How Much Should I Charge For My Rugs?

Estimate Based On Time

As I mentioned previously this method can be a good estimation in the beginning if you do not have any idea about this market. When you decide to sell your rugs if you do not calculate the cost of them before and you can not guess it close enough you can easily put a really low price tag on your art and go into the red. 

In this method, firstly create a list of all the necessary materials and tools during the whole tufting process. Once you write down all of them try to estimate the price per 1 square ft (or per square m). It would be possible to use these unit costs to estimate the price of all your rugs if you are using the same materials for all of them. We can roughly estimate the cost for one square foot of a custom-made rug as 24-30$, of course, don’t forget that these numbers can change dramatically according to the quality of rug you want to achieve and your location around the world. Check Is it Expensive To Start Tufting? to learn more about how to calculate cost per sq ft.

Take a moment here and try to guess the cost of your materials precisely. Because if you skip this step or do not take everything into account, you can easily turn your new business into a loss. 

After you know the actual cost for your rug pieces, you can see how long it takes for you to create each individual piece. The hourly rate can vary depending on a lot of different perimeters but it is possible to estimate for yourself. If you are not sure about this step, simply just think about how much your 1 hour is worth? 

For one specific rug that cost 70$ to create in 4 hours, with a 25$ hourly rate, it would be a good estimation to put a price tag of 170$ on it. 

Based On Design

As an alternative to the time-based approach, you can think depending on the quality/complexity of the design. For a starting point, it would still be highly useful to calculate the overall cost of the rugs before anything. In this way, you will be sure that you will be on the green side of the line for sure. 
In case, you are creating really high-quality designs with a lot of tiny details or unique compositions no one ever created before, you may try to determine the price for your rugs in a different way than your hourly rate. Because there is no doubt that creating something unique is not easy and requires a lot of time and energy. Feel free to reflect this to the price tag as well.

Beyond any of these methods, the first and easiest thing you can do is check what others are doing. There are a great number of artists on social media with their own personal online shops, you can try to find and look at how they are valuing their arts. It is not a bad thing to look at others when you are at the beginning of a new journey and take inspiration from them.