{"id":179,"date":"2013-04-13T12:41:35","date_gmt":"2013-04-13T19:41:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spinningwheel.net\/?p=179"},"modified":"2013-04-13T12:41:35","modified_gmt":"2013-04-13T19:41:35","slug":"whats-it-worth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spinningwheel.net\/?p=179","title":{"rendered":"What’s it worth?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Maria asked me,<\/p>\n

I was asked why I didn’t knit to sell when I was unemployed during the worst of the great recession. I said it was because nobody I knew could afford $500 sweaters. I don’t design, so there’s also the issue of using others patterns, which nobody got, either.<\/p>\n

I think it’s most economically feasible to sell patterns to knitters rather than hand knit garments to non-knitters. Have you tried figuring out how many patterns you’d have to sell at, say, $8 to break even for designing one?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And that’s the entire point of this mini series on cost estimating my projects.<\/p>\n

Let’s review one of my more successful single patterns: Kitty Selbu<\/a>. This mitten pattern was inspired by my cat’s healthy scare. (Note: we lost the kitty, eventually.) The pattern sells in my Ravelry store<\/a> for $6.00. For simplicity’s sake, let’s look only at the Ravelry sales, which accounts for the vast majority of my single pattern sales.<\/p>\n

\"kittyselbburavsales\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I have grossed $570 in Ravelry sales on this pattern since November 2010.<\/p>\n

I have made many pairs of Selbu mittens, so I can, from my experience and the time tracking I performed on the mitts, estimate that I spent about 30 hours labor on these mittens, and an additional 3 hours in photography, layout, and publishing. At my bare minimum wage, that’s an estimated $330 invested in the creation of this pattern.<\/p>\n

Leaving aside costs that a business would normally need to include, such as office space to work in, electricity to run the lights and computers, and so forth, I can then calculate that I have\u00a0profited\u00a0$240 from the sale of this one pattern. Since November 2010.<\/p>\n

So to answer the basic question, I would need to sell 55 patterns at $6 to break even.<\/p>\n

This begs the question: what is a pattern worth? How much can I charge for a pattern, to increase my profits, before I drive away sales with a too-high price tag?<\/p>\n

Let’s do some more competitive analysis. This time I’m focusing on patterns, and for that, I go to Ravelry.com.<\/p>\n

This table contains the top nine most popular for-sale mitten patterns.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/a>\"fiddlehead\"<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/a>Fiddlehead Mittens
\nAdrian Bizilia
\n$5.95 stranded fingering weight<\/span><\/td>\n		\"cloisonnee\"<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/a>Cloison\u00e9e
\nStephanie Pearl-McPhee
\n$5.00 colored cuff, plain hand worsted weight<\/span><\/td>\n		\"winter\"<\/a>
\n<\/span>Waiting for Winter Mittens & Fingerless Mitts
\nSusan B. Anderson
\n$4.00 basic worsted weight mitten<\/span><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
\"owl\"<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/a>Horatio and Oren
\n<\/span>Barbara Gregory
\n<\/span>$7.00 stranded fingering weight<\/span><\/em><\/td>\n		\"grove\"<\/a><\/span>Grove
\nJared Flood
\n$6.00 textured worsted weight<\/span><\/td>\n		\"mitered\"<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/a>Mitered Mittens
\nElizabeth Zimmermann
\n$7.95 in Knitter’s Almanac texured worsted weight<\/span><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
\"northman\"<\/a><\/span>Northman Mittens
\nDavid Schulz
\n$5.95 stranded worsted weight<\/span><\/td>\n		\"sitka\"<\/span><\/a>Sitka Spruce
\ntincanknits
\nC$6.00 textured worsted weight<\/span><\/td>\n		\"woodhollow\"<\/a><\/span>Wood Hollow Mittens
\nby Kirsten Kapur
\n$6.00 textured worsted weight<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

These are the most popular for-sale patterns. There are several ways I can interpret this review. $6.00 seems to be a reasonable price for a mitten pattern.In fact, it’s fairly median.<\/p>\n

Another observation is that most of these patterns are worked in worsted weight yarn, and decorated with a texture pattern rather than colorwork. People buy what they want, so knitters apparently prefer textured mittens at a larger gauge to fine stranded work.<\/p>\n

But there’s a larger point that only reviewing for-sale patterns completely overlooks.<\/p>\n

Of the top 25 mitten patterns on Ravelry, only nine of them cost money. The other 16 are free.<\/p>\n

I can surmise from this that knitters are willing to pay a small price for a pattern that suits their preferences – textured worsted weight – but most would choose a free pattern over a paid one. In fact, only seven of the top twenty five used colorwork in any technique at all, aside from very large stripes or self-striping yarn, and of those, only four used stranded knitting.<\/p>\n

My patterns don’t even show up in the top 100 most popular designs.<\/p>\n

So why is that?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Maria asked me, I was asked why I didn’t knit to sell when I was unemployed during the worst of the great recession. I said it was because nobody I knew could afford $500 sweaters. I don’t design, so there’s … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[11,10,7,9],"class_list":["post-179","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-knitting","tag-business","tag-competitive-analysis","tag-knitting-2","tag-ravelry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinningwheel.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinningwheel.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinningwheel.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinningwheel.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinningwheel.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=179"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/spinningwheel.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":197,"href":"https:\/\/spinningwheel.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179\/revisions\/197"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinningwheel.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=179"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinningwheel.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=179"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinningwheel.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=179"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}