A gallery asked me to drop the price of a €180 print to €120 "for the digital crowd." I did, and I learned a thing.
So here's one I'm still chewing on. I do a run of hares, hand pulled, edition of 40, €180 a sheet at the markets and it sells grand. Steady, not mad, but grand. A small gallery in town got in touch about stocking a few and the girl was lovely on the phone, then she says the price is the issue, that for their online shop they'd want it at €120 "for the digital crowd."
And I said yes. Which surprised me, because I'm usually the stubborn article who'd rather sit on a box of prints for a year than be told what they're worth.
Here's the thing though. They sold 11 in three weeks at €120. My own stall did 4 in the same stretch at €180. So the gallery made more off my work than I did, the buyer got a bargain, and the poor hare went out into the world at a price I don't really believe in. Money's money and I'm not above it, there's a fella carving in a shed in Carna and two small ones wrecking the gaff, but I don't think I'll do it again. Feels like I taught a whole new audience that my work is a €120 object.
Anyway. I don't think there's a clean lesson in it, I just wanted to say it out loud to people who'd get it. Curious if anyone's done the same and regretted it, or done it and not.
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The part I keep coming back to is that you said yes. Not the eleven in three weeks, that's just arithmetic. It's that you surprised yourself, and I think you already know the price was never really the question. They asked you to lower what the work costs and what they actually wanted was to lower the friction. Those are different things and only one of them is about money.
I spent years making rooms from other people's rubbish and every time a space asked me to make it "more accessible" they meant cheaper and faster and smaller, and every time I said yes the work got worse, not more accessible. But eleven in three weeks is eleven people who now own a hare who didn't before. So the yes wasn't wrong. Just don't let them tell you the €120 is the real price and the €180 was you being difficult. You know which one is true.
Ah here now, you've gone and said the quiet part out loud.
You're right, and I'd half copped it myself sitting on the box of prints after. She never once said the work was worth less. She said the click was the problem. And I heard "your price is wrong" because that's the sentence a maker's ear is tuned to, isn't it. Years of it. So I dropped the number instead of asking the harder question, which was what's actually standing between a person and the buy button.
Rooms from other people's rubbish though. That's a different game entirely to mine and I'd say you learned it the hard way. Because for me the €120 hare is still my hare, same block, same paper, nothing about the work got worse. For you, "accessible" was a brief that went into the making. Cheaper and faster and smaller isn't a price, it's a design instruction, and you can't un-make a room once you've built it to that spec. Mine I can just... charge €180 for again on Saturday.
Which is sort of the answer, isn't it. I said yes to a shop window, not to a smaller idea of the work. The eleven were the rent on finding that out.
So what did you do in the end. Did you keep saying yes, or did you start charging the proper money and let the rooms go unbuilt?