How do I price a custom order?

You price a custom order by starting from your normal pricing method and then adding for every extra thing the custom part costs you, and there are far more of those than the extra making time. Done properly, a bespoke piece should come out noticeably dearer than the nearest thing in your shop, so if your custom quotes keep landing at your normal price, or somehow under it, something in the sum has gone missing.

I think I know what, too, because it got me for years. The message arrives, usually on a quiet evening, and it says something like "I love your work, could you make one specially, in her wedding colours?" And the first honest feeling is flattery. Somebody has looked at everything out there and picked you, personally, and that warm glow is exactly what talks you into a small number. In my hairbow years, when there was genuinely no money coming in, I'd quote a custom bow at my ordinary price and then drive out to buy a colour of ribbon I'd never use again, and the consequences of that wrong number turned up the same week, in a house where every pound was already spoken for.

She chose you specially, so you reward her with a discount on your own time

Why does a custom order cost more to make?

Because the making time is only the visible part. Custom work arrives wrapped in a layer of invisible work that almost never makes it into the quote.

Start with the messages. There are always more than you expect. The first enquiry, the colour question, the photo of 3 fabrics for her to choose between, the measurement she forgot, the "sorry, one more thing" a week later. By the time the piece is agreed you can easily have spent 2 hours inside that conversation, and it's real working time even though it never feels like work, because it happens on the sofa in little slices.

Then the sourcing. Your normal prices quietly rely on buying materials in useful quantities. A custom order in a specific colourway sends you out to buy 1 metre of something at full retail, plus the postage on it, and every bulk advantage you'd carefully built into your pricing evaporates for this 1 piece.

There's usually a sample too. A toile, a test bow, a trial run in the new colour just to check it behaves. That's making time the customer never sees and you probably never counted.

And it interrupts your batch. Normal work gets made in runs, 6 of the same thing cut together, and a bespoke piece barges into the middle of that and makes everything around it slower. It costs you more than its own hours, which is a strange thing to say about an order until you've watched a week reorganise itself around one.

Last, the risk, which is the part nobody prices. If she changes her mind, or simply goes quiet, a piece made in her colours to her measurements can't be relisted to anybody else. Your normal work always finds another buyer eventually. This one might not.

How do I work out the actual number?

Start where you always should, with your normal backwards-from-the-market method, and I've written that up properly in how to price handmade products so I won't reteach it here. Get an honest base price for the nearest equivalent piece in your shop first, because a custom quote built on an underpriced base is just 2 mistakes stacked up.

Then add a line for each of the invisible parts. An honest guess at the message-and-decisions time, priced as working hours, because that's what it is. The materials at the single-unit prices you'll actually pay, never the bulk rate sitting on your spreadsheet. The sample as its own making time. Something for the batch it interrupts. And a margin for the risk that this piece can only ever be sold once, to 1 person.

When you tot all of that up, the custom version comes out a good chunk above the shop version, and it's supposed to. If the number makes you a bit uncomfortable, that's usually the sign it's finally right. The customer who truly wants a piece that exists for nobody else tends to understand it costs more than the one on the shelf, and the customer who baulks at paying for your time was always going to be hard work later on too.

Should I ask for a deposit on a custom order?

Yes, and please don't feel awkward about it. A deposit up front, half is common, is completely normal and it protects both sides. She knows you're committed to making it, and you know you're not buying wedding-colour ribbon for an order that quietly evaporates.

While you're at it, agree the scope in writing before you cut anything. Not a contract with clauses, just a message that says what you're making, in which colours and size, by when, for how much, and how many rounds of changes are included, because 2 revisions is plenty. That one message prevents the slow drift of "could you also just...", which is how a fairly priced order turns into an underpaid one 3 weeks later without anyone quite deciding it should.

And it's entirely fine to say no in the first place. Some makers price custom work high enough to be worth the disruption, some only take it in the quiet months, and some don't take it at all. "I don't take custom pieces" is a complete sentence, and nobody running a real business will think less of you for it.

Do custom customers come back?

They're the most likely customers you have to come back, and that's the part I'd nudge you to notice while you're busy worrying over the quote. A custom request comes from somebody who already knows your work well enough to want a version of it that exists only for her. She isn't comparing you against a search page full of similar listings. She decided you were the one, paid more for the privilege, and waited weeks while it was made.

But have you considered whether you've got any way of reaching her again after the parcel goes out? For most of us the answer is no. The whole relationship lives inside Etsy's message system, and Etsy keeps the customer, so the person who loved your work enough to commission it hears from you exactly never again.

Getting her onto a list you actually own, so the next collection reaches her without a search box in the way, is the easiest fix in this whole piece, and I'd do it before taking another commission. I've put the starting point into my free email course, 7 Days to Shift Your Shop, one short email a day for a week, on moving from waiting to be found to launching to people who already care. The custom customer belongs at the very top of that list.

The person most likely to ever buy from you again just gave you her wedding colours, and the day the parcel goes out, she disappears