The true costs of handmade

 

 http://www.gosocial.co/wedding-dress-on-a-bus/

I've seen articles about this before and thought the dress was beautiful and she looked gorgeous on her wedding day as any bride should, and that's as far as my thought process went.  But then today in my Facebook feed I saw this article again and they were making a big deal about how it only cost her $30.   For her this was a labor of love and she was doing it for herself, if you were to hire her to make this dress for you the cost would be much more.

Some people don't really understand the real costs of handmade.  They think that because the supplies and materials cost X amount the finished product should be X amount.  There's much more that goes in handmade than the materials. Lets look at the true cost of this dress.

The article says she worked on this dress during her 1 hour commute.  I'm assuming that's 1 hour each way so that gives her 2 hours a day to work on it 5 days a week.  That's 10 hours a week.  You'd expect to pay her for her time.  Minimum wage  being around $10/hour we'll use that figure.

If she worked 10 hours a week for $10/hour that's $100 a week.  It took her 5 months.  10 hours a week for 5 months is 200 hours.  There would be fittings, which would take at least 1-2 hours each.  With a minimum of 3 fittings, we'll average it out to 1.5 hours for each fitting, so that's another 4.5 hours of work.   200 hours crocheting + 4.5 hours fitting.  We're now up to 204.5 hours at $10/hour; that's $2045 + $30 materials.  Total cost $2075.

That's still not a bad price for a wedding dress, much less a custom handmade wedding dress,  but that's quite a bit more than the $30 they said she spent; and that's a conservative price because I'm not taking in to account how much time she spent planning and designing, and I'm sure she put in more than the 200 hours she spent riding the bus.

When you look at handmade items whether it's at a craft show or a boutique and think to yourself "That's so overpriced, I can get it at Target or Walmart for less than half"; think about the time that was spent working on it, the craftsmanship of the work, the skill level of the artist, and the fact that you're buying something unique, not mass produced, directly from the person who made it.