Pricing wedding cakes is something I know a lot of cake makers struggle with.
You can spend hours creating a beautiful cake, receive lots of lovely comments about it and still find yourself wondering, “Am I really charging too much for this?”
Or perhaps you’ve had the opposite experience: you’ve finished the cake, worked out how many hours you’ve actually spent on it and realised you’ve barely paid yourself at all.
Putting a price on something you’ve created yourself isn’t always easy. But if you want to build a successful wedding cake business, your prices need to work for you as well as your customers.
So how do you price wedding cakes properly without underselling yourself?
1. Don’t Copy Other Wedding Cake Makers’ Prices
It’s very tempting to look at other cake makers in your area and use their prices as a guide.
Knowing what’s happening in your local market can certainly be useful, but another cake maker’s prices shouldn’t determine yours.
You don’t know their ingredient costs, overheads or how long a cake takes them to make. They may work from home while you have separate premises, they may have completely different levels of experience and, importantly, you don’t actually know whether they’re making a healthy profit themselves.
Your wedding cake pricing needs to be based on your own business and your own costs.
That’s one of the biggest changes you can make if you’ve previously found yourself choosing a price because it simply “sounds about right”.
2. Know What Your Wedding Cakes Really Cost to Make
When you think about the cost of making a wedding cake, ingredients are probably the first thing that come to mind.
Flour, eggs, butter, sugar, chocolate, fillings and fondant are obvious costs, but don’t forget all the other things that go into creating the finished cake.
Depending on the design, you might also need cake boards, drums, dowels, boxes, ribbons, flowers, toppers, specialist ingredients or decorative materials.
Then there are your wider business overheads. These could include insurance, your website, marketing, equipment, training, software, accountancy, utilities and payment fees.
You don’t need to allocate your entire website bill to one wedding cake! But your business needs to generate enough income across all of your orders to cover the cost of actually running it.
And remember to revisit your costs regularly. The price you paid for ingredients and supplies a year or two ago may be very different from what you’re paying now.
3. Remember to Charge for Your Time
This is probably one of the biggest areas where cake makers unintentionally undercharge.
A customer sees the finished wedding cake.
You see everything that happened before it arrived at the venue.
Your time might include:
- Responding to enquiries and emails
- Consultations and tastings
- Designing the cake and preparing the quote
- Ordering ingredients and materials
- Baking and making fillings
- Preparing and covering the tiers
- Decorating and making handmade elements
- Stacking, finishing and packaging
- Cleaning up
- Delivering and setting up at the venue
A cake that takes six hours to decorate hasn’t necessarily taken six hours to produce.
There can be many hours of work surrounding the actual decorating, and that time has value too.
If your diary is full but your cake business still isn’t making much money, this is one of the first things I’d look at. Are you actually accounting for all the time that goes into each order?
4. Price the Cake You’re Actually Being Asked to Make
Two three-tier wedding cakes can require completely different amounts of work.
One might have a relatively simple finish and minimal decoration. Another could include intricate piping, handmade sugar flowers, specialist techniques and hours of detailed work.
They may serve exactly the same number of guests, but it wouldn’t necessarily make sense for them to cost the same.
When pricing a wedding cake, think about the complete design, including the number and size of tiers, finish, decorative techniques, handmade elements, structural requirements and the time you’re likely to spend creating it.
The same applies to delivery and set-up.
A wedding five minutes from your kitchen is very different from a venue an hour away where you need to transport several tiers, find parking, liaise with the venue and spend time assembling the cake.
Make sure your wedding cake quote reflects what you’re actually being asked to provide.
5. Be Careful With ‘Starting From’ Prices
There’s nothing wrong with showing starting prices on your website. In fact, I think they can be really useful.
They give couples an idea of whether your cakes are likely to suit their budget before they enquire, which can save time for everybody.
Just make sure they’re realistic.
If you advertise three-tier wedding cakes “from £300”, but almost every three-tier cake you actually make costs £600 or more, you could end up attracting lots of enquiries from couples whose expectations don’t match what you offer.
A starting price should represent something you could genuinely provide for that amount, rather than simply being a low figure designed to encourage enquiries.
