5 costs you should include when pricing a custom dance costume.

You’ve got a great dance costume business. Your clients love your work and keep coming back for more. But you’re not making much profit.

Read on to find out what items you might be missing out when you cost your custom dance costumes.

5 costs you should include when pricing a custom dance costume

💎  Cost of materials
💎  Consumables
💎  Tools
💎  Business Overheads
💎  Miscellaneous​

1. Cost of materials

Most people get this one. We all know that if a customer wants to buy a costume from us, we at least need to know how much we paid for the materials so that we can include that cost in our calculations.

But the cost of running a business is so much greater than just the cost of materials. 

2. Consumables

On top of the material costs such as fabric, crystals, lace and appliqués etc. there are a number of consumable products needed too.

Thread, glue, tape, tracing paper, stabiliser… All these things add up and if you are not spreading the cost of consumables over all of your commissions, then you are paying for these items out of your own pocket.

That is not a business, that’s an expensive hobby!

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3. Tools

These can be quite costly, but fortunately we don’t have to buy them too frequently. Scissors, rotary cutters and pins are relatively cheap, but what if you want to use a cutting machine like a Silhouette, or you need a printer so you can print out your PDF patterns?

You don’t want to be forking out for these yourself.

They need to be included as a business expense.

4. Business Overheads

Even though you may be working from home, you are still using the heating, electricity and gas while you run your business.

Sometimes it can help to think about it as if you were hiring a workspace away from your home. Imagine you hired a unit and then write down all of the costs associated with being there. 

Lighting, heating, water, they all have to be paid for. You can disregard rent if you are using your home, but all the other costs should be included.

If you had a job working for someone else at a location separate to your home, you would be saving money on your domestic bills while you were out. You’d be using less heating, water and power and so these costs are a legitimate business expense.

Then there’s the annual fees you might pay for web hosting, insurance, banking fees etc. as well as advertising, marketing and printing costs.

5. Misc

I like to include a miscellaneous category because there are always costs that don’t really fit elsewhere. 

You need to pay yourself a wage and make provision for business profit so you can grow your business over time.

When calculating your hourly rate, try and be as realistic as possible.

• Have you got any qualifications that increases the value of your work?
• How many years experience do you have?
• Do you offer a specialist service that can’t be bought elsewhere?
• Is there a national minimum wage or living wage in your country?

So many creative business owners pay themselves less than the minimum wage. It just shows how little some people value their time and expertise. 

Sometimes I think it might be because we tend to love what we do so much that we feel we shouldn’t be charging for it.

“I’m having so much fun doing this job, therefore I’m not going to charge much for doing it. I love it so much!’

Well, that just won’t work as a business model. If your business doesn’t cover the entire cost of producing a product, it is not a business. It’s an expensive hobby being subsidised by people who don’t value your work.

Sounds awful when put like that doesn’t it?

That’s because it is awful. But for some reason society has become reluctant to pay creative people for their work. 

“But think of the exposure.”

Artists are often asked to work in exchange for ‘exposure’ or ‘for free’ as I prefer to call it.

Last time I checked, I couldn’t pay my bills with exposure, so this one is not going to cut it with me. 

No one visits a car showroom and asks for a free car in exchange for the exposure the car will get as they drive it around. It would be ludicrous to do this, so don’t do it with your business either.

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The good news is that there are people out there who do value your work and will pay your prices.  I never had a problem gaining new customers, in fact I was booked up solidly for six months at a time and often had to turn people away because I couldn’t get their costume finished before their competition date.

Often people will pay more when they see that other people are paying more for something. It’s called social proof. We see other people paying a higher price than we have been paying, those people are very happy with their purchase and so we want to pay more too because we believe the product is better if you pay more for it.

The more dance costume makers who charge properly, the more customers will get used to it and start to understand how much it actually costs to make a dance costume.

Hopefully this has got you started thinking about how you charge for your dance costumes and whether or not you are charging enough to cover all of your costs.

If you want a full list of all the items you need to consider when calculating your costs, you can download my free costume costing checklist below.

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Get a copy of my free Costume Costing Checklist by entering your name and email below.

It’s an extensive list of all the costs you might have when making dance costumes and will help ensure you are including everything in your costings.