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hello everyone and welcome back to another video in this week's video I'm going to be talking about how I price my Rooks so bear with me because this might get a little bit rambly at times as I'm just speaking from the top of my head but so when I first discovered rug making um I discovered it on Tick Tock which probably a lot of you did the same or maybe on Instagram or something like that and I didn't really understand the Logistics of it and I basically just spent a couple months figuring out you know how much everything is and I was looking at other people's accounts to see maybe what they were charging I was dming other rug creators to see if oh if I wanted this rug how much would it be and kind of get a sense of their price and so initially I made the first rug I made the Frank Ocean blonde rug and I was planning on selling it and I ultimately decided to keep it because I knew I was going to make more rugs in the future and I wanted to keep it as kind of just you know a memory of making my first rug and the first time I ever got commissioned was by one of my roommates and I made him a rug and he paid me around I think it's 250 or 300 for a rug and I hadn't even quoted him a price he just said that to me and so I thought oh okay like there might be some money in this and that was also around the kind of price that some of the other rug creators that I had talked to were charging and so initially when I first started I priced my rugs pretty cheap around like 150 dollars I would say on average and that was basically just to kind of get the word out and have people share my rugs and everything like that basically just to get some exposure and as time went on and it started to turn into more of a business I kind of had to restructure my pricing strategy because I actually wasn't really making any money and you know it was great because I was able to get a lot of customers but at the end of the day if I wanted to turn it into a business it's not really sustainable to continue the pricing that I had so I kind of just sat down one day and and figured out okay you know if I if I wanted to treat this as a real job what would I want to be paid and basically I started with the material cost and you know so on average there's a lot of factors involved here it depends on what kind of yarn you're using and what kind of fabric you're using where you're getting your fabric from and stuff like that so based on the prices that I would pay for just the materials to make a rug it came out to be around 75 on average to upwards of a hundred if it's more colors but I kind of went with the 75 figure and I was like okay ideally I want to at least double the material cost so we'll go at 150 and that was kind of my initial um pricing plan but as I said I actually wasn't really making all that money I wasn't actually making all that much money and so I had to say well okay let's treat it as an actual job and maybe I charge labor technically and you know on average if it takes five or six hours to fully make a rug and I want to charge myself let's say a decent wage of 20 to 25 dollars then you know if it's five hours and you're adding you're adding an extra hundred dollars to that then okay now you have a price of around 250. and so that was kind of where I went with my pricing strategy and over time you start to understand how long it takes to make a rug how much it costs if you use four colors versus eight colors and things like that and so once you kind of realize how much it costs for you and how long it takes you then you can kind of get a sense of what you charge now what I tell my customers is a lot of people just DM me say how much for a rug and unfortunately it's not that simple so what I usually tell people is I'll DM them back and I'll say hey thank you for reaching out It ultimately depends on the size and the design so if you want to send over a design you have in mind I can give you a quote and once you get the design then you get a sense of oh there's five colors in here there's six colors in here oh they want it to be three feet I'm gonna have to use this much material and it's going to be this much yarn and the more and more you do it the more you're able to figure out okay for this rug it'll be 250 plus a shipping charge and majority of time that's worked out for me pretty well and especially with the car rugs that I do I charge within that hair in my mouth I charge in that 250 to 300 range in in the car rugs and People Are People receive that generally well because I think they understand the work that you're putting in for it and so yeah if I were to sum it up it would ultimately be you have to understand your material cost you have to understand that if you're treating it as a business then you need to pay yourself some sort of wage in order to continue to do it and continue to make money and that'll be different for everyone I don't I don't stick by those rules completely and say oh this took me 6.5 hours so I'm going to multiply that by 20 and then that's the chart blah blah because most of the time you have to quote people a price before they will even pay for the rug and so as time goes on you'll get more and more used to it and yes there have been times where I could have charged more for a rug because once I started doing I was like geez this is a little bit more difficult than I had anticipated but at the end of the day that's it's just all a lesson to be learned so yeah there's your material cost there's the size that you're making and I would say design is a huge Factor too because you don't want to do some huge intricate design that takes you multiple days to do and you're only charging a hundred and fifty dollars for because you know you put a lot of work into that and someone might be willing to pay much more than that I would say that's another big factor too is luckily for me my roommate kind of gave me a sense of what he was willing to pay for a rug and that helped me out a lot with my pricing so I know this is kind of all over the place and there's not really a a sound strategy because I think everyone's is going to be different but for me I make rugs up to three feet by three feet I have a sense of what designs are going to be more difficult or less difficult and approximately how much time it's going to take me and as time goes on you can kind of play with that price a little bit you know maybe increase it by twenty five dollars and see if someone is willing to pay that or maybe someone isn't willing to pay and you decrease it by 25 and then they are willing to pay So It ultimately just depends on the situation but I hope this helped you guys kind of get a sense into my own personal process because I'm sure mine might be different than a lot of other people that you may see on YouTube or other rug creators but yeah I would say just get a sense of your audience and what they're willing to pay and then get a sense of how much work you have to put in and ultimately what your material cost is as well so thank you guys for listening to me ramble I hope this helps I've gotten a few suggestions from people to make a video about this so for those people I I hope this helps you maybe figure out your own strategy for next week's video I'm going to be making a more in-depth video about how I turned this into somewhat of a business and how I'm able to make money off of it so look out for that to get kind of a full sense of my business perspective on this so thank you very much um we hit 1600 subscribers which is insane that's awesome I really appreciate it you guys I'm trying to be as consistent as possible with these videos so that you guys who are subscribed are entertained and even people that aren't subscribed hopefully this entertains you as well so thank you and I will catch you on the next video