Selling your work · What a pot actually costs
Clay, firing, membership and hours, divided by the pots you actually finish.
Most people price off a feeling and find out later they were paying for the privilege. The materials in a mug are a few dollars; the membership and the hours are the cost, and both get divided by the pots that reached the table, not the pots you started. Do the sum once and the price has a floor.
Four steps with a tick list at each: the honest count, materials, the two big lines, and the floor. Six mistakes, most of them about what got left off the envelope, and five videos of potters doing the sum out loud.
This is the short version: the count, the materials, the two big lines, the floor, each with a tick list. The worked example, the Level arithmetic and the questions are in the comprehensive version.
Read it, then watch it
Why this is written down and filmed, both.
The cost of a pot is a sum, and a sum belongs on a page next to the numbers that go into it: clay by the pound, firing by the cubic inch, membership by the month, hours by the hour, divided by the pots that made it to the table. What a page cannot do is make you believe the answer, and that is what the videos are for: five potters doing the sum on camera and being surprised by it, which is the moment this page is trying to give you.
Use both, in this order
Read the four lines of the sum. Watch a potter do it out loud. Do it once, on the back of an envelope, for one mug, with the tick list open.
The whole idea
Clay, firing, membership and hours, divided by the pots you actually finish.
Materials are a few dollars a mug. The month’s membership and your hours are the cost, and both get divided by the pots that reached the table, not the pots you started. Do it once on an envelope and the price has a floor under it. Most people price off a feeling and find out later they were paying for the privilege.
The five-minute version
The whole sum in six moves.
If you have priced anything before and you just want the shape of it, this is the shape of it. Everything below is these six moves, slowed down and with the places they fail marked.
Before the first line
What you need on the envelope.
Six things, and the last one is the whole lesson. The timer is the one nobody uses and everyone should.
An envelope, the bag price and a scale, the firing calculator, your membership receipt, a timer, and an honest count.
Step one
Count the pots that reached the table, not the pots you started.
This is the line everyone gets wrong. Twenty mugs thrown. Sixteen survived trimming. Fourteen came out of the glaze kiln. Eleven were good enough to sell. The clay, the firing and the hours were spent on all twenty, and the price of a good mug has to carry the nine that did not make it. Divide by eleven, not twenty.
A beginner finishes about half of what they start. A practised potter finishes most. That survival rate is the biggest single reason a beginner’s mug costs twice what a professional’s does, and it is also the reason the cost falls as you improve without anything else changing. Write the number down honestly for one month: started, trimmed, bisqued, glazed, sold.
The pots that did not make it are not waste; they are tuition. But they are tuition the survivors pay for, and a price that ignores them is a price below cost. TaraLee’s video below is fifteen minutes on exactly why the feeling is wrong, and this is the line it is wrong about.
Step two
Materials per pot: clay, firing, glaze. A few dollars, and not the cost.
The receipts are the small part. Clay by the pound: a $28 bag here is 25 pounds, a mug is about a pound, so a little over a dollar. Bisque is free. The glaze firing is five cents a cubic inch with a $4.80 minimum, so a mug is $4.80 and a tray of small things on one cookie shares it. A dollar of glaze, roughly, from the wall. Six or seven dollars for a mug, before anything else.
The firing line is the one people underestimate, because a big bowl or a tall vase is priced on its longest dimension in every direction, and our calculators page works it out from the measurements. Small pieces of roughly the same height on one six-inch cookie, a quarter inch apart and under 100 cubic inches together, pay as one piece, which is why a tray of small things is cheaper per piece than one mug. Clay discounts by Level, from two to six dollars a bag from Yellow up, move the clay line a little.
And then the things without receipts on the pot: a bag of clay that dried out, the glaze on the pot that crazed, the packaging, the listing fee, the market table. Put them on the month, not the pot, and divide them by the finished count with everything else.
A worked mug
A pound of clay from a $28 bag is $1.12. Bisque is free. A mug four inches across and four and a half tall is 72 cubic inches, which is under the minimum, so the glaze firing is $4.80. A dollar of glaze, a few cents of wax. About seven dollars in materials, before the two lines that matter.
Step three
Membership per pot, and hours per pot. This is the cost.
Two lines carry the price. The month’s membership divided by the pots finished that month. And the hours per finished pot, from wedging to the photograph, at a rate. For most members the membership line is bigger than all the materials together, and the hours line is bigger than that.
