The Profitability of Cutting Boards
Skip to the bottom of this long post to see my discussion on making the profit.
I love making boxes. It’s what makes me happy. I never got into making cutting boards because when I started woodworking, I didn’t have much use for them at home. Then, as I started to accumulate boxes around the house, I started selling on Etsy to help fund my hobby. Earlier this year, in the interest of having a variety of products, I brought a couple of cutting and serving boards to a Farmer’s Market, along with my boxes and turned items. Long story short, I sold out of the boards, and came home with more money than I had ever made at a Farmer’s Market. Clearly, there was a demand.
So, I went down the rabbit hole. This post will be my build process, thought process, and pricing process.
It starts at the sawmill. For transparency’s sake, here is my bill for this build, which came to $177.
I then started cutting the slabs into approximately 20″ sections, with the intent of having a final product of 12″ x 18″. I ended up with 25 initial “blanks” to help me make money on my $177 investment.
I like to keep as much of the grain intact as possible. With a piece of walnut like the one below, why would you ever start cutting that into strips? Let the grain speak for itself!
However, I needed a final width of 12″, so I needed to add about 1.5″ on either side.
So ripped some scrap maple to serve as borders for this board. It looked okay, but I thought it was a bit boring.
I then ripped those maple pieces in half, and replaced the kerf with pieces of spare walnut from those slabs. This looked better (to me).
Other boards needed to cut in the middle for a variety of reasons, but grain continuity is very important to me. I marked the boards (even the boards that would be cut into strips) so that as I reassembled them the grain would still be continuous. Later, when I pointed this out to potential customers, they were very impressed.
The stack began to grow. Each cutting board was its own problem-solving activity, so none of the boards were the same, which I enjoyed.
I like putting feet on the bottom of the boards, and had been using some non-skid feet from Home Depot. At $2.50 for a set of 4, this would have $62.50 for feet for 25 boards. I wanted a better deal, so I went shopping on Amazon. I found these in packs of 30 for about $13. So 90 feet was about $40, which amounts to enough feet for 22 boards, at a cost of $1.80 a board. Not much better, but it adds up. So, add $40 to my $177 lumber bill, and so far I’ve spent $217.
I’ll cut to the chase. Here is what I was able to bring to the next Farmer’s Market.
I had 15 of the 25 boards ready to go, with others still in the works.
By the next farmer’s market, I had the rest ready.
So, the crux of the matter - making money on cutting boards. Not counting minor expenses (glue, sandpaper, electricity, wear and tear on tools, etc.) I needed to make money on my $217 investment. I ended up with 23 boards (2 of my blanks had to be “sacrificed” in the process). So, let’s do some math.
A lot of woodworkers will tell you to charge double your materials. So let’s start there. If you divide $217 by 23, my cost was $9.43 per cutting board. If I double that, I should charge $18.87 a board, or about $20. At this price, I would probably sell out very quickly, but my profit would only be $243.
The thing to remember here is that this is my hobby, not my profession. If you are trying to make a living off of this, this probably won’t pay much of your bills (mortgage, groceries, utilities, etc.).
So let’s look at charging more. If I charged $50 a board, which is comparable to some cutting board sellers on Etsy for a 12″ x 18″ board, $50 x 23 is $1,150. Subtract the $217 investment, and the profit is now $933, or about 4.3 times (430%) your investment. For a hobbyist like me, that’s pretty good. If you’re making this a profession, you’re getting closer to paying some bills. However, as your prices increases, your rate of sales most likely decreases.
Some cutting board makers on Etsy are charging around $100 for a board the size of mine. Well, after the same math, the profit is over $2,000. That’s fantastic and a profit of 10 times your investment, but how long will it take to sell all of them? I honestly don’t know. I’d like to hear from some of them. I guess if you’re willing to wait longer to sell all of them, it’s an amazing profit margin.
Where I live, the cost of living is low. With that, people that come to my farmer’s market booth simply would walk away. Then my profit drops down to zero because I’m not selling any. If I were in bigger towns like New York or Chicago where people are used to paying more for things, I could probably charge $50 a board quite easily. I live in Cincinnati, where people will scoff at those prices.
So I turn to becoming an online seller, in particular Etsy. This allows me to cast a bigger net as far as customers. The downside, however, is that Etsy is FLOODED with cutting boards. It’s ridiculous. Getting discovered by a customer on Etsy will be difficult, especially with many sellers willing to make another investment to “boost” their products so that they appear earlier in searches.
Also, many sellers on Etsy have the equipment to “customize” the cutting boards through the use of laser engravers, CNC machines, and carving. I don’t have that equipment, and honestly, don’t like it. I make boards with interesting grain that speaks for itself, so I want that to be the main feature, not a laser-engraved name for cute picture.
So, every cutting/serving board maker has to find their niche and their own comfortablity in that profit and rate of sales relationship. Do you accept a slower rate of sales in order to make the profit you desire, or lower your price to get immediate (but much less) money? It’s a personal choice you have to make.
Again, the biggest factor is if this is a profession or a hobby. Do you have kids’ mouths to feed? Or are you just doing this for fun/relaxation and are just trying to buy/upgrade some tools?
In the end, I decided to charge $30 a board. I am mostly selling these locally at craft fairs and farmer’s markets, and I live in a lower cost-of-living part of the USA, so it’s a price customers around here are willing to pay. At this price point, I will (eventually) make $690 in sales, and $473 profit. For a hobbyist, that’s good enough to buy me a very nice new handplane or something.