How to Price Your Cakes (or Anything in General…)
Woohoo! Weekly Friday blog posts! Currently sitting in the airport waiting for our flight to San Diego so hopefully, I can write this in time before we fly in the air!
Can I just say that I am loving that YOU are all loving my blog posts! I’ve been getting a ton of direct messages from bakers and non-bakers about how my Instagram tips are so helpful! If you missed that post you can find it HERE.
Last week, I did a poll on my Instagram stories on pricing cakes or managing full-time job + a side hustle. It was pretty even but with 15% more who wanted to learn about pricing cakes! I realized a lot of my followers who aren’t bakers voted on pricing cakes so this post is going to focus on HOW you should price your cakes (or any type of service in general) which will then answer your question to WHAT should I price my cakes at!
Please note that this is from my personal experience of running a home bakery, living in 3 different cities – Provo, Utah, Los Angeles, California, and Boston, MA.
During my time at BYU, Pinterest was invented and after freshmen year living in the dorms, I moved into an apartment with an actual kitchen!! My 5 roommates and I knew how to cook basic things but when Pinterest came out I was hooked. I remember my goal my sophomore year was to make one new meal a week. If you follow me on my personal Instagram, you can scroll all the way down and find some interesting photos of things I called “new meals.” Definitely not food porn status but hey I was using Instagram filters back then so I was already at my low hahaha anyways sorry to get off track! Going to a very conservative, Mormon university – no one drank alcohol or partied – but everyone loved their sweets!! So my roommates and I would make chocolate chip cookies every Sunday and invite people over and once I moved into a bigger place in the Spring, I would throw these so-called “dessert parties.” I loved party planning and with the stress of party planning, I wanted to make sure everyone who came was fell fed – so I searched high and low on Pinterest for the yummiest desserts to make for my party! & that’s where my love of baking started. (Literally searched forever in my FB albums to find a dessert party photo – found this waffle bar party I hosted hahaha)
By senior year – that was my thing – throwing the biggest dessert parties in all of Provo! Okay, not sure if they were that huge but they were pretty big in my eyes! I would make all kinds of desserts from brownies, cookies, chocolate-covered strawberries, cookie shots, etc. But I actually never made a cake until my bridal shower – Spring 2015. I searched all over Pinterest to find the most perfect cake to make and I attempted a two-tiered naked strawberry shortcake. It wasn’t the prettiest but at that time I was like “WOW, I made this?” I posted it on my personal Instagram and everyone thought it was so beautiful! Then I slowly started making more cakes for friends and family. When I got laid off from my job, my friends and family kept insisting I sell my cakes through Instagram and FB. It never occurred to me that I could sell cakes or that people would even want to buy them?! I was so stressed just thinking about how to price my cakes to friends and family that I was going to quit right there. But, I didn’t quit!!! So finally here are some pricing tips/strategies I wish I would have known when I first started out as a home baker!
1. KNOW YOUR MARKET
So many people DM me asking me how much they should price their cakes. I immediately go to their profile and see where their location is. It’s hard to tell you what I price my cakes in Boston and it won’t really help much knowing the price of cakes in Boston when you live somewhere different! But you are the only one that will know your own market! When I started out baking in Provo, Utah – I knew that my cakes wouldn’t be that expensive because the cost of living is SO low. I don’t think you guys know this but Steven and I lived in a 2 bedroom apartment when we got married for only $700 (CRAZY CHEAP compared to where we live now..) So looking back, I think I charged $25-35 for a 6″ cake? I researched other home bakers and bakeries and took about $5-10 off because I was just new to this whole baking thing. The key thing is to know your market and just do your research! This will help you in the long run when pricing.
2. KNOW YOUR WORTH
Bakers and even creative entrepreneurs (photographers, wedding planners, florists, etc..) need to have this engrained in their minds. Even though I was a so-called baking NEWB when I was in Utah, I still could make beautiful cakes right from the beginning! Obviously, not all were like the cakes I do now but for example – the Momofuku Milk Bar Birthday cake. I mastered that cake pretty quickly in Utah, I remember posting an Instagram photo of it and MilkBar actually commented on it saying “You’re hired.” Best comment ever. They price their cakes online for $50 for a 6″ three-layer cake + a ton for shipping! So I thought charging $45 was a reasonable price for how much work it takes that goes into a Milkbar cake. It was probably on the higher side of cakes for people in Utah, but if you wanted a Milkbar cake in Utah and not have to pay for additional shipping or a flight to NYC then people would buy from me and no one blinked an eye when I told them my price. That’s when I knew you have to be confident in your work to price what you want to price.
3. YOUR TIME IS SO VALUABLE
In Los Angeles, I wish I upped my prices because do you know how much time goes into baking just one custom cake?! You have to email back and forth with the client to know the perfect design that they want, make the batter, bake the cake layers, WAIT for them to cool, make the frosting, prep and make the decorations for the cake, buy whatever added toppings (florals, cake toppers, candles, etc.), package it, and deliver it! One custom cake would probably take about 3-6 hours depending on the complexity of the design. I never really think of getting paid hourly – but I do ask myself these questions when I price my cakes: is making this cake worth my time not spending it with my husband, is it worth my time to forgo a weekend exploring the city or really anything that you would rather be doing than making someone else a cake! But, obviously, you bake cakes for people because YOU love doing it! Just always remember to think about yourself and your time first before catering to other people! Also, something else that I thought of that I wished I did differently when I was living in LA – for some reason if I was making a two-tiered cake for a birthday party or some party that was not a wedding – I charged what one 8 inch cake would be and one 6 inch cake but I realized that stacked cakes are so much HARDER to make and you should price accordingly because it’s literally the same exact work as a wedding cake. So now I just charge stacked tiered cakes all the same! I hope that makes sense!
4. PRICE CAKES FOR FRIENDS AND FAMILY ACCORDINGLY
I learned at a Tuesdays Together event that you should always be confident when pricing your cakes to friends and family. For me personally, I’ll make free cakes for my immediate family and their kids. It’s my gift to them and I love seeing their reactions to the cake I made them. I think friends are the tricky part because you want to be nice but also you still want to get paid (duh) – There are some friends who have helped me in some way or the other and I would thank them with a free cake! Some friends I would even offer some $$ off the cake and they would still pay me full price! No matter what – if you don’t feel obligated to them in any way, your friends or family should pay full price for your cake because they should be your #1 fans in growing your business!! So why wouldn’t they want to pay full price? Anyways – I haven’t had any bad experience with this but this situation will probably come up for you one day.
5. INCREASE YOUR PRICES (when the time is right)
Los Angeles and Boston are pretty similar – the cost of living is just RIDICULOUS. In the beginning, I was pricing my cakes in Boston like I was still in LA. But, I made some changes with different ingredients that I used and my skill level improved drastically. I upped my prices and when people started asking me how much my custom cakes were – I gave them the price and probably only a handful of people told me it wasn’t in their budget. But the rest of the 90% didn’t blink an eye with my prices! & then as I got more popular in the Boston/Cambridge area, I knew I needed to raise my prices because my workload was getting way too high for how much I was paying myself. You have to remember that people who want your cake or service will pay the price you give because having that custom cake or service is a luxury! They don’t have to go to the grocery store to buy a cake that was made 100 times that day and they get their own custom cake with everything that they love inside a cake!
I hope this blog post helped you in some type of way on knowing how much you should price your cakes or services for! I know I didn’t give any exact numbers but I did give you some tips/strategies that can help you understand how to price your future cakes.
If you ever have any questions – email me or DM me on Instagram!
