Raise your prices. I kept raising mine until it is TOTALLY worth it to do a carve. And I do them less frequently. For small metal parts, a fixturing jig makes those dead simple.
can i ask what kind of price range do you ask for a sign ?
It depends on the sign, but they start at $45 and go up from there.
What materials are you using for your signs?
I charge 50 and on up for my acrylic signs the bases are made from some kind of hardwood whatever I find at the time
Mine start at $90 and go up to $300.
Side note: When folks post projects they did for $ it would be nice to know the prices they charged and if there are caveats to why itās lower or higher (ex. nicer hardwood, fancy hard wear, etc.) Trying to figure out average pricing for things, which includes research elsewhere too.
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Good luck to you Andrew, that balance is really hard to sort out. I have a day job that pays well, and so I only pick up the woodworking jobs that are going to be really fun. When it starts feeling like work I have to take a step back and remind myself that if I am only doing it for the cash I am not spending my time well.
I do, however, dream of getting to the point where I am making nice enough woodworking pieces that it actually made sense to spend more time at the workshop and less time at my desk.
We can all dream right?
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Another thing to consider is regional pricing. Just because someone in "big city "america can get $xxx.xx doesnt mean that the poor schmuck in ālittle backwaterā can charge the same amount . Regional economics play a part in what things can be priced at.
Smaller communities tend to have lower wages and often lower housing costs etc. this is why a national 15.00 hr minimum wage everywhere is a poor idea. 15 an hr in California or NYC is probably scraping the bottom of the barrel wheras itās living pretty good in other areas.
Then there is what I like to call the Wal-mart effect.
Folks see alot of inexpensive, mass produced, cheap CRAP in the big box stores and think that a quailty hand crafted simIlar item made from real wood, or other material one or just a few at a time should be priced the same. This tends to dilute what an item can be reasonably sold for.
I for one dont want quit my day job to make a living from my home workshop, then my hobby, which i can walk away from from time to time, becomes my ball and chain.
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i think people are overthinking this way too much.
Just start charging what you think is fair. If you get a lot of interest, keep upping your price until you reach a point where you have the amount of orders you feel comfortable with. If interest fades, lower againā¦
all the rest is making it far too complicated
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Sure, we donāt need to get into regional differences or anything but if someone in another major city says they can get $100 for something then thatās $45 more than what I wouldāve thought to charge and thatās nice to know.
Someone will pay what you ask itās all about what itās worth to the buyer. If itās custom made then they are going to pay more for it. If itās just your run of the mill sign that you have i 20 in stock then itās not going to be as much. Do they undersell yourself. I charge 50 for an 8x8 light up sign. I get orde4s all day long. Have people understand that using a cnc is a true craft cause you still have to program it to do what you want to do and get it right everytime
I almost hate to bring up the notion of āart.ā Some signs are simply going to have more value owing to design, composition, materials, colors, finish, etc. Iāve seen beautiful work posted here from a carve and finish standpoint that suck from a design, composition - even text layout standpoint.
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Pricing is actually one of the things I struggle most often with. Iām probably a bit on the cheap side for my general charging, but I am having fun and making some decent coin. 
Iām planning to do letters inside of a circle cut out in plywood. Going to sell them unfinished. Originally I was thinking like $6-7, now Iām thinking $8-9. Weāre already on Amazon for vinyl monograms (which is a beast and has produced more volume for us than either my wife or myself ever expectedā¦not a bad problem to have) and I can personally tell you that the difference between $6 and $8 means nothing to most shoppers. We just upped our prices and had no drop offs. We even doubled our craft time and still saw no drop off. Is there a break point? Of course.
But the one thing I havent seen mentioned in this thread is simply this: not everybody can make these things. They donāt have the skills, tools, money or whatever. Why spend $2k or more (Iām already in for like 2.2k and havenāt even finished assembly) for one carving or one item? Theyād rather pay like $100 once and get something that is good quality. Instead, Iāll spend the money and capitalize on 100s of those people that just want 1 item and smile all the way to the bank.
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BINGO!
@JustinBusby I studied this many times - There should be no difference between $6 and $9.99, psychologically to the buyer. I would start at $9.99 and test $19.99 - especially if you already have a decent customer base for your vinyl. Good luck! And also congratulations on your business!
Thanks. Itāll be an adventure going into CNC world and also FBA world (fulfillment by Amazon).
Back to the original topic, my wife and I were in the exact same spot twice now. Weāve handled it three different ways to give us ābreathingā room.
The first way was to just take a break. We put the shops on away/vacation mode and finished all the orders we had in queue (took over a week to get the queue flushed out) and then let it sit for like 3-4 weeks. We actually only started it up again because of an impending furlough at my real job. But that 3-4 week break was enough for us to get refreshed and feeling better. Took maybe 3-4 days to get the order volume back to pre-break levels and in fact, weāve had more volume since then than we did before. Obviously, you donāt have any income coming in but, for us at least, we both still had our full time jobs and it was fine.
The second way was we increased the craft time. Our decals were set at 4-5 business days and we upped it to be 6-10 days now. That gives us more weekend time to do more batch processing and lets us not necessarily worry about it during the week (we have like 90 orders we will try to get through this weekend, may not be that many). As I stated before, even upping the craft time didnāt deter orders. Did we get a rise in cancellations due to shipping times? A little. I think weāve lost maybe 10 out of 750+ orders and the ones weāve lost are single item orders (most of our orders are single item) so not too worried. While we are a āneed it nowā society, people will still wait for speciality items that they a) canāt buy off the shelf, b) canāt do themselves, or c) wouldnāt know where else to buy it.
The third thing is that we just finished was we had a family member (17 year old cousin) come stay with us and do the orders for us. Weād still do the design and then quality inspection after he was done, but the cutting and weeding of the vinyl he did. So we were far less stressed, it was his first ājobā, and while it ate into profits, it helped us both not be as stressed.
Thatās just my experience with handling the burned out feeling. So far, itās worked. Now, itās hard to not quit the real job and do the side job full time and if the CNC can produce what I hope it can produce, that might just happen.
My grandfather was a machinist and the most amazing tool he owned was a lathe. I wanted one my whole life - and did not know how to use oneā¦ one day, I bought a 1929 Lodge&Shipley fro $400. I used it for about 6 months and got āOKā at boring, facing, and turningā¦ so, I dropped $4,000 on a nice new Jet 13"x60" ārealā lathe - BRAND NEW!
I started doing a few jobs for myself, then a few jobs for customers who had an āemergency,ā then projects kept comingā¦ it took me 5-6 years to āBurn out.ā
I LOVE my lathe. I love being able to just āturnā something out, but I get downright crushed when I see a ājobā come down the pipeā¦
There are some weekends I do NOTHING but stand at itā¦ the money is great ā WE took a two week trip to British Columbia last year on the $$$ I madeā¦ Next Summer we have a 2 week trip planned to Costa Rica on the $$$ I plan to makeā¦ If it wasnāt for the āfree money,ā Iād have sold that thing LOOOONNNGGG ago!
My X-Carve is not producing much revenue yet, but I learned not to āsellā it out like I did my lathe