The Double Standard of “Expensive”: Why We Undervalue African-Made Luxury.
You have seen it happen. A customer picks up a handmade product, soy scented candles, a hand-woven bag, a bottle of small-batch hot sauce, turns it over, reads the price, and hesitates. “Ah, Is this not too expensive?” Sometimes they say it out loud. Sometimes you just see it in their face.
And if you are the creator who made that product, you know the feeling that follows. The doubt. The temptation to apologise for your own price. The quiet question: should I just charge less?
The answer is no. And this piece is going to tell you exactly why you should never second guess your value.
The problem is not that African-made products are overpriced, the problem is that too many people, consumers and creators alike, have been conditioned to undervalue them. That is a different problem entirely. And it has a different solution.
What Actually Goes Into the Price
When someone buys a mass-produced lotion from a supermarket shelf, they are paying for a product that was manufactured at scale, using standardised ingredients by automated processes in a factory designed to drive cost down to its lowest possible point. The price reflects that.
When someone buys a handmade body butter from a small skincare brand, they are paying for something entirely different. They just might not know it yet.
Here is what is actually inside that price:
- Skilled, hands-on labour. Small-batch, artisan production is time-intensive. A single batch of cold-pressed oil, hand-rolled incense, or traditionally extracted shea butter can take hours or days to produce. That time has value.
- Quality, traceable ingredients. Authentic African-made products are often built on ingredients sourced directly from farmers and cooperatives, ingredients with provenance, integrity, and potency that mass-produced alternatives cannot replicate.
- Small-batch production costs. When you are not producing 10,000 units at a time, your cost per unit is higher. Raw materials, packaging, and logistics all cost more at smaller volumes. That is the structural reality of artisan production.
- Generational knowledge. Many small creators are working with formulations, techniques, and ingredients that have been refined over centuries. That knowledge is not free. It was earned, passed down, and perfected, and it is part of what you are buying.
- A sustainable livelihood. Behind every African-made product is a person or a small team of people, trying to build something real. A price that does not sustain that person is not an honest price. It is a subsidy paid by the creator at the expense of their own viability.
None of this is in the mass-produced alternative. Which is why the comparison is not just unfair, it is plain wrong.
The Comparison Problem
There is a deeply ingrained habit of comparing artisan products to their mass-produced equivalents, and finding the artisan version “expensive” by that measure. A handmade candle versus a candlesold at shoprite. A small-batch hot sauce from Jay’s Kitchen versus a bottle of Tabasco sauce. A hand-woven basket sold at Lomé grand market versus a machine-made one sold at miskay.
But these are not the same product. They share a category. They do not share a supply chain, a production method, an ingredient standard, or a story. Comparing their prices is like comparing the cost of a tailor-made dress to a fast fashion alternative and concluding the tailor is overcharging.
The right comparison is not between an artisan product and a factory product. It is between the product of an artisan and its equivalent from anywhere else in the world, a small-batch French skincare brand, a handcrafted Japanese ceramic, an Italian olive oil. Nobody questions those prices. Nobody tells those producers to charge less.
The double standard is not accidental. It is the result of decades of African goods being positioned as cheap, abundant, and interchangeable. Changing that narrative starts with how creators price their work, and how consumers understand what they are buying.
What You Are Actually Paying For
When you buy an authentic made product at its honest price, you are not just buying the physical thing in your hands. You are paying for:
- Cultural integrity. A product made the way it was always meant to be made, with the right ingredients, the right process, and the knowledge of what each element does.
- Supply chain transparency. You can ask where it came from. Most authentic creators can tell you exactly which region their raw materials are sourced from, and why.
- Community impact. A purchase from an local creator supports the local economy, a supply chain rooted in the continent, and often the livelihoods of the farmers and producers behind the ingredients.
- A story worth telling. Every authentic African-made product carries a narrative, of origin, of method, of meaning. That story is not available at any price from a factory floor.
That is not a premium. That is a value proposition. And consumers who understand it do not hesitate at the price, they feel good about paying it.
For Creators: Own Your Price
If you are a creator reading this, here is the most important thing to take away from this piece: your price is your positioning. The moment you underprice your product to compete with mass-produced alternatives, you do not become more competitive. You become invisible, because you are playing a game you cannot win on someone else’s terms.
The brands that last, that build loyal customers, that get picked up by international retailers, its not because they are not the cheapest, it is because they are the most credible. And credibility is built through consistent quality, honest storytelling, and a price that reflects the real value of what you have made.
Practically, that means:
- Know your full cost of production. Ingredients, labour, packaging, overheads, and your time. Price from that foundation, not from what you think the market will bear.
- Build your margin for growth. A price that covers your costs but leaves nothing for reinvestment is not a sustainable price. You need room to grow, improve, and scale.
- Tell the story behind the price. Consumers are far more willing to pay a fair price when they understand what is behind it. Explain your ingredients, your process, your sourcing. Make the value visible by storytelling
- Stop apologising. Confidence in your price is part of your brand. If you hedge, discount reflexively, or frame your price as something to be forgiven, your customer will take that cue and milk that cow dry.
Where We Come In
Here is the thing nobody puts in the caption: having a brilliant product is only half the battle. The other half, the harder half, is everything that happens after you make it. The pricing strategy. The brand positioning. The market access. The ability to walk into a room full of retailers or investors and make them feel what you feel when you hold what you have made.
That is the gap. And it is where most incredible products quietly disappear.
MadeIn! exists specifically for this moment, the gap between “I have something extraordinary” and “the world knows about it.” We work with creators across fashion, lifestyle, homeware, food and drink, you name it, who are already doing the real work, and we give them the commercial foundations to match. Real market intelligence, brand positioning that makes the value impossible to ignore and routes to market that do not require you to figure out everything from scratch alone.
Because let’s be honest, your product was never the problem. We Africans are well-known for always been producing world-class goods. What has been missing is the scaffolding around the product. The infrastructure. The strategic layer that turns something brilliant into something that scales, travels, and lasts.
Consider MadeIn! your ultimate support system, literally. If you are a creator reading this thinking, ‘Yes, that is exactly what I need,’ then you already know where to find us.
The Pricing Is not the Problem
The next time someone hesitates at the price of your product, the answer is not to lower it. The answer is to help them understand what they are looking at.
They are looking at skilled hands. They are looking at traceable ingredients. They are looking at a supply chain that supports hadworking people in real communities. They are looking at a story that cannot be replicated at scale, standardised in a factory, or reduced to a barcode.
They are looking at something worth paying for. And African creators deserve to be paid for it, properly, sustainably, and without apology.
MadeIn! is Spurt!’s brand incubation arm for African consumer products, amplifying African creators from concept to global market. Learn more about us at madeinafricabrands.com.
