Charged €60 for a small lidded vessel and three others sold off the back of it, still not sure I priced it wrong or lucky dumb
sold a little lidded pot at the market last Sunday for €60. handbuilt, caña color glaze that came out almost exactly how i wanted which basically never happens. woman who bought it posted a photo on instagram, three people messaged me that night asking for "something similar." i quoted them all €75 and they all said yes.
which is great obviously. but i keep doing the math and after clay, glaze, two firings, the hours of throwing and trimming and the one lid that warped and had to redo... that €60 piece was maybe €9 an hour. and the €75 ones are gonna be worse because now i'm self-conscious about repeating myself and I'll probably take longer.
the thing is the €60 piece got me three sales. if i'd priced it €90 would it have done the same? i genuinely don't know and that's the part that keeps me up. cheap prices get you seen, but you can't live on exposure unless someone else pays your rent. my grandmother keeps telling me to charge more and she's 84 and has never sold a thing in her life, yet somehow she's right.
anyone else ever had a "cheap" piece accidentally do more work for you than your best priced one? or am i just bad at this.
3
4commentsSaveFollow threadShare
Now honey, I'm gonna tell you something my grandmother told me when I first started selling my quilts and I was fussing over what to charge. She said, "Girl, you ain't selling cloth and thread. You selling the hours and the heart, and the heart don't come cheap."
That €9 an hour is the wrong way to look at it, and here's why. That woman didn't buy a pot. She bought the one that came out almost exactly like you wanted, the one that don't happen but once in a while. That's not something you can price by the hour like you're clocking in at a factory. And them three folks who messaged you that night? They saw something in a picture and felt it. That's worth something no kiln ever made.
You didn't get lucky dumb. You got the price right because somebody looked at your work and told you what it was worth to them, and you believed them enough to raise it a little for the next ones.
Now don't you go getting shy on yourself when they pick up them €75 pieces. You stand behind em. And if that one lid warps again, that's just the clay telling you who's in charge, and in my line of work we call that character.
Your grandmother was a wise woman and I'd say she never once counted the hours on a quilt either. I've been carving linocuts near twenty years now and I still do the same damn maths on the odd bad day, sure didn't I sell a hare print a few weeks back and worked out I'd made less per hour than the lad sweeping the floor in the pub. But here's the thing I've landed on after all this time, and it took me long enough to get there. The fella who buys the print isn't paying me to carve, he's paying me to be the one who carved it. That's the whole trick of it and it's a hard one to hold onto when the glaze comes out wrong or the lid warps on you.
And the three people messaging you that night? That's not luck and it's not dumb. That's proof. You can't argue with three yeses. The market already told you the price, you were just the last one to hear it.
the hare print thing hit me because i did the exact same maths on that lidded pot in my head while the lady was still standing there. like, trying to subtract the failed lid while she complimented the glaze. it's such a worker's brain habit, clocking every hour like the kiln cares.
but you're right and i think i knew it deep down, that's why i kept my mouth shut and took the €60 instead of awkwardly explaining my hourly rate to a stranger in a market. nobody's ever bought a pot because it took me six hours. they buy it because it made them feel something on a Sunday morning.
still weird to price the "being the one who made it" part though. i think that's the part my family doesn't get either, they see the hours and see the failure rate and i'm like yeah but did you see the glaze. ha. glad it's not just me doing the pub-floor maths, that made me laugh.
Your grandmother sounds like she knew exactly what she was doing. I'm gonna sit with that for a minute because you're right, I keep doing the math like I'm clocking in and that's not what this is.
The funny thing is I'd tell any other maker the exact same thing you just told me. But when it's my own hands in the clay suddenly I'm doing spreadsheets in my head at 2am like a lunatic. The woman didn't even haggle. She just looked at it, held it, smiled, paid. That should tell me something.
Still feels like a fragile little house of cards though. Three people saying yes in one night is not a system. But maybe it doesn't have to be one yet. Maybe I just keep making the ones that come out right and let the pricing catch up to the work instead of the other way round.
Gonna tell my abuela you said that, she'll approve of your grandmother big time. Give her a hug from Valencia.