How to sell handmade jewellery

You've made about forty pieces, you've given half of them away, and the ones you did sell went at a price you now suspect was less than the silver cost you.

The short version: cost the metal by weight and recost it every few months, put your hours in the price at a rate you'd accept from an employer, sell sizes as measurements rather than guesses, and decide your repair policy before the first clasp fails rather than after. A pair of sterling hoops that cost you $9 in wire and 40 minutes of bench time is not a $22 product, and if you price it at $22 you'll be busy and broke by March.

Jewellery is unusual among handmade categories because the material has a market price that moves, the product is worn against skin, and it comes back to you for repair. Most articles about it stop at "photograph it well". The money is in the other three.

Recost your materials every quarter

Silver is sold by the gram and the price moves. Gold moves more. Findings, chain, clasps and stones all follow, with a lag.

So the price you worked out in January is not the price in October, and the single most common way a jewellery maker loses a year is by keeping a price list that was correct once. Put a recurring note in your calendar every three months: open your supplier's site, check what your most-used wire, chain and findings actually cost today, and update your cost sheet. It takes twenty minutes and it's the highest-paid twenty minutes in the business.

Weigh your pieces. Not estimate, weigh. A jeweller's scale that reads to 0.01g costs less than a single order and it turns "about $9 of silver, I think" into a number. Once you know a ring uses 3.4g of sterling, your cost updates itself the moment you update the per-gram figure.

Keep the offcuts. Sterling scrap has real value and most small makers throw it in a drawer and forget it exists.

Price so that wholesale stays possible

Here's the mistake that closes a door you'll want later.

If a shop ever asks to stock your work, they'll expect to buy at roughly half your retail price. Which means your retail price has to be about double a wholesale price that itself covers your materials, your time and a margin. If you priced retail at materials plus a bit of time, wholesale is impossible, and you'll have to either raise all your prices at once or say no.

Work it in this order:

1. Materials, weighed and current. Metal, stones, findings, chain, solder, polishing compounds. Include the packaging box.
2. Bench time at a real rate. Sawing, filing, soldering, pickling, sanding, polishing, setting, quality checking. Time yourself on one piece properly, once. It's always longer than you think.
3. A failure allowance. You'll ruin some. 5% to 10% depending on the technique.
4. That total is your floor. Wholesale sits above it. Retail sits at roughly double wholesale.

For a pair of hoops: $9.10 of sterling and findings, 40 minutes at $28 an hour is $18.67, plus 8% for the ones that don't come out right. That's about $30. Wholesale $42, retail $84.

Most makers reading that just winced. The response is not to cut your hourly rate to $8 and call it a business. It's either to design pieces that take less bench time per dollar of perceived value, or to accept a lower rate deliberately for a defined period while you build reputation. Deliberately is the operative word. There's more on the general method, and what to do when the honest number is above what your market will pay, in how to price what you make.

Say exactly what the metal is

The words matter, and buyers who have been burned once know them better than most sellers do.

• Sterling silver is 92.5% silver, usually alloyed with copper. It tarnishes. That's normal and it cleans off.
• Gold-filled has a thick bonded layer of gold, and with reasonable care it lasts years. It is not plating.
• Gold vermeil is a thicker gold layer over a sterling silver base.
• Gold-plated is a thin electroplated layer over a base metal. It wears through, often in months, especially on rings.
• Brass and copper oxidise and can leave a green mark on skin. Harmless, and some people hate it. Say so in the listing.
• Stainless steel is durable, cheap and hypoallergenic in most grades. It's also hard to work.

Nickel is the allergy that matters. A large number of people react to it, and the reaction is real dermatitis, not a preference. If you use base-metal findings, know whether they contain nickel and say so. Offer sterling or steel ear wires as an option, and put "nickel free" in the description only if you can actually stand behind it from the supplier's own specification.

One more, and it varies by country: if you're describing something as silver or gold, some places require an official assay mark above a certain weight before you can legally call it that. Check what your national assay office or trading standards body requires before you write "solid silver" in a listing. Don't guess, and don't copy what another seller's listing says, because they may be wrong too.

Sizing without a fitting

Rings are the problem. Everything else is manageable.

The paper-strip method that circulates online is unreliable, because paper stretches and people pull it tight. The method that works: ask the buyer to take a ring they already own, that fits the finger they want, and measure the inside diameter in millimetres across the middle. A US size 7 is about 17.3mm inside diameter. Send them that anchor so they can sanity check themselves.

Two things to add to every ring listing:

• Measure in the evening. Fingers are meaningfully larger after a day on your feet and in warm weather, and a ring sized at 8am in January will be tight in July.
• Wide bands fit tighter. A 6mm band usually needs half a size up from a 2mm one. Say it, or you'll resize.

For anything above about $150, tell them to get sized at a jeweller. It costs them nothing and it saves you a resize plus two lots of postage.

The other measurements, standardised, in every listing:

Piece	What to state
Necklace	Chain length in inches, plus where it sits. 16" collarbone, 18" just below, 20" mid-chest
Earrings	Total drop from the top of the ear wire, and the width
Bracelet	Inside circumference, and whether there's an extender
Ring	Size, band width in mm, and the size scale you're using
Any stone	Dimensions in mm, not "small"

If you sell the same design in eight ring sizes, sell it as one product with a size option rather than eight products. That keeps your catalogue readable and your stock counts honest, and the mechanics of doing it without creating a mess are in how to handle sizes and variants.

