Sold a vase for €80 that took a week. Did the math on my own time and I'm basically working for €1.40/hour.
Okay so I finally wrote down the actual hours on a piece for the first time. Big mistake. Huge.
This vase, the one I posted last week, the green one with the little face peeking through the glaze. Sold it at the market for €80, felt like a win. Real figure, fine, whatever.
Then I counted. Seven days on and off because the clay kept slumping when I built it too tall, two failed attempts in the kiln, the glaze crawled on the first fire and I had to sand the whole thing down and redo it. Like 55+ hours all in.
€80 for 55 hours. That's about €1.40 an hour. A kid with a lemonade stand earns more than that.
I don't get how other makers survive on this. Either they're way faster than me, or they're not counting either, or they've got a partner with a real salary. My grandma keeps asking why I don't just charge more and honestly? Fear. I'm scared that if I put €180 on it nobody buys it and I've made a thing that just sits in the studio taking up shelf space.
But at €1.40 an hour I could flip burgers and have more money and more free time. I want to know what the actual number is that makes it worth it. Not the dream number. The one where I don't feel like a clown doing this.
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The math never flatters, and it's better you wrote it down. Most makers avoid it for exactly this reason. But I'd push back a little: the 55 hours aren't the price of the vase, they're the price of learning to build that tall without slumping, get the glaze to crawl right, pull the face through without wrecking it. The next one takes less. The one after that, less again.
The real problem isn't your hour rate, it's that the market pays for the object, not the apprenticeship that went into it. An €80 vase carries maybe three good hours of actual labour once you know what you're doing. The other fifty are tuition, and nobody at the market is going to reimburse you for those.
The question is whether you can get to the pointy end faster, or charge what the knowing is worth. Both, ideally. But don't let the first honest count talk you out of the whole thing. It's the first one that hurts.
Mm, that's wisdom right there, and I know it for true. I've sewn my whole life and if I counted every hour I spent learning to cut a straight line by eye or fix a seam I'd've wept long ago. That tuition just comes with the craft.
But I'll tell you what nobody says out loud: the hours count double when they're your first of something. That vase taught you more than eighty euros' worth, child, and now that lesson's yours forever.
Still, I want you to price the next one like you mean it. You're not charging for the clay, you're charging for the hands that know what to do with it now. Don't sell yourself short just because the first one cost you dear.
"the hours count double when they're your first of something", oof, that's gonna stay with me. You're right though. The slumping, the crawl, the sanding, all of that was me paying for knowledge I literally cannot lose now. Next green vase I build? Stands up first try.
But hear you on pricing like I mean it. That's the part I keep chickening out on. I'll do the math on the next one before I put the tag on it, not after. Maybe then I finally stop undercutting myself to make a sale feel good.
Also "the hands that know what to do with it now", that's going on a post-it on my kiln. Thank you for that.
okay that's actually a fair point and I needed to hear it. the slumping thing is definitely a lesson I keep paying tuition on. but the "three good hours" thing hits different, that's the part I'm chewing on now. like, should I be charging what the market says or what my time actually costs? because if I price the vase at what 55 hours 'should' earn I'm selling nothing, and if I price it for the three hours I'm basically betting the learning all gets amortised eventually. I think I'm more mad that the two failed kiln loads are invisible in the price, you know? nobody sees those. they're just my problem.