What a 69x Price Spread Inside One Product Category Taught Me About Selling Premium Goods
By Hope Johnson
I recently ran the numbers across our own catalogue and the result surprised me, even after fifteen years in the category.
Looking at 209 single essential oils across 741 size variants, the price per millilitre ranges from $0.81 to $55.99. That is a 69x spread inside one product type, on one website, sold by one company. The median sits at $2.05. At the top, agarwood runs to $485.97 for ten millilitres. At the bottom, sweet orange is under a dollar a millilitre.
To a customer arriving on the site, all of these are small bottles of oil that look nearly identical. That gap between what the buyer perceives and what actually drives the cost is the central problem of selling anything premium, and I think it generalises well beyond botanicals.
Three things I have taken from it.
**Price usually reflects physics, not positioning.** The spread is not a branding decision. It is yield. It takes an enormous volume of rose petals to produce a small quantity of rose otto, and agarwood depends on a slow, uncommon process in the tree itself. Sweet orange is cold-pressed from a peel that is already a by-product of the juice industry. The expensive things are expensive because of how much plant, time and scarcity sits behind each millilitre. When a business cannot articulate the physical reason its premium product costs more, that is usually a sign the premium is positioning rather than substance, and customers work that out eventually.
**The buyer cannot infer the reason, so you have to supply it.** This is the practical failure I see most often. A seller knows exactly why one item costs sixty times another, assumes it is self-evident, and puts both on a grid with a price underneath. It is not self-evident. Nothing about a 5ml bottle communicates yield. We publish the botanical species, the country, the distillation method and the actual chemical composition, and most customers will never read it. Its function is not to be read. It is to exist, because a specific disclosure is expensive to fake and its presence signals something to everyone, including the people who do check.
**Your pricing structure teaches customers something, whether you intend it or not.** Across products with more than one size, buying the largest size costs about 54 percent of the smallest per millilitre. That is a meaningful discount and it is entirely rational for us, since a good part of the cost of a small bottle is the bottle, the label and the handling rather than the oil. But it also quietly tells a customer that the small size is the expensive way to buy. If you have not looked at your own per-unit curve recently, it is worth doing. Most catalogues contain at least one place where the pricing accidentally recommends a purchase you did not intend to recommend.
The broader takeaway is about which categories you are actually operating in. When a customer can evaluate a product themselves, price and quality eventually align through feedback. When they cannot, and essential oils are a category where adulteration is common and hard for a buyer to detect, that correction never arrives. Quality becomes a cost you carry voluntarily rather than an advantage the market hands you, and the only way to convert it into an advantage is to make it externally checkable.
For any founder selling something whose value is invisible in the photograph, I would ask two questions. Can you state, in one sentence a customer would understand, the physical reason your expensive item is expensive? And is there anything on your product page that a dishonest competitor would find inconvenient to publish? If the answer to the second is no, you are competing on claims, and claims are free.
The 69x spread is not a pricing problem to be solved. It is an explanation problem, and the explaining is the work.
Data note: figures calculated from the Miracle Botanicals public catalogue in August 2026, covering 209 single essential oils and 741 size variants. Prices change and blends, carrier oils and hydrosols were excluded to keep the comparison to neat single oils.
Written By Hope Johnson, Founder, Miracle Botanicals Essential Oils