You’re printing price tags for the fall fairs this week, and you hit the same wall you hit every season: your candle comes in small, medium, and large, and you don’t actually know what the middle one should cost. So you do what feels reasonable — pick a round number, maybe add a few bucks per size, or just charge one clean price for all three because it’s easier on the sign and easier on the customer.
That “easier” price is quietly costing you money on both ends. And the frustrating part is you’d never see it in your bank account — it looks like a good weekend either way.
Why one price breaks the moment sizes differ
Here’s the thing almost nobody accounts for: your materials scale with size, but your price usually doesn’t. A large candle isn’t “a little more candle” — it’s noticeably more wax, more fragrance oil, a bigger vessel, sometimes a second wick. When you charge one flat price across all three, you’re pretending they cost the same to make. They don’t.
Let me put real numbers on a soy candle line, because vague pricing advice is how we all got into this mess.
Say your material costs land like this per candle:
- Small (8 oz): wax + fragrance ~$3.60, vessel $2.00, wick $0.15, lid + label $0.90 → $6.65
- Medium (12 oz): fill ~$5.40, vessel $2.75, wick $0.20, lid + label $0.90 → $9.25
- Large (16 oz): fill ~$7.20, vessel $3.75, two wicks $0.35, lid + label $0.90 → $12.20
Now add labor. Pouring takes roughly the same time regardless of size — call it 6 to 7 minutes at $20/hour, so about $2.00 to $2.33 each. Add 20% overhead for the studio, the propane, the failed pours. Your true cost floor comes out around $10.38 small, $13.70 medium, $17.44 large.
Look at that spread. The large costs 68% more to make than the small. There is no single price that can sit fairly on top of all three.
What the flat price actually does
Say you charge one clean $28 for every size — nice round number, simple sign.
- The small now earns $28 − $10.38 = $17.62 profit. Sounds great, until you remember it’s a small 8 oz candle priced like a premium one. Shoppers pick it up, register the size, and set it back down. It’s overpriced for what it is — so it sits there as inventory you already paid for.
- The large earns $28 − $17.44 = $10.56. It’s the biggest candle on the table for the same money — obviously the best deal — so it’s the one everyone reaches for. Your worst-margin item becomes your bestseller.
That’s the trap in one sentence: the flat price makes your least profitable size the one that flies off the table, and your most profitable size the one that doesn’t move.
The mix drift you never see
Here’s where it gets sneaky. When you planned the weekend, you probably assumed an even split — a third of each size. On that assumption your average profit at $28 looks like about $14.16 a candle. Comfortable.
But customers aren’t buying evenly. They’re buying the deal. So the real mix skews large — say 20% small, 30% medium, 50% large. Run that and your actual average profit drops to about $13.09 a candle. You lost roughly $1.07 per candle to a mix shift you never chose and never saw on any receipt.
Sell 300 candles across a fair weekend and that’s about $320 gone — while your small stock sits unsold in the bin. You’d swear you priced it right. The spreadsheet in your head said $14 a candle. The table quietly paid you $13.
Bigger objects punish flat pricing even harder
Candles scale roughly by weight, so at least the material grows in a straight line. Now think about a potter’s bowl, a knit blanket, or a leather tote. Those don’t scale by length — they scale by area and volume, which grow by squares and cubes.
An 8-inch bowl next to a 6-inch bowl isn’t 33% more clay and glaze. Surface area alone grows by roughly (8÷6)², about 1.78× the material — and that’s before the extra glaze and the longer time on the wheel. So the folksy “just add $5 for the bigger one” isn’t a little short. It can be half of what the size actually costs you. Every large you sell chips away at the margin you think you’re earning.
The fix: cost each variant like it’s its own product
Stop treating small, medium, and large as one thing with a size sticker. Cost each one as its own recipe — its own materials, its own wick count, its own true floor — and set each price off that. In CrafterBy you can build one template with a size variable and let it price all three from their real costs, so you’re not re-doing the math by hand every time your wax supplier nudges the price up.
Off those true costs, an honest markup lands somewhere like $22 small, $30 medium, $38 large. Notice what happened: your small came down. It’s now priced like the small candle it is, so more of them sell. Your large went up to where its cost actually lives, so it stops being a giveaway.
“But three different prices confuse people.” They don’t. You’re already showing three sizes on the table — three numbers next to them is exactly what a shopper expects. If anything, a $38 large sitting beside a $22 small makes both look fairly priced. The spread is doing quiet work for you.
“It’s only a few dollars.” It’s a few dollars times your whole season. It’s the $320 that walked out of one fair weekend. And it compounds: when your wax and vessel costs creep up over the year — and they will — the large slides underwater first, because it carries the most material. A flat price hides that until it’s a real hole.
You melt the wax and print the tags once. Do the size math once too, before the tags go on. Charge the small like a small and the large like a large, and let your bestseller finally be the size that actually pays you.
