How do I raise my prices without losing customers?

You give people fair notice, you put the new prices on new work first, and you say it plainly without apologising for it. That is nearly the whole method, and the reason it feels harder than that is not the mechanics at all, it is the bit where you have to decide you are allowed to.

I want to be straight with you before we start, because most advice on this is quietly dishonest. You probably will lose a few customers. Anybody promising you a way to put prices up that nobody notices is selling you a fantasy, and the fantasy is what keeps makers stuck at a number they set years ago when they were frightened.

Will I lose customers if I put my prices up?

Some, yes. Not many, and probably not the ones you are lying awake about.

The buyers who leave over a price rise are almost always the ones who were buying on price in the first place, and they were never really yours. They were in the market, you happened to be the cheapest acceptable option in it that afternoon, and somebody else will be cheaper next month. They also tend to be the ones who message the most, ask for the most, and leave the most anxious reviews, so the arithmetic on losing them is rarely as bad as it feels at 11pm.

What actually happens is duller than the disaster in your head. A handful drift off. Most people do not react at all, because they are not tracking your prices the way you are. And a few say something kind about it being about time, which is oddly the hardest response to take.

The version worth being genuinely careful about is a shop propped up by a small number of regulars who buy constantly. If 4 people are most of your income, a price rise is a conversation with 4 people rather than an announcement, and it should be treated that way.

How much should I put my prices up by?

Enough to fix the problem, which is the part I kept flinching from.

A nervous 5% is the worst of both worlds, because it costs you the same awkward announcement as a proper increase and leaves you needing to do it again next year. If your numbers do not work, work out the number that makes them work and go there, rather than to the number that feels least frightening.

Which means starting from the arithmetic rather than the feeling. Work backwards from what comparable pieces genuinely sell for, take off the platform's cut, your materials and packaging, and your own hours at a wage you would pay somebody else, and see what is actually left. I have written that method out properly in how to price your handmade products, and it is worth doing on paper before you pick a number, because a price rise decided by nerves tends to land somewhere that does not fix anything.

Two other things worth knowing. Your costs almost certainly rose without you noticing, because materials and postage creep up quietly and there is never an afternoon that obviously belongs to checking them. And if you have got faster at making, resist the urge to pass that on. The hour you saved by getting better at your craft belongs to you.

Do I have to tell people I'm raising my prices?

You do, and this is the part that turns a price rise from something that happens to your customers into something you did on purpose.

Give notice. A couple of weeks is plenty. Say what is changing, say when, and say it in the same voice you use for everything else. Then leave it alone.

The reason is honest and you can say it out loud: materials and postage have gone up, and the old prices were not paying properly for the hours in the work. You do not need a better reason than that and you certainly do not need an invented one. Do not blame a supplier you have not actually had a rise from, and do not pretend it is a limited-time thing when it is permanent, because both of those cost you more in trust than the extra pounds are worth.

Do not apologise, either. There is a particular tone makers fall into here, all sorry about this and I hope you understand, and it teaches people that the new price is a bit unreasonable and that you know it. Warm and matter of fact does the job.

One thing that surprises people the first time: a notice period usually produces a rush. You have given everyone who was sitting on the fence a reason to stop sitting on it, and a fortnight of that can be one of the better fortnights you have.

What if I just can't bring myself to do it?

Then the problem was never the price, and it is worth being honest with yourself about what it actually is.

Underpricing is very often about being liked. If nobody can object to the number, nobody can object to you, and a low price is a way of apologising in advance for having the nerve to sell something you made. It feels like humility and it works like a tax, paid by you, every single order, for years.

The other half of it is that a low price does not read the way you hope it does. You intend it as generous. A buyer comparing two similar pieces often reads the cheaper one as the lesser one, and wonders quietly what has been skimped on. I have written about that trap in should I price lower than my competitors, because it deserves its own answer.

But here is the thing I would actually like you to sit with. Raising prices is terrifying in exact proportion to how many of your buyers are strangers. When every customer arrived from a search box, comparing you against a screen of other shops on price alone, then price genuinely is the whole conversation and 10% genuinely can lose you the sale. When somebody has watched you make the thing, knows whose hands it came out of, and came looking for you specifically, the number moves and she barely blinks.

So the real question underneath this one might not be how much you can charge. It might be how many of the people buying from you have any idea who you are.

Which is a slower thing to fix than a price, and it is most of what I write about. The first piece of it is the Handmade Launch List, which is free, so the next price rise lands with people who came for you rather than for the number.

Somewhere in your shop is a price you set years ago, when you were frightened and new, and had no idea yet how good you were going to get