Pricing your products

We received a question today about how we come up with pricing for our products, and I thought I'd write a general answer here, to the best of my ability. With essential oils, we have found that though it takes a little bit of time, it is best to come up with a price per drop for each essential oil, especially if you are creating blends and dilutions. Oil prices vary so much, and fluctuate in price from year to year. For example, grapefruit oil can be about $.05/drop, and rose is well over $1/drop. If you are putting 33 drops of rose oil into an 8 oz. blend for someone, that is over $33 just in rose essential oil, not including bottle, label, base oil, and other oils you might add. We have all of our oils organized in a very nice database (thanks to Roy) showing our cost per drop, per 2.5 ml, 5ml, 15ml, etc. so that when I am creating new blends for people, I have a really good idea of what the cost is. We also have all of our bases (jojoba oil, skin cream, etc.) calculated to the ounce.  Of course, you'll also want to consider your bottle & label costs. Again, this does take some time, but it so worth it! And speaking of labels, we have also had several questions about where we get ours. We print our own, and purchased the equipment from a company called Primera. It was a little spendy, and I'm curious what everyone else out there is using?

Here is a quick chart with estimated drops of oil per different sized bottles, so that you can do your own calculations at home:

1 ml = 20 drops
5 ml = 1 teaspoon = 100 drops
10 ml = 2 tsp = 200 drops
15 ml = 1 Tablespoon = 300 drops
30 ml = 1 ounce = 2 Tablespoons = 600 drops

1 ounce bottle = 600 drops
2 ounce bottle = 1200 drops
4 ounce bottle = 2400 drops
8 ounce bottle = 4800 drops

I hope this helps, and would love to hear what others are doing.