The price-rise message you've rewritten four times

You’ve written the message four times. Once on the Tube on Monday. Once in the Notes app on Wednesday. Twice at the kitchen table on Sunday, both deleted. The brownies went to the market at the old price anyway.

Send the first draft.

The maths you already did ¶

Butter’s up 19% across the year. The National Living Wage just moved to £12.71. The Ofgem cap dropped slightly, which is the single piece of good news in the quarter. The per-brownie numbers shifted by coins; the per-year numbers shifted by hundreds of pounds. Your spreadsheet is up to date. Your listings aren’t.

That’s the whole problem — the gap between the recost and the announcement. And the thing blocking the announcement isn’t the maths. It’s the feeling that you’re being greedy, even though the numbers are plain and the butter is real.

You’re not being greedy. You’re updating your prices to match the current cost of ingredients, same as the supermarket you bought the butter from just did.

What you think they’ll hear vs what they actually hear ¶

Your brain, writing the message: “They’re going to think I’m cashing in. They’ll remember when it was £3. Someone will post about it in the village Facebook group. Someone will screenshot this.”

Their brain, reading the message: “Oh, yeah, butter’s gone up. Saw that at Tesco last week. Fair enough.”

The gap between those two readings is the whole post. Your regulars have seen butter move at their own supermarket. They’ve heard about the minimum wage rise on the news. They know something is going on. What they haven’t seen is you respond to it honestly — and when you do, it signals a business that knows its numbers, not a baker who’s suddenly gouging.

The bakers who actually lose customers over price rises are the ones who apologise into the message so hard that the customer now thinks something must be wrong. The bakers who hold a confident price and a one-sentence reason keep almost everyone.

The message that works ¶

That’s it. Five sentences:

1. The announcement
2. One reason (ingredient-led, not vague)
3. The new price on the flagship product
4. The commitment on existing orders
5. A short, warm sign-off

No apology. No hedging. No “I’m so sorry to have to do this.” The word “sorry” does not belong in a price-rise message — it signals that the price itself is the wrong move, which it isn’t.

When someone does push back ¶

Roughly one customer in twenty will say something. Sometimes it’s “oh that’s a shame” and they buy anyway. Sometimes it’s a more pointed “everything’s so expensive now” or “I’ll have to think about it”. That’s fine.

A script for the rare genuine pushback:

You’ve acknowledged them, explained once, and left the door open. You haven’t negotiated, offered a discount, or undermined the price you just announced. Customers who stay after that message are ones who value what you do. Customers who don’t were not going to stay long on the old price either.

The reframe for next time ¶

The four drafts piled up because this recost piled up. A year of small moves in butter, eggs, flour, labour, energy — and you absorbed all of them. When the adjustment has to cover the whole year at once, it feels like a crisis announcement. Four drafts’ worth of crisis.

Recosting four times a year instead of once fixes this. A 3% move in butter every quarter is a routine 10p adjustment and a one-line notice. A 19% move once a year is a message that takes four drafts to write.

The next Ofgem cap change is 1 July. The next butter price will be whatever it is on 15 October. Fifteen minutes at the start of each quarter. Do the recost. Send the short message. Go back to baking.

Send the first draft.