Thursday 15 July 2010

Working out cost of making pots.

This jug came out of the kiln
It has no lip, but in the Michael Cardew book a Portrait
by Garth Clark
There is one of a similar design without a lip
and that is called a jug.
It's black slip on white slip with a honey glaze.
I need to iron my black material as a background to get a better shot.
but otherwise it's a pot I'm very pleased with.
I've had to work out my material costs for making pots.
I've come up with a simple guide.
Luckily I have always kept a record of how many pots come from each Glaze firing
so I've been able to work out an average from each firing.
which for me works out at 36.
so the cost of two firings divided by 36 gives me a firing cost per pot.
Based upon how many are made from One Tonne of clay I have worked out an average of 750 pots
I can work out how much it costs to fire each pot as an average
add this to the cost of clay per tonne divided by 750
gives me a clay cost per pot.
I've also been able to work out how much glaze material I use
to glaze the 750 pots so the cost of this divided by 750
gives me a glaze cost per pot
Does this make sense so far, I'm beginning to loose myself in all this.
average pots made per tonne of clay = 750
average clay cost per pot
average glaze cost per pot
average firing cost per pot
add to these how long it takes me to work through a tonne of clay
so lets say 4 months.
so add 4 months rent.
Then it all falls down if you try to work out the man hours used to make these 750 pots
based on 48 hours per week at 18 weeks
that comes to 864 hours
so what rate do you charge your own time at ?
It doesn't quite work like that does it.
But for the tax man purposes the figures in red above are what they want to know.
So I hope this helps.

5 comments:

cookingwithgas said...

oh-don't go there you will go get a real job!
What about electricity, insurance,health insurance, driving to work,phone,business cards, food, clothes,heat,air conditioning.......need I say more?
I notice that some folks think we have no overhead.
Gee- how can we get someone else to pay us so we can just have fun making pots?!

togeii said...

Ohh, cost per pot analysis. I love it.
Dave

Yana Out East said...

I love this blog because you always seem to be at least one step ahead of me. I've been trying to calculate this too. After all the calculating, I just pick a number out of the air and go with it.

Paul Jessop said...

Me Too!

Christine said...

Ha, Your cost per pot analasyse, along with those comments and your final statement made me laugh out loud!
I've always kept records of what comes out of every kiln. So that say I get in 20 glaze firings a year, I worked out how much we needed to live, including overheads, food petrol etc and from that how much each kiln needed to make. Then it came to pricing the pots to make that up and it is terrifying! What I'm (we all are) prone to doing is pricing things down,'I CAN"T charge THAT, there is a blip on the rim' etc, so I now try to charge the best ones up - 'This pot is special, it has that elusive zing'. Of course in our self critical world the ones (£) going down way number the ones(£) going up, but that is the general idea....

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