When I was looking into getting a zafu—a Japanese meditation cushion useful for sitting on the floor—I found several sites that talked about how to make your own, but one site in particular stuck out to me.

Zafus don’t come cheap. The inexpensive ones start around $30, and the finer quality ones will run you into the $40-$60 range. This is why I was looking into patterns in the first place, and it seems I’m not the only one.

This particular page, though, added up the cost of supplies and compared it to the average price they had found online, and concluded that zafu sellers are making an “outrageous” profit. I looked at their figures and looked at the price and thought, “sounds reasonable.”

I’m not linking to the page because this isn’t meant to be a call-out. I wanted to use this as an example to talk about pricing handmade goods.

Pricing handmade items is a fuzzy process at best, but a general rule of thumb is to double the cost of your supplies. That’s your starting point. Then you need to factor in things like time and effort, difficulty, the going rate, and any overhead you have. For example, there are items that I’ve decided not to bother making and selling not because they’re difficult, but because they’re time consuming and the going rate doesn’t make it worth the hours put in.

So let’s look at the figures for the zafu:

The fabric cost them $11. No yardage given, but it was enough to make two cushions.

Three pounds of kapok, also enough for two, cost them $20.

(Let’s leave aside for now that that fabric price is low enough for me to suspect a sale or coupon (a yard of cotton duck is usually around $9), and the fact that I couldn’t find a source for kapok anywhere near that low, and just go with what they’ve quoted.)

We’re looking at around $15-$16 per cushion.

Double that and you’re already at $30, the low end of the price range I found for zafus.

They report that the sewing took about two and a half hours. No estimate on the time for stuffing the kapok so I’m going to make some assumptions and add in another half hour, Say it took around three hours to make, total. Not too bad for handmade goods.

At $5 an hour—less than minimum wage—that adds up to $15.

Now we’re at $45. Right around the average price they found. And I haven’t even factored in overhead.

Considering all of this, the $30-$60 price tag doesn’t seem high at all. Especially when you add in the eco-friendly cottons or hemps or decorative fabrics used by many of the shops I found.

When you buy a handmade item, you’re paying for more than the cost of supplies. You’re paying for time an expertise. And yes, the person deserves to make a profit.

In the end, I bought my zafu. Kapok really should be blown in, not stuffed by hand, and my research showed that not all buckwheat hulls are created equal and the cheaper ones aren’t going to give you a good cushion. If I wanted quality stuffing, either one was going to run me up as much as a complete cushion. I decided it was worth it to let someone else do the work this time.