimum break even price. How does this work into the living expenses that we calculate it of $55,000 a year? Let's Dismore Matt. So we're gonna take that $55,000 a year that we need just to live and divide it by our minimum price that we need to charge for this ring this $9. That means to make the $55,000 a year we need to produce to make 6112 rings a year. Can you make over 6000 rings per year? OK, now, let's look at our time commitment versus our income goal. So to achieve our income goal of $55,000 a year, we know that we need to make over 6000 rings in one year. But if we want to stay to our time commitment of making rings for only 75 hours per month on average, then that means we could make 3600 rings in a month. So we are 2512 ring short of reaching our $55,000 income goal if we just base it on our time, what we thought our time commitment we'd like to put into versus the income goal that we need to make. So what do we do? We have lots of choices. First thing that you can consider is reducing the material cost by sourcing other suppliers and buying in bulk when you're new and starting your business, you probably by your items maybe online or from Michael's or Joan's or or just the craft store. So you're already paying their retail price. Soon, when you start by more more material, you can probably source out some wholesalers and you'll be able to reduce your material costs. But we're dealing here in 75 cents, so by reducing your material, cost me to 30 cents somewhere. That's not going to take a big chunk out. So let's see what else we can dio. You could start to work faster, to increase from making four rings per hour to maybe seven or eight rings an hour. And I'll tell you, once you start making one thing over and over and over again and you're mass producing yourself that you will get faster, you'll probably you will be able to double your time so that $25 an hour will go a whole lot further. You can bring that labor costs down toe half because you're making faster. Another thing you could do is revisit your overhead costs and reduce them. So you're gonna look at, you know, is there a different website server that you can use that's going to save you money or, you know, how can you reduce some fees, things like that so you can look at your overhead costs and try and reduce them a little bit. I don't like this next one, but I have to put it in there as an option, and what that is is toe. Look at lowering your profit margin until your creative business is more established, so that means that 20% that we put in there on the previous Page four business development and classes that to reduce that or take that 20% out out now that will reduce your your, you know, wholesale costs. But what that's going to do is eventually you will need that 20% and you might as well add it in at the beginning, then raising your prices later on, when your business is a little bit more established and you've got, you know, Ah, big client base and you don't want to raise your prices on them all of a sudden. So putting that 20% and are tan or 30% whatever your percentage of profit that you want, put it in there right at the beginning. You can make cuts from your monthly expenses for a while, so that's always something you can look at, you know, cut down, going out to eat a little bit more. Um, you know, look at maybe call up the bank and ask for ah, better interest rate. So there's different things that you can do to cut your monthly expenses until you start to get pretty established. Something else you could do is get a little part time job that balances your time versus your income goal. Sometimes we have to do that right at the beginning of starting, starting a creative business that that just keep that income going just to sort of pay the bills for a while. Until things really get off the ground and you can do your handmade business full time, Then you know, you might want to look at a part time job. Now, this one's my favorite. We're gonna focus on this one for a little while, raise your wholesale prices to reflect your income goal. So we're gonna look at this again to reach your $55,000 income goal and make 3600 rings a year, which is your time commitment goal. This ring needs to raise up the price to $15.28. I did some research online. I looked at all the popular handcrafted websites like at Sea and Big Cartel and all those and I found out that $15 for a handcrafted Amma this and silver ring is a very reasonable price, and it will generate an income in an online my ah, boutique. So now that we've got that down, we know what we can charge. Wholesale prices are going to meet you in less than three, where we're gonna talk about the retail market