Photographs of small shiny things

Jewellery is the hardest thing to photograph with a phone, because it's small, it's reflective, and autofocus hunts.

Three fixes that do most of the work. Shoot in bright indirect daylight next to a window, never in direct sun, because direct sun blows out metal into a white smear. Put something matte and neutral behind and under it, and keep coloured surfaces away, because silver picks up every colour in the room. Tap to focus on the piece, then move the exposure slider down until the metal has detail again.

Every piece needs one shot on a hand, ear or neck. Scale is the single most-asked question in jewellery DMs, and it's answerable once with a photo instead of forty times in chat. The technical detail, including how to stop reflections from your own phone showing up in the metal, is in how to photograph jewellery.

Custom work is a different business with the same tools

Someone will ask you to remake their grandmother's ring. Before you say yes, know what you're agreeing to.

Custom orders need: a deposit that covers your materials plus enough of your time that walking away doesn't hurt, a written description of what you're making, a confirmed size before you cut metal, a delivery date with slack in it, and a plain statement that custom pieces can't be returned.

Take the deposit before you buy anything. Fifty percent is the norm and nobody blinks at it. The rest is due before dispatch, not after. The full mechanics of quoting and collecting on bespoke work, including what to do when the customer changes their mind at the halfway point, are in getting paid for a custom order.

The sentence that saves you: "I'll send a photo at the halfway point for approval, and any change after that is a new quote." Say it at the start, in writing, and the awkward conversation never happens.

Month eight, when the repairs arrive

This is the part almost nobody writes about, and it's the part that decides whether you have a business or a hobby with a spreadsheet.

Roughly six to twelve months after a good sales run, repairs start arriving. All at once, and disproportionately from one batch, because that's the batch where you used the cheaper clasps or soldered a jump ring badly on a tired Sunday. A broken chain, a lost earring back, a stone that came loose, a ring that's gone oval.

Decide the policy now and publish it:

• Manufacturing faults, first 12 months: free repair, you pay return postage. A jump ring you didn't close properly is your fault. Fix it and say sorry.
• Accidental damage and wear, any time: fixed repair fee, buyer pays postage both ways. Publish the fee. "$18 plus postage for a chain repair" stops a negotiation before it starts.
• Resizing: first one free within 30 days, chargeable after. Only offer it on designs that can actually be resized, and say which those are. A ring with stones all the way round often can't.
• Lost earrings: sell singles. A quarter of your earring customers will lose one. A single is an easy sale and a very happy customer.

Keep a note of which repair came from which batch. Two of the same failure is a design problem, not bad luck, and fixing the design is cheaper than fixing thirty pieces.

And ship every piece with an anti-tarnish tab and a small zip bag, with one line telling the buyer that sterling tarnishes, that it's normal, and how to clean it. The tarnish complaint is entirely preventable with one sentence written before the sale rather than one paragraph written after it.

Worked example: Dani, stacking rings, Portland

Dani makes hammered sterling stacking rings and a small line of earrings. Rings retail at $58, sold in a set of three for $150.

Per ring: 2.9g of sterling, which she recosts quarterly, plus solder and polish. About $7.40 today. Bench time is 22 minutes now that she batches ten at once, so at $30 an hour that's $11. Packaging, box, tab and card is $1.60. Failure allowance 6%. Her cost is around $21.20, so $58 retail leaves her $36.80 before fees and postage.

She sells about 45 rings a month, mostly as sets. Roughly $2,100 of revenue, about $780 of cost, and 20 hours at the bench plus another 12 on photography, messages and packing. She's making around $41 an hour on her time, which is a real wage.

The thing she changed in year one: she stopped selling nine designs and started selling three, in more sizes. The catalogue was 54 listings and half of them had never sold. Cutting to three designs meant she could keep every size in stock, photograph properly, and stop remaking a design she'd already decided she disliked.

That, incidentally, is where you'll meet Sailo's honest limitation. The free plan holds 10 products. If you sell one-of-a-kind pieces, each with its own listing, you'll pass 20 in a fortnight and you'll be choosing between deleting sold pieces and paying $19 a month for the 100-product plan. For a maker running repeatable designs with size options, 20 is plenty for a year. For a one-of-one maker, it isn't, and it's better to know that now.

Shipping something small and expensive

A padded envelope with a $180 ring in it is a bad idea, because the one that goes missing is unprovable and uninsured. Small parcel, tracked, signature on anything above your pain threshold, and never write the contents on the outside of the box in a way that says "jewellery" to whoever handles it.

Box the piece so it can't move. Movement is what breaks chains and loosens stones in transit. The general method for parcels that arrive intact is in shipping fragile things, and jewellery has the additional problem that the damage is often invisible until the customer wears it.

On payment: Sailo takes nothing on bank transfer, cash on delivery or chat orders, since it never touches the money on those. Card payments cost 3% of the goods on the free plan and 1% on Business. On a $150 set that commission is $4.50 on free and $1.50 on Business. On Dani's volume the $49 a month is under 1% of revenue and the rate drop more than covers it, so it's an easy call. At six orders a month it isn't — the free plan settles cards too, and taking transfers while you build up is not a compromise.

What to do next

Weigh three of your pieces today, look up what the metal in them costs this week, and write a cost sheet with materials, minutes and price in three columns. If any row shows a retail price below double your true cost, that's the design to reprice or retire first.

Then write your repair policy in four sentences and put it on your shop page, before the first clasp fails rather than after.