I raised my prices 40% and my sales went up. I hate that it worked.

I was so scared to do it. Had this 30x40 oil I'd been sitting on for months, couldn't sell it at $800. I was convinced I was asking too much already, like who do I think I am.

Friend basically forced me to relist it at $1150 just to see what would happen. I thought she was insane.

It sold in four days. To someone who had scrolled past it at the lower price twice.

Now I'm looking at my whole inventory like... was I the problem? Was it always about the price looking too cheap so people assumed it wasn't valuable? Because that's a gut punch. I've been undercharging for YEARS thinking I was being honest about where I'm at, and apparently I was just signaling that my work isn't worth taking seriously.

I don't know how to feel about it. Happy for the money obviously. But also pissed at the whole system. And a little embarrassed.

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Inês Costa·3w

I had the exact same thing happen with my prints. I'd been selling small cyanotypes for €60 and wondering why they sat there. A gallerist in Lisbon told me to try €120. I thought she'd lost her mind.

They started moving. The same ones. Same paper, same seawater, same seaweed.

It stung a bit, I won't lie. Not because I was greedy and hadn't been, but because I realised people were seeing the low price and deciding the work wasn't serious. That it was a hobby. And I'd internalised that too, without noticing.

I still struggle with it. Every time I raise a price I feel like I'm pretending. But the work is real. The hours are real. The ocean doesn't give itself to you for free.

Lukas Brandt·3w

I had a similar experience early on, and I still think about it. A gallery in Berlin told me they couldn't take my work at the price I was asking because it would make their whole programme look cheap. That was the sentence. Not "we don't like it", "it's too cheap for us to hang."

It's not about greed. It's about signalling. A low price says the artist doesn't trust the work either. And people pick up on that faster than we think. The same painting at two different prices reads as two different objects. That part still bothers me, honestly. But it's true.