Votive pricing

[IABeeMan]

 The wife and I poured up several vitive candles this evening. We are gonna experiment with the beeswax candles and see if there is a local market for them. The votive jars we have hold 3 oz of beeswax. We have no clue what these sell for. What are the going prices for 3 oz votive candles.

[manfre]

I've just started to get in to candle making and have been thinking about selling them at my local market, so I've put a bit of thought in to pricing. People manage to sell those 1oz blocks of beeswax for $1, so that seems like a good baseline to use. $1 per ounce of a votive should give you a decent profit after the cost of the wax, the wick and your time. It's the same price as the raw 1 oz block, but has a much larger potential audience to justify the slightly smaller profit margin.

If you're selling the votives with a glass container, add $1 or some change friendly increment that is more than the container cost.

I'm still deciding about which decorative molds I want to buy and there are way too many choices. Some of the molds are expensive and I have been trying to figure out how many candles I am willing to sell before I'd like to recover the cost of the mold. E.g. If a mold costs $40, do I want to add $2 per candle to recover the cost of the mold after selling 20 candles, or $1 per candle to recover after 40 candles. This fee added in to the candle price can always get reduced after the mold cost is recovered.

Candle Sell Price = $1 * ounces of wax + container cost + mold recovery fee

[Bee Happy]

I don't think I will ever understand market dynamics. (except location, location, location.)
You can charge next to nothing, and sell next to nothing; or you can charge insanely ridiculously too much and sell out.

[annette]

How about this fact to totally confuse you.

Given the choice between two cosmetics, both having identical ingredients, a women will purchase the higher priced one thinking it is the best one.

There definitely is a psychology when it comes to purchasing things.

[vermmy35]

Here is one way to try and figure out how much to charge for you candles.  Its basically a return on investment.  You have to apportion how much wax, honey, and propilis you receive from your hives.  Then figure out the total variable cost and assign the portion to your candles.  Then after you figure all that out you set your return on investment lets say you want 20% on the return on investment. 

Its really quite easy if you had a cost accounting class.  I would suggest looking for a book like Accounting for dummies or cost accounting text book. 

[Brian D. Bray]

How about this fact to totally confuse you.

Given the choice between two cosmetics, both having identical ingredients, a women will purchase the higher priced one thinking it is the best one.

There definitely is a psychology when it comes to purchasing things.

The key is preceived value.  If you took shot glasses and made voltive candles out of them you could sell them for a higher price than the norm.  If you took shot glasses with lablels on them you can double the price and still sell more than the plain shot glass ones. 
You can buy 3 plain tshirts for less than $6.00, but stencil a logo of some kind on it and you can sell them for over $6.00 apeice.

The item with the greater perceived value will always out sell a like item even if the preceived value is false.