I’m doing this not just for price transparency but also because smashing the pay taboo helps everyone get the pay they deserve. And I am self-employed so I have the privilege of no boss to get in trouble with.
This veil was easier to work out my hourly rate because, unlike Happily Ever After in my previous attempt, the embroidery machine is not involved so all the work is me.
In this case, my customer was based in the UK (like me) and paid £200 for her veil on Etsy. Etsy then helpfully gives me a breakdown of fees to show my actual earnings on this sale – £178.16.
However, it doesn’t explain why only £157.52 arrives in my bank account. If anyone more familiar with the inner workings of Etsy, HMRC or maths in general can explain where the missing £20.64 went, I’d be grateful. I’ll even send it to you if you show me how to recover it.
The cost of the fabric, crystals, beads, comb, thread etc bring this figure down another £40, to £117.52, while postage and packaging costs drop it a further £15.05, to £102.47.
I set my stopwatch to see how long it actually took me to make this veil, from cutting out the fabric, through edging it, to hand-stitching 18 crystals and hand-beading the 3-D spider. Including parcelling it up at the end, it was two hours and 14 minutes, so my hourly earnings were £45.54. Not half bad, but still short of the £75 hourly rate I generally base my prices on.
And for extra fairness, I stopped the timer to make my cup of tea.
