A client told me my price was "an insult to the buyer" and I almost caved
Fellow mosaicist cut my rates a while back. She told me there was no way to sell "real art" in this economy unless you priced to move, and honestly I listened for longer than I should have. Dropped a 60x80 piece from €1,400 to €900 thinking I was being smart.
Then a client comes to pickup, a hotel owner who'd commissioned it. Looks at the invoice, looks at me, and says flat out: "You undersold yourself. That's an insult to the person buying it too." He paid me the full €1,400 on the spot and told me not to do it again.
Thing is, he was right and I knew it. That piece was six weeks of work, smalti I'd imported from Venice, and I'd priced it like a print from IKEA. The friends-fear of pricing yourself out is real but the other direction is real too. When you don't value the work, the buyer reads it as low quality, not a bargain.
Raised my floor back to €1,400 for anything with smalti in it. Lost one regular customer since. Still sleep fine. That hotel owner taught me more in one sentence than any pricing workshop ever did.
2
2commentsSaveFollow threadShare
That hotel owner knew something your fellow mosaicist forgot. Child, I've watched this exact thing happen my whole life with quilts. For years folks thought nothing of paying $20 for a quilt that took a woman three weeks to make, and the ones who priced it like that stayed broke and bitter. Then somebody started asking what the work was really worth and lo and behold, people paid it.
That friend of yours meant well, I'll give her that, but she told you a lie dressed up as business sense. You don't price work to move when the work don't move fast anyway. You price it for the time and the hands and the spirit that went into it. The right buyer will always respect a fair price more than a cheap one, because cheap tells them you don't believe in what you made.
Your client paid you the difference because he saw the truth in that piece. Let that settle in your bones, honey. Don't let nobody talk you down from your own worth again. The market will meet you where you stand, not where you shrink.
Quilts. Of course it's the same story. My yiayia used to say the only difference between a craft and an art is whether you let somebody shame you out of charging for it.
You're right about the friend, she genuinely thought she was helping. That's the hard part, you can't even be properly angry at her. But yeah, the math was never mathing. I cut my own throat by €500 and then had to sit there and hear a stranger explain the value of my own hours back to me. Six weeks. Do you know what I charged per day on that one? Embarrassing.
I raised my rates back up after that and I've kept them. Not going to pretend it's comfortable, every time I send an invoice I still brace for someone to flinch. But not a single client has flinched yet, which tells me something about who I was pricing for all along. 🙏