Women-owned businesses earn 40% of what men-owned businesses earn. Only 15% of women feel confident in their financial management before they launch their business, compared to 31% of men.
The data paints a picture of women who don’t know how to price, or who know and are too scared to charge what they actually need to survive on. So let’s take confidence out of it entirely. Here are the pricing models for physical products — tried, tested, and impersonal enough that you don’t need to feel brave to use them.
Why the confidence gap exists
Financial literacy research keeps finding the same pattern: give people a test with an “I don’t know” option, and women pick it far more than men — even when they know the answer. Take the option away, and the gap shrinks by half. Half of the measured knowledge gap isn’t knowledge at all. It’s women declining to say what they already know.
What getting it wrong actually costs
Not a vibe. Real outcomes:
- Burnout. Making up a low price with volume means more hours for the same or less money, indefinitely.
- Debt. A margin with nothing in it means stock, materials, or tax bills get funded on credit instead of from the business.
- Closure. Businesses with no margin don’t survive a bad month, let alone a bad year.
- The quiet one. Being slightly underpaid and working way too much, forever. No crisis, no closure — just a business that never gives you back what it takes from you, for years, because it’s just functional enough to keep going.
The models
COGS — the number under everything.
Cost of goods sold is what every pricing model runs on, and most people underbuild it.
If you’re making the product yourself:
- Materials and components, at what you actually paid
- Packaging — every box, label, and bit of tissue paper that ships with it
- Your own time, at a real hourly rate
- A waste factor — the materials that don’t make it into a sellable product, because some won’t
If you’re buying a component or product wholesale to build into your own:
- The wholesale cost, in full
- Any packaging or waste you add on top of what you bought
- Your own time for assembly, finishing, or customisation
Either way, if the product ships and you’re not charging shipping separately, it goes in COGS too. It’s a real cost. Absorbing it silently is still a cost.
On your own hourly rate — don’t default to the minimum. Use it as the floor, not the number:
- Australia: $26.44/hour minimum (from July 2026)
- UK: £12.71/hour minimum (from April 2026)
- US: $7.25/hour federal minimum — most states set a higher rate, use yours
If you have a specialised skill — pattern cutting, fine embroidery, anything that took years to learn — add to the floor. You’re not a general labourer in your own business.
Worked example — Barb’s Busty Bras
Barb hand-sews her bras and buys in lingerie bags and clasps wholesale.
| Item | Cost |
|---|---|
| Fabric and elastic | $6.00 |
| Wholesale clasps and findings | $2.00 |
| Wholesale lingerie bag (packaging) | $1.50 |
| Waste factor (10%) | $0.95 |
| Labour — 45 min at $30/hr | $22.50 |
| Shipping (absorbed, not charged separately) | $8.00 |
| Total COGS | $40.95 |
Keystone pricing — double, then double again.
Keystone is the wholesale model: double COGS to set your wholesale price, then double the wholesale price again to set retail. Two businesses are taking a cut along the way — you, and whoever’s selling it on your behalf — and each one needs their own margin to survive on.
Barb, selling into a stockist: COGS $40.95 → wholesale $81.90 → retail $163.80.
The 3x rule — when doubling doesn’t cover it.
The 3x rule isn’t a separate path from COGS to retail — it replaces the second doubling step in keystone, when the standard markup doesn’t leave enough room. Use it when the item is cheap enough that doubling twice still leaves a tiny dollar margin, or when there’s an extra step — personalisation, customisation, a special order — that isn’t captured anywhere in the COGS maths. Instead of doubling wholesale to retail, triple it.
Barb, adding monogram embroidery not accounted for in her standard COGS: wholesale stays $81.90, but retail = wholesale × 3 = $245.70, to cover the extra labour the standard doubling never priced in.
Review interval.
Revisit every model at least every six months, and immediately after any material, packaging, or shipping cost increase. A price that was right in January can be wrong by July without anyone deciding it should be.
Signs something’s off
These models are strong enough to protect a business most of the time. Not always. Watch for:
- It’s hard to find the money to restock. If selling the product doesn’t reliably leave enough to buy materials for the next batch, the margin isn’t doing its job.
- Your wage gets cut or skipped regularly. If you’re the line item that flexes when money’s tight, the price is covering everything except you.
- Customers keep double-checking your quality. Repeated “is this actually worth it” questions can mean the price and the perceived value have drifted apart.
- You can’t build an emergency fund, no matter what you do. If there’s nothing left after everything else is paid, the margin is too thin to survive anything unplanned.
- Your tax bill is a shock every time. No stash set aside means the price was never actually accounting for what’s owed on it.
- You’re constantly running a sale to move stock. If the everyday price doesn’t sell the product and only the discounted price does, the everyday price is wrong, not the customer.
- Growth costs you money instead of making you money. Busier months should widen the gap between what comes in and what goes out. If busier feels scarier than slow, that’s the pricing, not the demand.
- You haven’t reviewed your prices against rising costs in the last year. Materials, packaging, and shipping don’t hold still. If your price has, the margin’s shrinking underneath you without anyone deciding it should.
None of these alone means disaster. A few of them together, over a few months, means it’s time to run the numbers again.
You set the standard
You have the power to shift the trend with your own pricing. Every business that prices on the model instead of on confidence is proof that the next generation doesn’t have to guess. They get to watch what financially literate, confidently priced, resilient businesses actually look like — because you built one.