How much of the cost of a veil actually lands in my pocket? The answer, it turned out when I tried to work it out, is not straightforward. I’m not sure whether I was surprised by the figure I kind of landed on, but I found it interesting enough to share it.
This example is based on an Etsy order I received before Christmas for a fingertip Happily Ever After veil.
With the local taxes in the customer’s US homeland, the total paid by them Etsy was £421.20 (~$567.72 US).
Before the money leaves Etsy, there are a few immediate deductions, which Etsy very kindly lays out:
I get a little confused here because if you take that £83.58 away from £390 (after tax), you get £306.42 (right?!), but what lands in my bank account a few days later is actually slightly more, £310.52. Where the extra £4.10 came from is anyone’s guess but I’m not complaining, especially in low season.
Either way, I then have some more hard costs to cover:
I use (almost award-winning; highly commended in the Quirky Awards 2023) sustainable packaging from Tishwish, Royal Mail’s international tracked & signed service with extra insurance, plus the new US 10% import duty (and Royal Mail’s 50p fee for handling this for me). All this brings what landed in my.bank account down to £242.52.
That’s before I even buy the materials for the veil itself.
I make enough veils that I can buy many of these in modest bulk – not exactly the economies of scale big manufacturers see, but, for example, I can halve the cost of tulle by buying it in 50m rolls, knowing I’ll get through it. So, the cost of the raw materials of this particular veil are £26.52, just under 7% of the purchase price, bringing the total going to me to £217.
So let’s consider the time it takes to turn a pile of tulle, thread and ribbon into a Happily Ever After fingertip veil. It takes approximately three days to cut, embroider, sew and assemble to completion, so call it 24 working hours, based on an eight-hour working day.
I set my hourly rate at £75, but the time taken to make this veil for £217 slash that to just £9 per hour, which isn’t even minimum wage.
However, most of the time required to make this veil is for embroidering which my machine (theoretically at least) can mostly get on with without me. So, let’s say only a quarter of those three days requires me hands on. That brings my hourly rate to a more palatable £36 per hour, but still less than half what I should be charging (more on this here).
But, and here’s where it gets a bit tricky to calculate again, we need to consider the cost of that beautiful embroidery machine, and all the other equipment I need to make the veil.
Embroidery machines are EXPENSIVE. I bought mine, an entry-level industrial multi-needle embroidery machine (swoon), for £6,000 a couple of years ago. It literally cost six times more than I paid for my car (priorities, my queens). For context, the next model up is £10,000. Even my first (now back-up) embroidery machine was £1,200 seven years ago, and that only has a single needle, meaning I have to rethread it myself for every colour change, which is every three minutes or so for this veil.
The software I use to create and edit my embroidery designs was £900 and I’ve since paid a further £250-ish for the latest edition. There’s also my Cricut (£300) which even actually works sometimes, but I do have to swear at it a lot first.
A few further costs not included in the image above are my business insurance (public liability, professional indemnity, stock in trust, etc) which is another £500-odd a year; machine servicing at around £200-300 a year and miscellaneous business costs including phone/WiFi bill, mortgage, etc.
As tricky as it is to put a fair price on my work, I think I usually get it about right. I only employ myself and I feel well compensated, so that’s a decent measure, plus I absolutely adore my job.
If you think I should be earning more for what I create, please consider that the next time you see a veil or wedding dress on an ultra-fast fashion site for next to nothing, and think about what the person who actually made it will earn from it.