Learn How to Price Your Cakes

"How to price your cakes?" - is one of the most important business decisions you have to make earlier on in your career! It is confusing, I agree! But it doesn't have to be that way!

I want to start off with a simple example.

Imagine you are the Gucci brand and you want to price your handbags. You compare the prices of local handbag shops and understand that a handbag costs £50 average.  However your Gucci handbags are made of premium materials, the design is unique and the quality is by miles better than the local handbags. But still, you decide to price your handbags competitively for £50.

Right move or wrong move?

A Gucci bag sells for £1000 average so I will tell you straight away it is a WRONG move!

KNOW YOUR COSTS - DIRECT, INDIRECT & LABOUR COSTS

This is a simple task of listing down all your costs;

Direct Costs - Ingredients (cake flour, butter, eggs, sugar etc.), Cake board, Cakebox etc.

Indirect costs - Electricity, marketing, insurance, rent etc. Think of all the costs that you incur as part of running the business, and proportion it to each order based on monthly costs/monthly order. Start with simple maths. So if you have £100 of indirect costs and you take 20 cake orders a month. Your indirect costs would be £100/20 = £5 per cake order.

An important cost that we often forget! Our labour cost. So if you spend 4 hours to bake and decorate a cake, and if you account for £10 per hour labour charge, that is £40.

When you start selling cakes, I would always advise you have 'simple' yet effective designs in your menu card that you can decorate easily without spending hours and hours on it! Time is money! I emphasise a lot on this in all my classes! Almost all the designs you see in my social media are done in less than 1 hour or so. You really don't have to spend hours decorating to come up with a beautiful cake.

So if I am selling a 6-inch cake with buttercream florals;

Direct Costs - £10

Indirect Costs - £5

Labour 4 hours - £40

Total costs £55. 

If you sell the cake for £65, your profit is £10.

COMPARE PRICES TO SIMILAR CAKE ARTISTS

It is indeed a good idea to look at the cake prices of local Cake Artists but make sure you compare yourself to similar artists. If you are a Buttercream Artist who sells floral cupcakes using organic premium ingredients, your price wouldn't be the same as a shop who mass produces their cakes and cupcakes.

MAKE COMPETITION IRRELEVANT

I am not a fan of competition, especially price war! So my advice is to find ways to eliminate competition.

Being unique is the key to making competition irrelevant. If you make what everyone else is making and if you sell what everyone else is selling, how are you different from the baker next door? Why should your customers order from you? Why should they pay your worth when someone next door is selling it for half the price?

Create unique cakes and designs that shout out your style!

One of my students based in London just sells Floral cupcake bouquets. She is known for her unique design, she is known for the taste of her bakes, and she offers something so unique that none of her competitors are offering. She is often 'booked out' and makes more income than her previous office job! She does all this whilst supporting her 6-year-old daughter as a single mother. How inspiring, right?

One of my other students based in India sells eggless buttercream floral cakes. That is her only product line because she doesn't have time to fit in any more orders! You underestimate the power of one solid product!

ATTRACT THE RIGHT CUSTOMERS

By selling unique products.

By pricing the products its worth.

By selling with confidence.

You are going to do yourself a big favour by attracting the right customers! No more price hagglers! No more of the rudeness and undesired talk about how your cakes are expensive than the baker next door. Offer your customers high quality, premium products that exceed their expectations. You are what you are and you are worth every penny of it.

A simple example here would be my Online Classes. One thing I take pride in is the aftercare and support I provide for my students. I am always there for them, supporting them as they progress in the cake decorating world. They value me, they value my courses and they are willing to pay my worth, without even thinking for a moment.

So now you understand, How to price your cakes? It is not just maths. It is not comparing yourself to others even. It is much deeper than that.

It is about who you are as an artist, what value you are providing your customers and how you exceed their expectations every single time!

Hope this has helped you understand a little bit more on "How to price your cakes?".

If you have questions, write to me [email protected] :)

Until next time,

Neetha