The Breakdown: Why Does Helen Levi’s Beach Mug Cost $64?
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Helen Levi, a 36-year-old ceramics artist based in Ridgewood, Queens, can’t stop thinking about a recent influencer drama on TikTok. It involved a creator wanting to buy a mug at a craft sale and balking at the price tag: $125.
“The comment section was full of people complaining that it wasn’t even made by hand, but by a mold,” Levi tells SPY. “People think that the only way something can be good is if it’s made entirely by hand, which is not worth glamorizing.”
It’s the kind of misconception that she wants to clear up. For every TikTok or Instagram video about an artist making something for a small business — resin coasters, vases, crocheted sweaters — is a comment section filled with people who don’t understand how labor and cost-intensive it is to make something at that scale. (As one viral sound goes: “It costs that much because it takes me fucking hours.”)
Levi has been running her store for 11 years, which has developed a cult following. Her most popular item is the “Beach Daily Mug,” which is 14 ounces and features a unique blue-and-white marbling on each one, running $64. She says that the price point is emblematic of all the other costs across her production and product line, which includes tiles, plates, and clocks.
“I think the best way to explain the pricing of one piece is to step back and look at all the pieces,” she says.
Levi took SPY through why the mug costs what it does — and why between training, shipping, rent, and fluid production costs, overhead for small-production artists isn’t an exact science.
Rent
Rent was the simplest cost for Levi to put an exact number on. Her 1,000-square-foot studio in Queens costs $3,600 a month, a size and price range she worked up to over a decade. She started in a shared studio space with other artists, eventually moving to Ridgewood in 2019, where she and two assistants handle the pottery, shipping, and sales.
“I want to pull back the curtain because people look on Instagram and see the large space and assume I must have taken out a big loan or have family money to afford it, when the reality is that I just grew the business slowly,” she says. “There’s this starving artist legend — it’s not easy to make money doing this but it is a real career and I want people to know this can be done.”
Materials
The cost of materials varies, but as an example, in 2023, Levi bought:
- 63 20 cubic foot bags of packing peanuts ($2,100 a year)
- 324 gallons of liquid casting slip, a material she uses for the mug and other products (Levi didn’t have exact numbers, but that usually runs between about $15,000 and $20,000, depending on which type)
- 24 gallons of clear glaze — also for multiple products ($500 to $800, according to the market, also depending on which type)
Levi also had to pay an up-front cost for a paper pad machine and a cardboard shredding machine that produces packing materials, each of which goes for about $3,000.
“And we have special stamps at the bottom of the mug that cost money,” she adds. “We also sand the mug to make sure there are no sharp edges — how many sanding pads do I go through a year? There are all sorts of small costs that just add up.”
Production
Levi makes thousands of products a year — being conservative, she says she made 5,000 in 2023. As with anything else, pricing is about scale, which is hard to plan, given that she’s often guessing how much she’ll need to produce.
She has to outsource part of the production of her plates, for instance, to a company with a RAM pressing machine. She’s charged for the cost of filling the machine when she places an order, so she orders enough plates to fill it and just stores them after, glazing and selling them gradually.
When the mug launched in 2018, she priced it at $58; now, it sells for $64. A year and a half ago, the stoneware slip required to make it was $15 per box; now it’s $22.70 per box. Packing peanuts were $22 per bag four years ago, and now they’re $35 per bag.
She makes stoneware slip and plaster molds for the mugs, which have a limited lifespan — that means making the molds, using them 50 to 70 times, and then starting a new mold, all of which are labor and materials-intensive.
“The reason it’s hard to calculate an exact price is because of how much loss you have in the process – a mug can crack before you fire it,” she says, estimating that the slip, the mason stain she uses, and the plaster mold all cost a few dollars each. That’s on top of a few dollars in electricity costs a few dollars every time she fires something in the kiln, and the cost to repair and replace a kiln every so often.
“A mug takes three minutes to throw on the wheel because I’ve been doing this for about 20 years, but there’s so much more [to it] than that,” she says.
She adds that she’s often eating the cost of a mug because of consumer expectations.
“It’s based on the market,” she says. “Even if I could sell a mug for $150, I would want people to use it. I want it to be functional. If someone’s not a potter, they don’t know that a handled mug takes way longer to do than a tumbler — molding it, smoothing it, sanding it, and making sure it attaches well. Customers don’t know it takes twice as much time. My tumbler is more profitable because it’s sold for a similar price.”
Staff
Levi’s starting wage for employees is $24 an hour, and they get raises over time, she says. They typically work 24 hours a week, a number that goes up to 40 as the holiday months approach.
Shipping
“I really started a packing and shipping company when I started a studio,” Levi says. “My friends who make fabric-based things like tote bags — they just take thirty seconds to print out the label and put it in a mailer.”
Her studio’s breakage rate is way below half of 1%, she says, because they invest in specialized materials — the two machines she leases in the basement, two or three dozen sizes of boxes, paper tape for the outside of the box, plate sleeves for when people order dinner plates. It’s hard to separate those costs from any one item, especially when she’s often eating expenses for larger orders that take more time and materials to put together – and then cost more to ship.
Profit
It’s “totally impossible” to figure out the profit margin for a mug until the end of a year, she says, because there are some years she loses money and some years she makes some off of it.
“It’s an averages thing,” Levi says. “I’m probably not the shrewdest business person because I know it’s working, since I have enough money to live my life. My business is at a small enough scale where I never borrowed money, so every year I grow a little based on my income and expenses,” is as specific as she gets.
“My idea is, if people like a mug they’ll come back when they can save up and buy something with a better profit margin like plates. Me throwing a large mug on a wheel isn’t much different than a small mug on a wheel, cost-wise, but you charge more because people expect a big mug to cost more and a small mug to cost less,” she says.