Don’t just sell jewellery – price it to fund the life you want

How do you really know if you’re making a profit on your jewelry?

I bet, you know what your beads cost. You can tell me to the minute how long it took you to make a piece. But when it comes to putting a price on it? You perhaps wing it a little 🫣. Worse still, you pick a number that feels “right” based on what you’d personally pay. I’ve done all of these, and here’s the thing: that number often leaves out a ton of the invisible bits. Your labour time, Wi-Fi, those cute little thank-you cards you pop in every parcel, your packaging costs, postage. Suddenly your “bestseller” isn’t funding your ideal life, it’s eating away at your profit.

Jewellery pricing isn’t just maths. It’s how you build a business that supports your life, instead of draining it. If you get this right, you’re not just covering costs. You’re paying for growth, for some breathing room, for the chance to design the kind of life you actually want, I’d love that for you ☺️. Whether that’s more time at your bench making, growing your business into a bigger business. Outsourcing and spending more time with the kids, going from hobby to full time jewelry maker, leaving a 9-5 job to start your jewellery making journey. Or, the freedom to choose where you live, how you work, and what your days look like. Yay!

I sat in maths purgatory until the bell set me free

Here’s the funny part – I used to think I was the last person who could ever talk about numbers. If you’d told school-me (or my math teacher) that one day I’d build a seven-figure jewellery business, spreadsheets and all. I’d have laughed you right out of the classroom and so would he for that matter.

My lack of confidence with numbers started in my childhood. From an early age, they (and by ‘they’ I mean the flawed schooling system we have here in the UK). Put all the maths misfits together and hoped for the best in the 80’s. I was right there in the front row and always just assumed I was numerically challenged, so I really didn’t even try in class. It wasn’t said outright by teachers, but being in the bottom set carried its own silent ‘you’re stupid’ message. So, I wrote myself off and spent years telling myself math aint my thing. I eventually realised it wasn’t me that was broken, it was the way math was taught that was broken. Cut to real life and I found out I actually bloody loved numbers! 😍

Hidden Costs You’re Probably Forgetting

It’s so easy to think, “well, the beads cost me £12, lobster clasp was £3 and the jump rings and wire were £2, so £17 it is!” But here’s the thing, that’s only half the story. What about the pretty box you pop it in? The ribbon, tissue paper, the little polishing cloth? Then there’s the boring but real things like website fees, Etsy fees, Credit Card charges, and even the electricity for the lamp you worked under till midnight. These ‘invisible extras’ might feel small on their own, but they add up very quickly. And if you don’t build them into your pricing, you’re quietly eating away at your profit without even realising it.

How to Put a Value on Your Time

If you were working for someone else, say in a shop or an office, you’d expect an hourly wage, right? You wouldn’t clock in, work a full day, and then be told, “thanks so much, but we’ve decided not to pay you.” Crazy talk! Yet that’s exactly what happens when you don’t factor your time into your pricing or you just use your profit margin as your labour fee. Making jewellery isn’t just about materials; it’s your skill, your creativity, and those hours of threading beads or bending wire. I always set myself an hourly rate, the same way an employer would. It means I know that every piece I make is not just covering costs, but also paying me for my time I’ve put into it. That’s the difference between a business that runs on guesswork and keeps you chained to the bench and building a creative business that can actually give you freedom.

Adore your numbers

I think a lot of creative people can relate to my little math story. I wasn’t the only one sat in that front row of maths misfits, and I’m definitely not alone now. Thousands of us were let down by the school system.

But here’s what I’ve learnt, being pigeonholed doesn’t make it true and numbers in the real world are very, very different. They can actually be fascinating, you might even love tweaking them, watching them grow, seeing how they shape your business. I know I do.

How My Little Spreadsheet Changed Everything

For years, I priced my jewelry by guesswork – and honestly, I didn’t look too closely at the numbers at all. I’d set a price that “felt fair,” then wonder why I was working nonstop but my bank account wasn’t growing. It wasn’t that I wasn’t working hard – Back then, I didn’t have a clue about profit or margins – how they worked, or how to make them work for me.

That frustration sent me down a long road of figuring it out. It wasn’t an overnight solution – it was years and years of learning, tweaking, and refining. I asked a ton of questions. I sat with accountants. I took advice from huge amounts of business books and mentors. I tested and adjusted until I could finally see the full picture of my business costs and how important they were.

Eventually, all those conversations and reading, came together in a spreadsheet that actually made sense to me. It wasn’t pretty at first – but every tweak made it more accurate and more reliable.

Suddenly I could see, in black and white, what I was really spending. For the first time, I felt in control. I stopped working for free, raised my prices with confidence, and started running the kind of business I’d always dreamed wanted – one that gave me the freedom. Back then, freedom meant simply not being stuck in a 9-5 job and to have my very own business. Today, it means having a business that funds my travel filled life.

Fast forward 20 years, and that first messy spreadsheet has evolved into the toolkit I still rely on today. It gave me clarity, profit, and choices – the power to design a business that supports my life.

And now, I want to teach you how to do the same. I’ve built my spreadsheet into a step-by-step toolkit, so we can go through this process together. You don’t have to figure it all out the hard way like I did – I’ll guide you, one step at a time, so you can skip the years of trial and error and start pricing with confidence today.

Why I Adapted My Spreadsheets for You

There’s a lot of product pricing calculators on the market and they’re overcomplicated. They ask you to pick between multiple margin models, dozens of pricing scenarios, and unnecessary formulas – and before you know it, you’re so buried in ‘options’ that quite frankly you don’t need.

I created the opposite. My toolkit gives you one clear, proven path to a fair, profitable product price – so you stop second-guessing yourself and start focusing on making and selling your jewelry.

This isn’t just a few spreadsheets – it’s a system that gave me clarity, cash flow, and confidence for years when building my 7 figure jewelry business. And now it’s built for you – simplified, guided, and designed to help you price your jewelry correctly the first time (and every time).

Whatever your maths story, whether you’re at the start of your beading journey or years in, whether you’re bloody brilliant with numbers or would rather eat the bottom of a bird cage than face those numbers, my Jewelry Pricing Toolkit will work for you. It’s a super simple tool to help you build your business on the right foundations, and to give you the freedom to focus on the bigger picture: creating, living, kids, travelling – whatever your freedom looks like.

Step-by-Step: How My Jewellery Pricing Toolkit Works

Overheads → Build out all your business overheads in my formula driven spreadsheet.

Pricing Calculator
Set Up → pick your currency and units so the number formulas run beautifully.
Build your inventory → add in every single bead, clasp, chain, ribbon etc with its cost for all your collections (takes a little time, but worth it!)
Log your hourly rate → because working for free is just silly!
Build your products → One by one build your freedom
Watch the sheet do its magic! → The sheet calculates your profit per piece and gives you a proven RRP (recommended retail price) you can actually feel confident about.

Coming Soon!

I’m so excited to share My Jewelry Pricing Toolkit, and it’s almost ready to launch, designed to help you price with confidence, stop guessing, and finally pay yourself what you’re worth.

Want to be the first to know when it’s live?
Subscribe below to get an email the moment it launches – plus an exclusive early-bird discount when it does.

“At the end of the day, my spreadsheet isn’t just about jewellery pricing, it’s about buying back your time. Tools like this are what make freedom possible: to create more, to live more, and (if you’re like me) to plan on splitting your year between two countries OR in many countries. That’s the bigger picture. That’s why it matters.”