Hi.
Can somebody help me? A customer call me today that she wants gum paste roses for the next wednesday . I need to know how much I have to charge for Large Roses, Med Roses & Small Roses. Please help me I running out of time to say yes or no to the customer.
Thanks in advance & God Bless.

Such short notice!!!! I peronally for small thru large roses at a weeks notice would charge between $9-$15 each. Maybe more, depends on how many she wants, do you have to color them, how long does it take you to make one rose?

She wants 50 and I hope does not take me too much time . She wants them in Ivory. Thank you, I apprecite your help.

I would charge right around $5 each flower. But i wouldn't take the order, 50 flowers is alot of work for such a short notice and i'm not a shop that needs to take everything that walks through the door to pay the bills.

Good luck.

Hey Cenell,

Funny enough, if I were to charge for gumpaste flowers, I would feel more comfortable with pricing them than even pricing a basic buttercream cake. The reason is, 90% of gumpaste cost is the labor. Materials are relatively inexpensive after your initial purchase of cutters, veiners and wire, etc...

What you probably need to do would be to time yourself to create each rose. Multiply that time by however many roses you intend to make and add in the time to "stem" them all. (wrapping in floral tape, etc).

When I do roses, they generally take about 20 minutes per rose. That includes rolling paste, cutting, veining, molding, handling/partial drying time and dusting. I add in at least an hour total to tape stems and clean up (for the whole project).

An example: Let's say it takes you 20 minutes per basic rose with the example above:

20 minutes X 50 roses = 1000 minutes. That equates to 16 hours. Add another hour or two for wrapping and cleanup. That comes to 18 hours. At your rate of $10 per hour (just saying), you need to add an extra $180 to the cost of your cake for 50 roses.

It gets expensive fast, doesnt it? I saw a great tutorial on gumpaste mega-roses yesterday from "Cakes by Francesca". You might want to watch her tutorial. If you could get the same effect on your cake with less roses, you could keep the price down and still have a beautiful cake. It looked to me like her regular rose size was equal to about 3 of my roses.

Hope this helps! Lisa

To make life easier, here is her website, with pictures of her ivory roses right on her front page!!

http://www.cakesbyfrancesca.com.au/

Here is the link to her tutorial. It is linked in her comments below on FlickR. Scroll down a bit until you see her link, ok?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/franjmc/2927935625/

Those are beautiful roses!

I can't wait to try that, thanks so much for sharing

Thanks to all. I al ready made the roses and I all ready know that tecnic from my teacher that is the one that I use. But thanks just I want to know how much I have to charge, because in all the time that I have inthis industry,believe me, this is the firt time that somebody wants gum paste roses. Thanks to all.