5. Lesson 3: Retail Market: praising handcrafted jewelry for your online shop. Retail shops, boutiques and art galleries from Skill Share and Ari North. Lesson three, the retail market. Wholesale prices are the minimum you have to charge for your jewelry to pay for your labor , overhead and profit. These prices are perfect for jewelry designers who sell directly to customers, for example, at craft festivals or online shops such as etc. Big cartel Shopify store in the N Amazon. But what if retail shops, boutiques and art galleries come knocking on your door for your jewelry? What price do you charge your retail accounts? Lesson. To outline the wholesale and retail formula as labor plus materials plus overhead plus profit equals wholesale price. Multiply that by 2.5 times for the retail price. So why do we multiply by 2.5 times for the retail price? Well, the retail shops, boutiques and art galleries generally purchase your jewelry for your wholesale price and market up 22 2.5 times to sell. In there shops. We worked out that the amethyst silver nesting ring, where it was to wholesale for about $15.28. We multiply that by 2.5 times. The retail price would be $38.20. Can this ring cell in retail shops, boutiques and art galleries for $38.20? Lesson to his research of wholesale prices for the Amah tests and Silver Nest, Oring revealed that the $15 price point was competitive. It's not the highest price ring, nor was it the lowest. This ring and price will attract a wide range of people online. But now let's think of the people who will spend $38 for the same ring. Let's discover who the ideal customer is, who will purchase this ring for $38. She's a free spirit who appreciates gemstones, especially AM ethicist. She likes that the ring is in a nest design because it represents something to her, like her family or her Children or her best friends or siblings. The design has an artisan look, making it one of a kind, and she's happy to browse around an art gallery boutique and find the special ring. She will spend $38 on this ring at a retail shop boutique er art gallery. It's a really great idea to do a couple of outlines on who you think your ideal customer is to buy your jewelry at both your online wholesale price. If you're just gonna sell directly to customers that way and also your 2.5 times retail price, who would that customer be? Are they the same? Are they different? They likely are pretty different. So try and maybe take some time and build the personality of who your ideal customer is. The Amethyst Nest ring Wholesale prices $15.28. The retail price is 38 20. Now here we're gonna use just a little bit of pricing psychology to finalize these numbers entirely them up. We are conditioned to read prices that end with 99 cents, or 97 cents, or 95 cents as a deal, and this is fine if you want your jewelry to be, associate it as a deal. But if you want to attract high end customers, should endure prices with whole numbers. Zero's air Great. An eight surgery. When are when the Our Season eight. We sometimes just think of it as a zero. So here I think a really good idea is to finalize our wholesale price as $16 and finalize our retail price as $38. There's no sense or anything in this. These air reasonable numbers, um, and offer a handcrafted Amma this ring for, you know, under $40. That's a really great deal at an art gallery or boutique. If you're going to sell your jewelry to retail shops, boutiques and art galleries and in your online shop, it is custom that you set all your prices at the retail price. Selling wholesale prices in your online shop puts you in competition with your retail accounts. You will have far more success if you're online. Shop prices are the same as they are in retail shops. It's also good for your relationship with your retail accounts and excellent for your bank account, cause you're gonna be making 2.5 times your wholesale price in your online shop. Well, I'm going to meet you in less and four where we talk about the whole details of your class project.
6. Lesson 4: Class Project: pricing. Handcrafted jewelry for your online shop, retail shops, boutiques and art galleries from Skill Share and Ari North. Lesson four, Your Class project. Your class project comes in three parts. One. Join the community. Everyone should have cheerleaders to encourage support their creative business. Joining our community will give you that foundation. Our community is positives poor tive and motivates you toe. Follow your dream off a successful creative business number to complete your class project well. Your public class project is for you to post Aziz much jewelry as you can in the Project Gallery with your wholesale and retail prices. But your private class project is to complete the work worksheets of expenses, your time and quantities for your own business records. We don't need to see how much your rent and mortgages that's just for you. Your worksheets can be found in the class section. There's a Pdf download and number three again. I want to say it. We want to see your jewelry and your wholesale prices and your retail prices. We also want to know where we can find your jewelry online. And if you are in any retail shops, boutiques and art galleries and together we're going to build a positive and supportive community, meet you in less than five final thoughts
7. Lesson 5: Final Thoughts: pricing. Handcrafted jewelry for your online shop, retail shops, boutiques and art galleries from Skill Share and Ari North. Lesson five Final Thoughts Pricing handcrafted jewelry in the wholesaler retail market is fundamentally math and confidence. These lessons taught you the man finding a supportive group, a creative business. Owners will help you with your confidence. Keep creating, keep learning, Keep growing your jewelry business Thank you for taking this class. I look forward to sharing more skill share classes with you. Stay in touch. Please share your class project.
Sandra Clarke, zero-waste textile and fibre artist
