Labor of Love…. $?
My mother has immersed herself in the art of bag making. She has knit 2 bags so far. Since she’s the one who created the patterns, I told her she should sell them! The materials cost roughly $25 a bag and would, of course, vary depending on which yarn and materials are used.
How much would you pay for a bag my mother knit? I know it’s really difficult to put a price on someone’s labor, but I’m asking because it has to be realistic. In the ‘market’ it seems the general consensus is to sell a hand-crafted item for three times the cost of the materials. No one in their right mind would pay $75 for a hand-knit bag unless it had some famous designer name tagged inside.
I’ve been asked by people to knit them various things if they bought the materials and paid for my labor. The difficult part is that knitting, to me, is a labor of love. A lot of it has to do with the fact that I’ve already gotten to experience working with the yarn and see the yarn go from string to a finished item. Due to this, the end product is something I’m usually happy to gift to friends/family for birthdays and special occasions and holidays and generally whenever I’m in the mood. So, taking all this into consideration, it is extremely difficult for me to assign a specific cost for my labor; I have yet to knit something for profit.
Anyone want to share their 2¢ ?
Note: These bags are not for sale; they are for only for show.
First off, the bags are beautiful! I have no idea how much to ask, though. Certainly she could get more with them being lined.
Have you checked Etsy to see what bags are going for over there?
I would think they would easily sell for $50 on etsy! They’re beautiful!
I don’t know the market for that sort of thing, $75 seems reasonable. If it were machine made, $40-50 seems fair, so tacking on $25-35 for it being handmade makes sense.
NICE!! I’m not any good at putting a price on hand knit things, either, but I think that if it was my style and I wanted it bad enough, I’d definitely pay $50-75.
Wow! Where are you planning to sell them? You can always aim high and see what happens; a lot of what we think a “fair” price is has to do with the initial price at which something is posted. So if you told me out the gate that those were $75 bags, I’d believe it. How long does a bag take your mom to knit?