The advice you will find first is that wholesale is half of retail. Halve the number, send the line sheet, wait for the orders.
It is the wrong place to start, and the reason is arithmetic. Retail prices are often set by looking at what similar things cost, or by what felt right the week you opened. If you halve a number that was arrived at by feel, you get a number that has nothing underneath it. Then a shop orders forty of the thing, you pack for two days, and you discover that the order you were most pleased to get is the one you made the least on.
So start at the bottom instead.
First, what one actually costs
Not the materials. The whole thing, landed in a box.
That means the materials, yes, but also the parts of the product that are easy to forget because they do not feel like the product: the packaging, the hangtag, the insert card, the thread and needle if you include them, the share of the print run or the firing or the batch that this one piece is responsible for. If you buy in quantities of a hundred and sell in ones, divide honestly. A hangtag that costs eleven cents is not nothing when the margin is four dollars.
Then your labor, at a real rate. This is the number makers leave out, and leaving it out is what makes wholesale feel like it does not work. If it takes you twenty minutes to make and finish one, twenty minutes of your time has a price, and that price belongs in the cost before anything else is calculated. You are allowed to pay yourself.
When I worked out wholesale for my own company, the thing that changed the number was remembering that a canvas does not ship alone. It ships as a kit, with threads chosen by hand and a needle sized to the mesh and a printed color key. The wholesale price had to carry the canvas and the kit, and the first version I wrote down did not.
Then the wholesale price, then retail
Wholesale is your cost multiplied by enough that the work is worth doing. For most handmade goods that multiple sits somewhere between two and two and a half. Below two you are usually buying yourself a job; above two and a half you may price yourself off the shelf, depending on the category.
Retail is then roughly double the wholesale, and this is the part that surprises people: your own retail price should follow from the wholesale number, not the other way round. You need the shop carrying your work to be able to sell it at the same price you do, or you are competing with your own stockists and they will notice.
If that final retail number is higher than what you currently charge, you have learned something worth knowing, and it is better to learn it now than after forty units are packed.
The minimum matters as much as the price
A wholesale program lives or dies on the opening order, and the number most people guess at is the one that decides whether the whole thing is worth doing.
Set it by asking what makes a box worth packing. There is a fixed cost to every order that has nothing to do with how many units are in it: pulling the stock, packing it, printing the label, writing the note, invoicing, and following up when the invoice goes quiet. That cost is roughly the same for six units as for sixty. A minimum that does not clear it means every small order is a small loss dressed up as good news.
Two hundred dollars is a common opening minimum for small goods and it is usually too low. Work out what an hour of packing and admin costs you, decide how much of an order you are willing to spend on it, and let the minimum fall out of that.
The same logic gives you case packs. If a thing is fiddly to pack in ones, sell it in threes or sixes and say so.
The rest of the terms, briefly
Lead times: say how long, and say it before you are asked. A shop buying for the holidays is planning in July, and the studio that answers a delivery question in one line gets the order.
Payment: new accounts pay up front. Established ones can have net 30 if you want to offer it, and you should decide that deliberately rather than when someone asks.
Reorders: the second order is where the money is, so make it easy. A shop that has to reconstruct what it bought last time often does not bother.
The test
When you have the number, run it against the only question that matters: if twenty shops each placed this order tomorrow, would you be glad?
If the honest answer is that twenty would break you, the price is too low or the minimum is too small, and better to find that out on paper than in a month of packing. If the answer is yes, you have a wholesale program rather than a wholesale page.
That is the whole method: cost first, at a rate that pays you; wholesale from the cost; retail from the wholesale; a minimum that clears the cost of the order itself. Everything else on a line sheet is presentation.
If you would like to see it in your own numbers, the calculator runs all of it — including the twenty-shop test.