How to Price Handmade Soap
Handmade soap has many small ingredients and a long cure, which makes it easy to underprice. Here is how to cost a bar properly, with a worked example.
What goes into the cost of one bar
- Oils and butters by weight: olive, coconut, shea and the rest, costed per gram from what you paid.
- Lye and water: take the amounts from a lye calculator for every recipe. Never guess lye.
- Fragrance or essential oil, colourants and additives.
- Labels and packaging: wraps, boxes, bands.
- Your time: making, cutting, curing checks, wrapping, divided over the batch.
- Compliance: in the UK and EU, soap sold to consumers is a cosmetic and needs a safety assessment before sale. Spread its cost over the bars it covers.
Worked example: a 12-bar batch
Olive oil, coconut oil, shea butter, lye, fragrance oil, labels and boxes come to $1.50 a bar. One hour of work for the batch adds $1.67 a bar and overheads $0.60, so each bar costs $3.77. The 2 × 2 rule gives $7.54 wholesale and $15.08 retail. At $9 a bar online, after fees you keep $3.93 (43.6%); the lowest price for a 35% margin is $7.61.
Soap pricing mistakes
- Pricing by what other soap sellers charge instead of by your own cost.
- Forgetting the safety assessment and labels.
- Ignoring the 4–6 week cure: you pay for ingredients long before you can sell.
- Giving wholesale buyers your retail price minus 10%. They need room to double it.
The spreadsheet for soap makers
The Soap & Bath Product Cost & Pricing Calculator costs bars, bath bombs and balms from your own supply prices, with a recipe-by-percentage helper (it does not calculate lye) and a full price list (Excel and Google Sheets).
Work out your own price
Try your numbers in the free handmade pricing calculator, one product at a time. The general method is on How to Price Handmade Products.
Example figures use $20 an hour for your time, $120 a month of overheads spread over 200 items, the 2 × 2 wholesale/retail rule, and Etsy-style fees of about 9.5% + $0.45. Your supplier prices will differ.