Membership: Green Level is $145 a month; a beginner finishing ten pots pays over fourteen dollars of membership per pot. Black Level is $275; a member finishing forty pots pays under seven. The same wheel, the same kiln, and the per-pot cost halves because the count doubled. Making more pots on the same membership is the most useful fact on this page, and it is why potters who sell make in batches.
Hours: time six pots, honestly, from the wedging table to the listing photo, including trimming, handles, glazing, sanding the foot, and the walk to the drop-off table. Divide by six. Then a rate, any rate; beginners often use what they would earn doing something else and raise it as they get faster. A mug that takes ninety minutes of your time at fifteen dollars an hour is twenty-two dollars of labour before clay touches the wheel. Jonthepotter’s video below does this arithmetic on a whiteboard, out loud.
Step four
Add it up. That is the floor, not the price.
Materials plus membership plus hours, per finished pot. For a beginner on Green Level finishing ten mugs a month, that is six or seven dollars of materials, fourteen of membership, twenty or more of hours: forty dollars a mug, and that is the floor. Cost is the number the price cannot go below without you paying to make the pot. It is not the price.
The price is cost plus a margin, checked against what comparable work sells for, and our selling lesson is that half. What this page is for is the moment before, when you know the number. Some people look at forty dollars and decide to sell mugs at fifty; some decide to make eighty pots a month on a Black Level membership and get the cost to fifteen; some decide the mug is a hobby and a gift and worth exactly what it cost. All three are right, and all three need the number.
Natalie Santoro’s video below is ten minutes of what the sum looks like for a small pottery business a few years in: the overheads that never make it onto a beginner’s envelope, and the reason the price of a professional’s mug is what it is.
Watch it done
Now watch five people do the sum out loud.
Watch this one, then go find an envelope.
None of these potters work here or know we exist. Between them they cover the arithmetic on a whiteboard, the beginner version, why the feeling is wrong, the overhead honestly, and a potter’s own worksheet. Nothing but the still frame loads until you press play.
Eleven minutes of a working potter adding up one pot and multiplying. The other four videos are in the comprehensive version.
When it goes wrong
Six ways it goes wrong, and what to do about each.
The three mistakes everyone makes first.
Pick the one that looks like your envelope. The first three are the feeling, the count and the hours. The last three are the membership, the market, and the hobby.
You priced it at what felt right and it felt wrong later
A feeling is not a number. It is usually the price of the last mug you bought, minus a discount for not being a real potter, and it is below cost more often than not.
The arithmetic on this page, once, on the back of an envelope, for one mug. Then the feeling has a floor under it.
Work it out now for the pot in your hand. If the number is above what you charged, the next one is priced from the number.
You divided your costs by the pots you made, not the pots you finished
Twenty pots thrown, sixteen survived trimming, fourteen came out of the glaze kiln, eleven were good enough to sell. The clay, the firing and the hours were spent on twenty. The price has to be carried by eleven.
Count the pots that reached the table, not the wheel. A beginner finishes half of what they start; the price of a good pot carries the ones that did not make it.
Recount. Then reprice.
You counted the clay and the firing and forgot yourself
Materials on a mug are a few dollars. The hour of throwing, trimming, handling, glazing, sanding, photographing and listing is the cost, and it is the one people leave out because it does not come with a receipt.
An hourly rate, any hourly rate, and honest hours per finished pot. Even a low rate turns a five-dollar mug into a twenty-dollar one on paper.
Time the next six mugs, start to shelf, and divide.
You forgot the membership and the tools
A studio membership is the rent, the wheel, the kiln and the glaze wall, and it is paid whether you make one pot or forty. Divided by the pots you finish in a month, it is often the biggest line.
Membership divided by finished pots per month, on every pot. Tools and bags of clay the same way over their life.
Add it to the sheet. The number goes up, which is the point.
You priced below the market to be nice, and it cost you and everyone else
A pot priced below cost tells a buyer that handmade pottery is cheap, and the next potter at the market pays for that too. Nice is not a price.
Cost, then a margin, then a look at what comparable work sells for, and the higher of the two. If the market price is below your cost, the answer is to make the pot faster or better, not cheaper.
Raise it. Most potters who raise a price sell the same number of pots.
You do not want to sell, and the arithmetic still matters
Nothing on this page requires selling. Knowing that a mug costs you twenty dollars to make is what stops a family member asking for twelve of them for Christmas at no charge.
Do the sum once anyway. A number you know is a number you can give away on purpose.
Enjoy the mug. It cost twenty dollars and it is worth more.
How it works here
At The Clay Hole, the numbers are on the website.
