How to Cost Your Own Labour, When Someone Else Makes It and Sends You the Bill

I do not make the jewelry I sell. A karigor makes it, and he sends me a bill — ৳300 to ৳1,000 a piece depending on the design. That bill is the thing most handmade sellers never get, and not getting it is why so many of them price their own labour at zero without ever deciding to.

Where these numbers come from

My own shop, from my own records, 4 September 2026. I buy the silver, pay a karigor — a goldsmith — to make the piece, then photograph it, pack it and sell it. Because the making is bought rather than done by me, the cost of labour in every item I sell is a hard number on an invoice, not a feeling.

Making charge I pay per piece	৳300 – ৳1,000	$2.45 – $8.15
What I bill the customer for it	karigor’s rate + 10–30%	—
Time from order-to-karigor to ready-to-ship	about 1 day	—

What an external labour price does to your thinking

When the labour arrives as an invoice, three things become impossible to avoid.

1. You cannot leave it out of the price. Somebody has to be paid on Friday. A cost you pay in your own hours can be quietly skipped; one you pay in cash cannot.
2. You find out what the work is worth on the open market. Not what you think it is worth, not what you would like it to be worth. What a skilled person charges to do it.
3. The harder design costs visibly more. ৳1,000 instead of ৳300 shows up before the piece is even listed. When you make it yourself, the complicated design costs you three extra hours and £0 on paper, so it gets priced as though it were the simple one.

That third one is the expensive one. It is why the most intricate item in a handmade shop is so often the least profitable, and why sellers are always mildly resentful of their own best-selling product without knowing why.

The markup is the only lever I have

My silver is priced off a public rate the customer can look up, so I cannot mark it up. Everything I earn beyond the metal comes from the 10–30% I add to the making charge. On a ৳650 making charge at 20%, that is ৳130 — about $1.06.

Being able to say that out loud changes what I work on. There is no point agonising over a 2% price rise when the labour line is 11.5% and I control the markup on it. The full breakdown of where the rest goes is in the margin analysis of my own shop.

How to give yourself the same invoice

If you make your own work, you already pay this cost — you just pay it in hours and never see the bill. Here is how to make it visible without pricing yourself out of your market.

1. Time one real piece, end to end, once. Not an estimate. Start the timer when you pick up the first component and stop it when the piece is finished. Include the parts you do not think of as making: laying out, cleaning up, the failed first attempt.
2. Pick a rate you would accept from someone else. The test is simple: if a friend asked you to make this piece for them at that rate, would you say yes on a Tuesday evening? If the honest answer is no, the rate is too low.
3. Write the result on the listing as a fixed number. “Labour: 45 min × $18 = $13.50.” It is now a line item, and line items get defended in a way that feelings do not.
4. Add your markup on top, deliberately. Your labour cost pays you for the hour. The markup is what pays the business for existing — the listing that did not sell, the batch that failed, the hosting bill. Mine is 10–30% and it is a decision, not a leftover.

The two mistakes this exposes

The mistake	What an invoice would have shown you
“I’ll pay myself out of what’s left”	There is rarely anything left. Labour that is paid last is paid least
Charging the same for a simple and a complex design in the same range	The complex one can cost three times the labour and earn less than the simple one
Not counting the failed piece	Its labour is real and has to be carried by the ones that sell
“My time is free, it’s a hobby”	Then your price is a hobby price, and a competitor pricing properly cannot follow you down

There is a version of the last one that is completely legitimate: deciding, knowingly, to sell below your labour cost to build reviews or clear stock. That is a strategy. What is not a strategy is doing it by accident for two years.

Three things to do with this

1. Time your slowest-selling item and your fastest. If the slow one takes twice as long and sells for the same, you have found your problem in one afternoon.
2. Put labour into your pricing as a fixed line, above your markup. Materials, then labour, then overhead, then fees, then markup — in that order, so the markup is the last thing calculated and not the first thing squeezed.
3. Re-price the design you dread making. That feeling is data. It is almost always the piece whose real labour cost never reached its price.

All shop figures are my own, from my records on 4 September 2026. Converted at 122.63 BDT to the dollar, the rate on 3 September 2026.

Questions people ask about this

How much should I pay myself per hour for handmade work?

There is no universal figure, and anyone quoting one is guessing about your market. The usable test is whether you would accept that rate to make the same piece for someone else on a weekday evening. If not, it is too low — and if your market will not bear the resulting price, that is information about the product, not a reason to lower the rate.

Should labour go in before or after materials in a pricing formula?

Order does not change the arithmetic, but it changes behaviour. Put materials, labour and overhead in as fixed costs, then fees, then your markup last. Whatever sits last in the formula is what gets shaved when you want to hit a price — so it should be the profit you are choosing to give up, not the hour you already worked.

What if adding my real labour cost makes the price too high?

Then you have learned something true: at your current speed and design, that item does not work at that price. The three honest responses are to make it faster, to change the design, or to stop selling it. Absorbing the labour is not a fourth option — it is the first three, delayed.

Does outsourcing making actually cost less than doing it yourself?

In cash, no — I pay ৳300–1,000 a piece I would otherwise pay nothing for. In clarity, yes. I know exactly what the labour in every item costs, which design is expensive, and what my markup on it is. That knowledge is worth more than the money for anyone trying to price properly.