Costing Flies

[Guest Big E]

I've gotten some requests lately to tie flies and have no idea what to charge. I realize that I am able to cost things that I am able to physically divide, ie hooks, eyes, legs, etc, but what about things like chenille, lead, fur, etc? I'm not doing it to make money but I don't want to be giving stuff away either. I'm not really worried about my time and just want to tie good flies that they'll be happy with.

 

So far, I've just looked at what other people charge and charge less. I looked at EBay to maybe get an idea but those prices were ridiculously low...dunno how they even break even.

 

Any ideas?

[stonefly1 0]

Good question! For me it depends on who I am tying the flies for. For people I know and appreciate the flies, I figure a $1 a fly is fair to recoup my costs. Then again it depends on the fly you are tying. For instance, if you are tying complex streamers that use tungsten cones you may want to charge more. Retail flies start at $1.95 and go up from there. Ultimately it is your call what you charge, but asking the customer what they are comfortable paying always seems to work for me. Hope this helps!

[riffleriversteelheadslayer 0]

well eric what I do is figure the time it takes for me to tie a dozen of a particular fly that I am selling then figure cost to tie as for chenille you divide the length of the package say 3 ft by the length used to tie a dozen then divide the cost by the qoutant that will give you the cost per dozen then after all that I try to make an even 10 bucks an hour so I figure it out like that

[atroutbum2 0]

my price depends on who im tying for, for a close friend, they get a deal. co worker, not so much of a deal

 

fly shop what the market demands

 

you got to figure what your labor/skill is worth per fly and put that into the cost. figureing out what the cost of the materials is easy.

 

also consider how hard is the pattern to tie, are there a lot of steps , diffrent materials......how many flies an hour can you tie

 

 

[Kirk Dietrich 0]

I second River and TroutBum. I even go a step further and figure the time for the different steps and material preperation. Most of the flies I tie can be broken down to tie like an assembly line. Such as a bend back. I'll time the bending of the dozen hooks, the winding of the body, the epoxying of the body, the tying of the bucktail wing, the painting of the eye, the epoxying of the head over the painted eye. Then add the times together, divide by however many I did and take my hourly charge anywhere from $10 - $20 per hour to determine my cost per fly to the customer after adding the materials, which like said above is easy to calculate.

The reason for breaking the steps out is that sometimes I have someone else do some of the steps and I do the others and it helps determine how much of a percent to pay out to the other tier.

I keep that information in a spreadsheet and it helps calculate the tying of other flies without having to time each step again by simply going to the step, such as tying a bucktail wing or painting and epoxying eyes and using that time on another fly that has those components.

 

Kirk

[JRG 0]

Big E,

 

I think a lot of those Ebay flies are imported at very low costs and are being re-sold which is why they're so cheap.

[Dustin Guyette 0]

i use the same prices as orvis

[rockworm 0]

I do not sell my flies. But I do keep track of material usage: I make a record of how many inches of yarn/floss/lead/chenille/tinsel/etc is needed to tye each size of fly. I do this just so I know how much material to cut in advance. Figuring out how much dubbing is required for most flies is probably not necessary as so little is needed; I think maybe $.05 per fly would be fair. (An exception to this may be if you are tying some of Polly Rosborough's fuzzy nymphs which can use quite a bit mink, hare, muskrat and beaver!)

 

If you are anything like me your expence sheet for each fly would look like this:

 

hook: 0.10

hackle: 0.10

other: 0.10

labor: 10.00

----------------

total: $10.30

 

You can see why I don't sell flies!

[day5 0]

Devide cost by inches. How may inches does it take to tie a fly.

[JSzymczyk 0]

Big E,

 

I think a lot of those Ebay flies are imported at very low costs and are being re-sold which is why they're so cheap.

 

 

I know of a guy who worked a deal with a Montana prison, he supplied the materials and the inmates tied flies at something like $0.35 per hour. He was selling them at a healthy profit. He must have known a few of the inmates were good tyers.

 

My brother buys a lot of flies on flea-bay from someone in Canada. They look pretty good (not as good as mine....) and he catches a hell of a lot of fish with them. Mostly because he's the luckiest bastard I know when it comes to fishing and hunting.