Why oils and lye are only a third of a soap bar's price
The ingredients in one example bar are four oils and butters, lye, fragrance and color, plus a label, a logo band and wrap. That comes to $2.22 a bar, or $351.65 for 144 with markup. It is a third of the $1,059.56.
The rest is time and order costs. The bars take 11.62 hours of work at $36, then there is the band printer's setup, the freight and an allowance for a batch that goes wrong. A price built from the oil receipt alone leaves all of it out.
Pot time, cutting and wrapping: the minutes per bar
The example works out to 3.3 minutes a bar. That covers weighing and melting oils, mixing lye, stick blending and pouring, unmolding, cutting and beveling, turning bars on the rack during the cure, and banding, labeling and wrapping.
To time yours, run a stopwatch over one full loaf from the scale to the last wrapped bar, then divide by the bars it made. Keep the setup out of it: the test batch, the washing up between scents and the approvals go in setup, which is 3.7 hours here.
Plain market bars without the logo band
Drop the band from the example: take it out of the materials so the bar is $2.10, set the band printing box to 0 and take an hour off setup for the logo approval. The 144 bars come to $945.55, or $6.57 each.
That 79 cents a bar is what the custom band really adds, which is useful when a business asks why their gift soap costs more than your market price. The quantity table on the original order tells the rest: $11.46 a bar at 48 and $5.82 at 576. The soap pricing guide goes through that example in full.
Curing racks, store cuts and what else the spreadsheet adds
The $36 break-even rate is the example studio's. Yours comes from your space, insurance, equipment and the hours you can really sell: work it out with the free true hourly rate calculator. The 10% is a markup on ingredients, and markup vs margin shows why it is not a 10% margin.
The spreadsheet also charges the oil warmer, curing racks, dehumidifier and wrap sealer by the hour, marks up the printed bands as outside work, adds a 5% cushion, asks about store commission, keeps a price list of oils by the pound, prints a quote with three quantities and logs whether each order made money. Its version of the same 144 bars comes to $7.80 each rather than $7.36.
The $150 minimum stays on either way. A dozen bars with a fresh scent and full setup come to $359.12 here, so small custom orders are never cheap.