Undercut on Handmade Prices? The Kiln Shop Car Park

2026-10-30

You are sitting in the car outside the kiln supplier, engine off, a box of glaze tests on the passenger seat. It is a grey Thursday, a little before eleven. You have ten minutes before they open the trade counter, so you do what you always do with ten spare minutes. You open the marketplace and search for your own bestseller.

There it is. Not yours, but close enough to make your stomach drop. A speckled stoneware mug, same soft grey, same little thumb rest. Free shipping. Priced at about half of what you charge.

You read the listing twice. "Handmade-style." Four hundred sales. A photo that looks a lot like the one you took on your windowsill last spring.

The thought arrives fully formed: I'll have to lower my prices.

The maths you do in your head

You lean back and start calculating, the way you always do, with fragments. The clay was a bit more expensive this year. The kiln runs on a bad electricity tariff. The fees on the marketplace, the packaging, the postage you sometimes quietly absorb when a customer seems stretched.

You know roughly what a mug costs you. Roughly. That word sits in your chest like a pebble.

If you cut your price to match, would you still earn anything? Or would you just be paying people to take your mugs? You do not know. You have never known for certain. You have a notebook, a half-finished spreadsheet from two Januaries ago, and a general feeling that things are fine because the studio is busy.

Busy is not the same as fine. Part of you has always suspected that.

What it quietly costs

The price war itself is not the worst part. The worst part is the way it makes you feel small.

You think of the craft fair in spring, when someone picked up a mug, turned it over and said, "Oh, I saw these cheaper online." You smiled and said nothing. You carried that sentence home with you for three days.

You think of the evenings you spend photographing, listing, packing, answering messages, and the way you have never once divided what you earn by those hours. You have a vague feeling it would be a rude number.

So when a competitor undercuts you, it does not feel like business. It feels like a verdict. As if someone has looked at your work, your months of getting that glaze right, and put a smaller number on it.

The trade counter opens. You go in, buy what you came for, and make small talk with the man who has served you for years. All the while the number is still running in your head.

The quieter question

On the drive back, somewhere between the roundabout and the retail park, the question changes.

It stops being how do I compete with that price? and becomes something gentler and more useful: what does my mug actually cost me, and what do I need it to earn?

That is a different question. It does not need you to beat a stranger with a factory. It only needs you to know your own ground.

Because here is the thing you realise at a red light. The other seller is playing a game you never signed up for: volume, sameness, shipping from a warehouse. Maybe they are making money, maybe they are not. You cannot see their numbers. But you can see yours, if you finally sit down and look at them properly, once, and keep them in one place.

What do you pay for materials, firing, packaging, fees? What is left per mug? What does that leave for an hour of your time? You might find you have room to hold your price. You might find one product is quietly carrying the others. You might find a mug you have been selling for months earns almost nothing, and the one you thought was a side line is your real income.

Either way, you would be choosing. Not flinching.

A different Thursday

Picture the same car park a few weeks from now. Same grey sky, same box of glaze tests.

You open the marketplace out of habit and the lookalike mug is still there, still cheaper. Your chest does not drop. You know what your own mug costs. You know the price that keeps the lights on and still pays you for the hours. You know which products are doing the heavy lifting and which ones are just pretty.

Maybe you nudge one price up. Maybe you stop making the item that never paid its way. Maybe you leave everything as it is, because the numbers say it is fine, and for once the word "fine" is something you have checked rather than hoped.

At the next craft fair, when someone says "I saw these cheaper online," you smile for a different reason. You say, "They might be. This one is made by me, in a small kiln, from start to finish." It lands quietly and it is true. And you do not carry the sentence home with you.

The market will always have someone cheaper. What changes is whether you feel at the mercy of them.

If this was you in the car park

We made a small Excel workbook for exactly this moment: Price Your Handmade Work Right – Cost, Fees & Profit Calculator. It shows cost, fees and profit per product, suggests a price, and keeps your market and online sales together in one place. It does not replace a tax professional, and it will not make decisions for you. It just lets you see your own numbers calmly. There is a 30-day money-back promise, no questions asked, in case it doesn't help.

An illustrative story, written with AI assistance.