Know Your Worth & Be Confident In It

Know your worth & be confident in it before you start marketing your group.

Make a list of everything you sell in your group, then next to each item write out how much that item costs you in materials. That price should include packaging you use to ship your orders, any costs incurred from vendors shipping your materials, the cost of the actual materials, etc. Then next to each item write out how much time it takes you make that item. That time is going to include how long it takes you on average to invoice, find your product, order your materials, actually make your item, and packaging/shipping.

So an example for a t-shirt may look like this:

MATERIALS COST
Shirt: $3.45
Shirt shipping: 30 shirts, shipping was $45 = $1.50
Screen: $5
Screen shipping: 30 screens, shipping was $8 = $.27
Packaging for order: $1
TOTAL: $11.22 per shirt

TIME
Gathering orders & invoicing: 30 shirts / 3 hours = 6 minutes
Ordering materials: 30 shirts / 1.5 hours = 3 minutes
Organizing shirts when received & pairing them with prints: 30 shirts / 2 hours = 2 minutes
Pressing shirt: 30 shirts / 5 hours = 10 minutes
Shipping: 5 minutes per shirt
Communicating with customers, customer service, etc= average 4 minutes
TOTAL: 30 minutes per shirt

Then figure out what YOUR hourly wage is. I would say at a bare minimum, $10 per hour. Based on the numbers above, I need to add $5 per shirt for my labor cost since one shirt takes about 30 minutes of my time.

So my total cost per shirt for materials and labor is $11.22 + $5 = $16.22
Anything OVER THAT is profit. A huge misconception is that anything over the cost of materials is profit.... but you’re shorting your minimum cost of labor.
So then your thought may be, “well I’m only going to charge $16.22 per shirt then!” and that would be a HUGE mistake. Your profit is what pays for marketing, giveaways/promotional items, re-makes, taxes, etc. You NEED that money if you want to have a sustainable business.

I hear a lot of women say “I’m not making any money” and usually it’s because once you write out the numbers, they are literally working for free once they take into account the actual cost of making a shirt and the cost of doing business (re-makes, shipping overages, shipping materials, etc).

So today’s tip... know your mother f’en value. Don’t settle for “bargain” customers so you can make a quick buck... because in the end that “quick buck” is going to cost you a lot more than it was worth.