Pricing Engraved Products

Before you determine your pricing structure, we recommend learning the prices of other engraving businesses in the area. It’s a good way to gauge the amount customers are willing to pay for engraving services and also helps you determine a competitive price for your services.

Many successful engraving businesses use the following formula to calculate pricing:

• Minimum charge – covers the time of job setup.
• Artwork charge – covers time required for creating any logos or artwork.Materials cost – covers the cost of all related materials.
• Number of items – this helps calculate the time required to engrave each piece of the job.

Example: For 100 engraved wedding photo frames that include three lines of engraving (a quotation, names of the newlyweds, and date of wedding) and 70 total characters, the wholesale cost is approximately $350 ($1.75 per wood frame), the unengraved retail cost is $1,500 ($15 per frame), the artwork charge is $50, and the engraving time is about four hours (one minute per item, plus time to change out frames).

What do you charge for a project like this? It’s really based on the market in which you are selling and the amount you need to earn on the job to make it profitable enough for your business. Below are a couple different ways that you could price this project:

• Charge for engraving per letter. For example, you could charge a standard engraving fee for any engraving over 40 characters at $0.30 per character.
• Use a standard fee for engraving based on the time it takes to engrave, not on the number of characters. For example, the text for the frames will not take long to engrave on each one, so you might charge the retail fee plus $30.00 per frame for engraving.

-James Stanaway, Epilog Laser