Pricing a product seems to be the most difficult factor in starting a small business. I struggle with it myself and professionally this is my line of work. I don't make or sell soap but a basic pricing strategy is pretty universal.  Your soap revenue needs to cover your supplies, time, overhead and profit.

Supplies – typically this is the easiest to calculate, based on the recipe you calculated how much the batch of soap costs you to make it. Including tax and shipping if applicable.  Additionally, if you purchase your supplies wholesale some artists/ crafters tack on a retail mark-up to their supplies. Then divide the total cost by the number of bars you get per batch.

Example: A batch of soap cost $2.00 to make and yields 8 bars, the price per bar equals $0.25 per bar.

Time – There are many different ways to approach putting a dollar amount on your time.  The easiest is to decide how much, per hour, your time is worth, realistically.  If you are a beginner typically your hourly rate would be lower than someone who has many years of experience. Putting a dollar amount on your worth can be tricky but you don’t want to find yourself in a situation where you are working for your very own sweatshop.  Once you have an hourly rate record how much time it takes to make a batch of soap from first ingredient to packaging and multiply the time by the hourly rate. 

Example: It takes 2 hours to make a batch of soap start to finish, your hourly rate is $8 per hour, and the batch yield 8 bars of soap, the price per bar equals $2.00

Supplies and time are your direct costs; from the example above the direct costs equal $2.25.

Overhead and profit are considered indirect costs and they are typically a little harder for most small business to calculate.

Overhead – these are the cost associated with making your soap that doesn’t directly result in making soap, such as, advertising, utilities, shopping for supplies, creating recipes, craft shows, bookkeeping, etc. This one is hard especially for home based artists who fit all these tasks in between there other responsibilities.  The fastest way to do this is to record, for a month, all the time you devoted you your soap business that wasn’t to create soap, multiply that number by your hourly rate and divide by the number of bars you made that month.

Example: You recorded 10 overhead hours, your hourly rate is $8 per hour and you made 160 bars of soap, you’re overhead per bar equals $0.50.

Profit – All products have a profit built in, you deserve to make a profit.  I particularly found this one hard when creating a price structure for my glass, so I understand.  There are usually at least two levels of profit built into a product, first is the profit to the manufacturer (you) and second is the profit to the distributor (retail store). Without going into too much detail, your (manufacturing) profit is essentially the return you desire from your business.  If you invested your money somewhere else you would expect a return, so you should expect one from investing in yourself. Profit, similar to hourly wage is a realistic expectation of a return on investment. For this example I’m going to use 8.75% (makes the final math simple).  Add up the costs for supplies, time and overhead. Then multiply that total by your profit ($2.75 X 0.0875 = 0.25). Add the profit amount to the supplies, time and overhead to arrive at your wholesale or price floor amount. ($2.75+.25=$3.00)

The distributors profit is the amount that the seller marks up the product to cover their expenses. This amount varies but typically averages 100%, so double what they buy it from you for. This is an important number to know even if you aren’t selling to a distributor right now, because one day you might want to put your items in a the little boutique in town or a shop owner will contact you and want to know your wholesale price. So it’s best to factor in a retail mark-up now than having to double your prices later.

Example Math Overview:

Direct Costs:

          Supplies:      0.25

          Time:           2.00

Indirect Costs:

          Overhead:     0.50  

          Profit 1:        0.25

Wholesale Price:   $ 3.00

          Profit 2:        3.00  

Retail Price:         $ 6.00

Again, I don’t make soap, so in no way do I imply that my example numbers are realistic just mathmatical examples.

Additionally, many people have written many books on this one topic and I have only provided a simple summary version. I hope it helps and I apologize if this was more information than you wanted.