We Have to Talk About the Cost Of “Handmade”

How Artisans Price Their Handcrafted Work

Valerie Schafer Franklin
Creators Rising
Published in
8 min readSep 29, 2023

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An illustrator tightly grips an ink pen as they draw a cartoon on a sheet of high quality expensive paper, which is held to a board with masking tape. His tools and materials and scattered around.
Photo by Dillon Wanner on Unsplash

Pricing is one of the hardest decisions artisans have to make. Unlike modern retailers who may price their products as a “loss leader” or strategically price them as high as the market will bear, artisans generally price their products with a simple and transparent formula: (the cost of Materials + Time) multiplied by

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Valerie Schafer Franklin
Creators Rising

Building Artisans Cooperative (https://artisans.coop), running a family craft business (walnutstudiolo.com) and writing for fun about food.