The aim isn’t necessarily to get as many enquiries as possible. It’s to attract the right enquiries for your business.
If attracting more of the right couples is something you’re working on, I’ve shared more ideas in How to Get More Wedding Cake Bookings: Marketing Tips for Cake Makers.
6. Don’t Be Afraid to Make a Profit
I think there’s sometimes a little discomfort around the word profit, particularly when you’re turning something you love doing into a business.
But making a profit isn’t the same as overcharging.
Your ingredients need paying for. Your business overheads need paying for. Your time needs paying for. And after all of those costs, your business still needs to make a profit if it’s going to be sustainable.
Profit allows you to replace equipment, invest in training, cope with unexpected costs and continue developing your business.
You haven’t built a profitable wedding cake business simply because there’s some money left after you’ve bought the ingredients.
This is why understanding your numbers is so important. The more you understand what each cake actually costs you to produce, the easier it becomes to see whether your wedding cake prices are genuinely working.
7. Have Confidence in Your Wedding Cake Prices
This can be easier said than done!
You send somebody a quote and immediately start wondering what they’ll think.
Sometimes you can even find yourself trying to justify the price before the customer has questioned it.
If you’ve worked out your costs properly, accounted for your time and allowed your business to make a sensible profit, you don’t need to apologise for your price.
Your customers aren’t simply paying for flour, eggs and sugar.
They’re paying for your skill, creativity, time and experience, as well as the responsibility you take for producing and delivering an important part of their wedding day.
And not everybody will be able to afford your cakes.
That’s okay.
If somebody’s budget doesn’t stretch to the design they’ve chosen, you might be able to suggest changes that reduce the amount of work involved. Perhaps the decoration could be simplified or fewer handmade elements could be used.
That’s very different from doing exactly the same amount of work for less money.
Sometimes you simply won’t be the right cake maker for that particular customer, and that doesn’t automatically mean your pricing is wrong.
8. Review Your Wedding Cake Pricing Regularly
Wedding cake pricing isn’t something you should work out once and then forget about.
Your ingredient and supply costs will change over time, but so will your experience, skills and the type of cakes you’re making.
It’s worth looking back at completed orders occasionally and asking yourself:
How much did that cake actually cost me to make? How many hours did I really spend on it? And was the final price worthwhile?
You might discover that a particular technique consistently takes much longer than you allow for, or that your delivery and set-up time is eating into what you thought was your profit.
That’s useful information.
Use what you’ve learnt from previous cakes to price your future wedding cake orders more accurately.
Knowing Your Numbers Builds Confidence
For me, this is really what confident wedding cake pricing comes down to.
It’s incredibly difficult to stand behind a price if you’ve essentially guessed it.
If you’re thinking, “£450 sounds about right…”, of course you’re going to question yourself when somebody tells you it’s too expensive.
But when you understand your costs, your time, your overheads and what your business needs to make, there’s a reason behind the figure you’ve quoted.
That doesn’t mean you’ll never question a price again, but it gives you something much more solid to base your decisions on.
Pricing is also just one part of creating a business that works for you. I’ve talked about this more broadly in How to Become a Successful Wedding Cake Maker: Skills, Confidence & Growing Your Business, including developing your skills, building confidence, marketing and looking after your customers.
You Don’t Have to Figure It All Out Alone
When most of us first discover cake decorating, I don’t think we’re dreaming about pricing, accounts and profit margins!
But understanding the business side becomes incredibly important when you want to turn something you love into a sustainable cake business.
It’s one of the reasons business support forms part of my Wedding Cake Lounge.
As well as tutorials, workshops, recipes and demonstrations to help you develop your cake-making skills, I invite expert guest speakers into the Lounge to cover areas such as accounting, marketing, sales and social media.
There’s also a community of fellow cake makers to learn from, ask questions and share experiences with – something I think can be incredibly valuable when you’re running a business that can otherwise feel quite lonely.
If you’d like more support developing your cakes and growing your business, you can find out more about the Wedding Cake Lounge here.
Most importantly, don’t be afraid to value what you do. Your customers aren’t just paying for the ingredients in their wedding cake. They’re paying for all of the practice, knowledge, creativity and experience that allows you to create it for them.
