Kiss My Knits!

I get inquiries every day about the Jayne hat, as seen in Firefly. I currently charge $35 including shipping. While the price I’m charging is honestly low considering you’re getting a hand-knitted custom-fit item direct from the designer, it’s still more than some fanboys are willing to pay. More to the point, there are others knitting Jayne hats who don’t value their time as highly as they should and so are pricing theirs lower. C’mon, knitters, your time’s worth more than 25 cents an hour. I’ve made 30 of these hats so far this summer. People WILL pay it if you ask it.

I gave the price and info to a guy yesterday. Today I see he’s bidding on a Jayne hat on eBay that’s going (so far) for $12.50.

I can’t blame the fanboys – if they can get something that looks similar somewhere else for cheaper, naturally that’s what they’re going to do. I wonder if I shot myself in the foot when I posted a pattern for the hat, even if it was sized for a woman’s noggin. I still subscribe to the “information wants to be free” theory, and just trust that people are honest and only using the pattern for their personal use.

The yarn I use retails for about $7 a ball. For three colors, that’s $21. However, there’s only about half a ball of each in a hat, so we can halve that and get 10.50.

I ship each hat in a cardboard box filled with straw. I hand-write the note that Jayne’s mom sent and tuck it into the box. That’s a cost for box, straw, paper, drawing-style pen and inkwell (the last few are reusable from person to person, of course, so that’s negligible). Let’s call it $2.

Shipping will be either priority or first class, and I always get delivery confirmation so we both know that the package has been shipped and whether it’s arrived. The shipping total is either about $4 or $2.89. The first class figure is fresh in my mind because I sent one to San Diego yesterday.

So far we’ve accounted for about $16. That leaves $19.

That’s me freeze-framing the DVD and reverse-engineering a design, knitting a test hat, then further refining that design until it’s just right. Most patterns which one would purchase in a knitting shop would range from $3-5. That price is so low because the designer can rely upon printers to mass-produce the pattern and distribute it around the country. The designer will make his or her money in bulk. Obviously, that’s not the case with me, and I believe the ability to create a new pattern is valuable, but for our purposes we’ll assume my brainwork is worth $5.

So now we’re left with $15 remaining. The rest is payment for me being expert enough to know how to alter the initial pattern I came up with to fit a variety of people. It’s also, let’s say, four hours of labor on each hat. It’s skilled labor, and my time is worth at least $3.75 an hour. Certainly there are many unskilled laborers who earn more.

I think sometimes when we can go to WalMart and buy a shirt for five bucks, it makes us forget the actual costs involved in making something of quality. I know I certainly felt that way before I started creating things. “That’s a nice handmade scarf, I wouldn’t pay $20 bucks for it.” Now I’d look at the same scarf and say, “they’re only charging $20? That’s nuts.” It’s all a matter of perspective.

Sigh. I’ve still got some orders backed up, but after that it looks like I might have to consider dropping the price a little. Too bad – $35 is exactly the cost of one hour of group speech therapy for my kid.

Darned market pressures.

ETA: mentioned that this should be posted other places, and she is right. I have posted it in knitting. I hope my fellow knitters will take away from this the message “don’t devalue yourself. The things you do have worth. Do not be afraid to speak up and say so.”