This page is written for potters everywhere. A few things are specific to our building, so you know before you start.
Three things to know here
Clay is from $28 a 25-pound bag, with Level discounts from Yellow up. Bisque is free; the glaze firing is five cents a cubic inch, $4.80 minimum, worked out on the calculators page, and small pieces of a height on one cookie pay as one. Membership is $145 to $275 a month by Level, divided by the pots you finish. Your work is yours to sell.
Clay
From $28 for a 25-pound bag, from our shelves; no outside clay. Yellow, Purple and Black Level Members get two, four and six dollars off a bag. A mug is about a pound, a bowl two, a platter four or more.
Firing
Bisque is cone 05 and free. The glaze firing is cone 5½ at five cents a cubic inch on the longest measurement in every direction, $4.80 minimum, $600 cap, paid before the piece goes on the drop-off table. Our calculators page does the sum from the measurements.
Membership
Green $145, Yellow $170, Purple $200, Black $275 a month, with more classes, shelf space and clay discount as the Level goes up. Divided by the pots you finish, it is usually the biggest line on the envelope, and it falls as the count rises. Our membership page has the whole comparison.
Selling
Everything you make here is yours to sell. The studio does not sell members’ work and does not ship. The rest of the Selling Your Work lessons are the how; this page is the number they all start from.
Questions people actually ask
The ones that come up every week.
What goes into the cost of a pot?
Clay, by the pound used. Firing, bisque and glaze. Glaze, roughly, by the pot. Membership or studio rent, divided by the pots you finish a month. Tools and equipment over their life. Packaging and listing fees if it is sold. And your hours, at a rate, for every step from wedging to the photograph. Divide all of it by the pots that actually reached the table, not the pots you started.
What is a mug worth here, roughly?
Work it out for yourself, because the answer depends on your Level and your survival rate, but the shape of it: a mug is about a pound of clay from a $28 bag, which is a little over a dollar. Bisque is free. The glaze firing is $4.80 at the minimum. A dollar of glaze. A share of the month’s membership divided by the pots you finished that month, which for a beginner finishing ten pots on a Green Level membership is over fourteen dollars a pot, and for a Black Level Member finishing forty is under seven. Then your hours. The materials are a few dollars; the membership and the hours are the price.
What hourly rate?
Any rate is better than none. Beginners often start at what they would earn doing something else, or at a local minimum, and raise it as they get faster. The point is not the number; it is that an hour of your life goes on the sheet as a cost, so a pot that takes two hours cannot be priced like a pot that takes twenty minutes.
How many pots do I actually finish?
Fewer than you think, and the honest count is the whole lesson. A beginner throwing twenty mugs finishes ten or twelve that are good enough to sell. A practised potter finishes seventeen or eighteen. Every cost, the clay in the failures, the firing of the crazed ones, the hours on the collapsed ones, is carried by the survivors.
Cost, then what?
Cost is the floor, not the price. A margin on top of cost is what pays for the next bag of clay and the market fee, and a look at what comparable work sells for tells you whether the market will bear it. Our selling lesson is the pricing half; this page is the cost half, and the cost comes first.
Does the firing calculator help?
Yes, for the firing line. Our calculators page works out the glaze firing for any piece from its measurements, five cents a cubic inch with a $4.80 minimum, and small pieces of roughly the same height on one six-inch cookie pay as one piece. A tray of small things is cheaper to fire per piece than one mug.
Why does the membership count if I would pay it anyway?
Because it is what the pot is made of. If you would pay the membership whether or not you sold a pot, then selling pots is a way to get some of it back, and knowing the per-pot share is what tells you how much. It also tells you that making more pots on the same membership makes every pot cheaper, which is the single most useful fact on the page.
Related lessons
Six lessons that sit next to this one.
Three to read next.
Cost is the first number in selling. These are the pages the number feeds.
That is the whole sum
Count the finished pots. Materials. Membership. Hours. Add it. That is the floor.
Your first envelope will say a mug costs you forty dollars, and you will not believe it, and then you will time six mugs and believe it. That is the moment this page is for. What you do with the number is yours: raise the price, make more pots, or enjoy an expensive mug on purpose.
If you want the worked example, the Level arithmetic, the overhead notes and the answers to the questions everybody asks, switch to the comprehensive version at the top. Otherwise, go find an envelope and a timer.
Written for potters everywhere. Where our studio does things differently, the page says so.
Which version would you like to print?
Both print clean, with the videos turned into labelled boxes you can search for later.