I put my prices in the caption and lost two followers and gained a commission
For years I did the dance. "DM for pricing." Which means a week of polite emails with someone who was never going to buy anything, while I pretend the number is a secret worth protecting. Nonsense. The number is the number.
So in March I started putting it in the caption. This panel, 40x60, smalti and salvaged marble, 1.900 euro, four to six weeks. That simple. No "investment" language, no "collections start at."
Two people unfollowed. Fine, they were never my people. What I did not expect: three inquiries in the first month, and one of them bought. A woman in Kalamaria who said she had been following me for a year and always assumed my work was "for museums or hotels." She thought the mystery meant expensive. It was the vagueness that scared her off, not the price.
The other thing nobody warns you about, the asking is the exhausting part. I have spent years answering "how much for something like this" with nothing to look at, and the whole time we both knew I was guessing at a wall.
I am not going to pretend it fixed everything. Some people see the number and go quiet, and that is information too, it saves us both a month. And yes there is a small guilt, like saying money out loud in a room where nobody else has. Greek thing maybe.
Anyway. If you have been hiding your prices to seem more serious, I would look at that. The hiding is usually doing the opposite of what you think.
3
4commentsSaveFollow threadShare
putting the number out there is the whole game. the "dm for pricing" thing is basically a filter that keeps out the people who would actually pay, because anyone who respects their own time won't sit through a week of vibes to find out you're 400 over budget. the ones who do email back and forth forever are usually the ones who were never going to buy anyway. losing two of them is the cost of doing business.
the part that gets me is how much of it is just... price anxiety dressed up as mystique. you're not withholding a state secret, you're worried someone will see the number and flinch. but flinching is information too. better to have them flinch in the caption than three emails deep.
1.900 for smalti and salvaged marble at 40x60 honestly sounds cheap, so maybe the real lesson is you underpriced yourself and the visibility just let the right person find you. either way, congrats on the commission
I think you are mostly right, but I would push back a little on calling the quiet ones a filter. In my experience the people who email for a week and then vanish are usually not disrespectful of your time, they are simply working out whether they can afford it, and some of them come back a year later. I publish my prices now too, for the simpler reason that I got tired of writing the same email, but I have not noticed that it screens anyone out. The serious ones still ask questions, and they still take their time deciding. What changed was only that the first conversation could start at the real number instead of somewhere before it.
Fair enough, and you are right that "filter" is too tidy a word for it. I don't actually think the quiet ones are rude. Some of them are just doing sums, and I have had people come back eighteen months later, one of them bought a small panel last autumn. So no argument there.
But I'll hold my ground on one thing: it wasn't the vanishing that bothered me. It was me. A week of emails where I am performing patience, writing the number in the fourth paragraph like it's a confession, and then nothing. That was the part making me tired. So yes, same as you, mostly I just got sick of typing the same thing.
Where I'd differ is the second part. I did notice a shift, not in who disappears but in who arrives. Fewer "hi, how much" with no other sentence. More people opening with a wall, a room, a size. Maybe that's just the number doing the sorting before I waste anyone's morning.
Your point stands though. Publishing it doesn't screen anyone out. It just moves the first real conversation forward, which was all I wanted anyway.
"Price anxiety dressed up as mystique" is exactly it. I spent years telling myself I was being discreet, when really I was just scared of the flinch. Once you say the number out loud a hundred times it stops being a live grenade.
Though I'll half agree with the other commenter too. Not everyone who emails for a week and vanishes is a time waster. Some of them are just people who genuinely don't know what handmade costs, and they're doing the maths in their head for a few days. The real filter isn't the emails, it's the caption. Nobody clicks away because of the price alone, they click away because it's finally a real decision instead of a maybe.