Pricing your Work

If you're streamlining your (or some of your) masks/product lines I can offer this "formula" up an old leather man taught me:

Materials + Labor + Overhead = At-Cost Price
At-Cost Price x 1.5 = Wholesale Price
At-Cost Price x 2 (or 2.5, or 3, or 4...) = Retail Price

MATERIALS = cost of materials that go into making 1 item. For leather that's easy enough to figure out (rough # square feet x cost of leather per foot). Some things, like cost of paint/dyes/stains etc are easier to figure out when you're cranking out dozens of the same item at a time. Simply divide the bottles of paint/dye/etc used by the number of masks they'll make, then multiply that number by the price of the bottles and you'll know the cost of that material. (eg: suppose 1 bottle of dye will colour 10 masks and the bottle costs $5. 5/10 = .50 so each masks ends up using $ .50 of dye in addition to the other material costs.)

LABOR = [your hourly wage] x [# of active hours spent working on mask] (does not include soaking since you can be doing something else during that time, does not include drying time unless you use a heat gun). The tricky part here is what do you want to charge for your Hourly Wage? Like Andrea & Picasso said you put all the years of your experience, not just the time you spent on that individual piece, into each of your works. But if it's for something streamlined - something you could theoretically train a monkey/assistant/your kids to do what would you consider a fair hourly wage?

OVERHEAD = either (a) 25% of [Materials + Labor] or (b) 33% of whichever's greater - Materials or Labor. // Overhead in general accounts for the menial costs incurred by your operations - from the electricity to keep your workspace lit to the tea & coffee consumed during a standard creation period to the scissors and other equipment that break or have to be replaced after some-thousand masks have been made. These things are impractical to account on a project-by-project basis so they get lumped under the catch-all category of "Overhead".

But again, it's all really up to you and what sort of operations you're working at. If you're aiming to go into moderate mass-production having a formula like this helps streamline that process. One-of-a-kinds and custom orders are another matter entirely - they take much more of your creative time - so the same pricing strategy might not represent as fair an investment of energies.

Check the market for products similar to yours, ascertain where you feel your technique & experience place you and value accordingly.