Ask most shop owners how they priced a dress and you'll hear a version of the same thing: "I bought it for 800, so I sell it for 1,500." Where did 1,500 come from? A feeling. It felt right. It's more than 800, the customer didn't flinch, so it stuck.
Pricing on a feeling is how a shop can be busy all month and broke at the end of it. Every price you set is either building your margin or quietly eating it, and "it felt right" has no idea which. The good news: pricing properly is not complicated maths. It's a handful of steps done on purpose instead of by vibe.
Why the price you feel is usually wrong
Two mistakes hide inside "I bought it for 800." First, 800 is almost never your real cost. Second, the jump to 1,500 was never checked against what you actually need to make. Fix those two and you're already ahead of most shops on your street.
How to price a product so it actually pays
Step 1 — Find your true cost, not the supplier's price
What you paid the supplier is only part of what that item cost you. Add the fare to Gikomba or Eastleigh and back, split across everything you carried home. Add any cleaning, repair, or pressing a mitumba piece needed before it could sell. Add your share of a bale — if a 20,000-shilling bale gives you 40 sellable pieces, each one starts at 500 before anything else. The true cost is buying price plus everything it took to get that item onto your shelf ready to sell. Price off the supplier's number alone and you're subsidising your own shop.
Step 2 — Set a markup, not a random number
Once you know true cost, you add a markup — the amount on top that becomes your gross profit. Instead of feeling your way to a price, pick a multiple and apply it. A common range for a Kenyan boutique is 1.8× to 3× true cost depending on the item: everyday, easily-compared pieces sit lower; distinctive or hard-to-find pieces carry more. An item that truly cost you 600 at a 2× markup is 1,200; at 2.5× it's 1,500. Now the price has a reason behind it, and you can apply the same logic to your whole shop instead of guessing item by item.
Step 3 — Understand markup versus margin (this is where owners lose money)
These two words get mixed up, and the mix-up is expensive. Markup is your profit measured against cost. Margin is your profit measured against the selling price — and margin is what actually pays your rent. Here's the part that surprises people: doubling your cost (a "100% markup") is only a 50% margin, not 100%. If you sell that 600-cost item for 1,200, half of every shilling that comes in is still just paying back the item. Thinking in margin keeps you honest about how much of a sale is really yours, and stops the classic trap of feeling rich on a big markup while the actual margin is thin.
Step 4 — Set a floor price, and never sell below it
Every item needs a number below which you will not sell it, no matter how good the haggle or how much a staff member wants to close the sale. Your floor is true cost plus the minimum margin you're willing to accept — never cost itself, because selling at cost pays you nothing for the rent, the fare, and the day you stood there. Decide the floor when you price the item, calmly, not in the heat of a customer pushing you at 6pm. This is exactly the guardrail that keeps commission-hungry staff from giving away your margin to close a sale — the floor should be something the shop enforces, not something you hope everyone remembers.
Step 5 — Price in real, sellable numbers — with haggling room
Now shape the number for how Kenyans actually buy. Round, clean prices (1,500, not 1,470) read as confident and are easier at the till. And in most shops, customers will ask you to come down — so set your asking price a little above your floor on purpose, giving you room to "reduce it for you" and still land safely above your floor. That isn't dishonest; it's leaving yourself somewhere to move. The owner who prices exactly at the floor has nowhere to go and either loses the sale or loses money.
Step 6 — Review prices on what isn't moving
A price is not a decision you make once. If something has sat for weeks, the market is telling you the price is wrong for that piece — and holding the line is just freezing your cash on the shelf. Reprice slow movers deliberately: drop toward (not below) the floor, bundle them with a fast seller, or clear them to free the cash and the space. Repricing what's stuck isn't admitting defeat — you already took the loss when it stopped selling; a markdown just unfreezes what's left.
Why guessing gets expensive at scale
One or two items priced on a feeling won't sink you. Two hundred will. Across a whole shop, small pricing errors compound into a shop that turns over plenty of money and keeps almost none of it — and because no single sale looks wrong, you never see where it went. The only way to catch it is to actually know your cost and margin on each item, which is more than memory can hold once you're past a few dozen products.
This is one of the quiet jobs Stoka does. Because it records what each item cost you and what it sold for, it knows your real margin on every sale — not a feeling, a number — and it lets you set a floor price the system holds to, so nothing sells below it even when you're not the one at the counter. You price with intention once; the shop keeps you honest to it every day after. It's the same discipline the full guide to running a shop that doesn't leak is built on, applied to the one decision — the price — that every shilling passes through.
Price on purpose
You don't need a spreadsheet or an accountant. You need to stop pricing on a feeling. Know the true cost, choose a markup, think in margin, protect a floor, leave haggling room, and reprice what's stuck. Do that, and the busy month and the full till finally start meaning what you always assumed they meant — money you actually get to keep.