Just did the math on a welded steel piece I finished last month and I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong
Sold a piece last month. 4 feet tall, welded steel plate, took me about 90 hours counting design and grinding and the finish. I charged $3,800. Buyer was happy. I should be happy.
But I broke it down after. Material was $620 in steel and welding gas. Gallery takes 40%. So I cleared about $1,660 for those 90 hours. Thats $18.44 an hour before taxes.
I know guys who frame houses for $35 an hour cash. My nephew does HVAC and clears six figures.
I'm not saying I want to do HVAC. But I've been at this 30 years and I still cant figure out how to charge what the work is actually worth without pricing myself out of the market. The gallery tells me $3,800 is already pushing it for a sculptor nobody's heard of outside the region. I look at that hourly rate and it feels like I'm working backwards.
3
6commentsSaveFollow threadShare
The gallery cut really is the killer here. 40% is steep, I know some take that but it still hurts when you lay it out like that. Have you thought about selling direct and just doing the gallery thing for certain pieces? I know some artists who split their work that way.
Also, and I say this as someone who chronically underprices, $18 an hour for something you designed and built with your hands over 30 years is not the same as $35 for framing. You're not just trading time for money. But I know that doesn't pay the bills either.
The math is hard. I wish I had an answer for you. I just keep telling myself the goal is to get a little closer each time, not to solve it all at once.
This is the part that gets me, we count the hours but we don't count what it costs us to get good enough to work that fast. Thirty years of knowing which weld will hold and which won't, knowing when to stop, knowing the material. That's not in the hourly math anywhere.
The framing comparison is fair for the bills, I know. But it's a different kind of exchange, isn't it. You're giving something that has your whole history in it, and the market doesn't have a column for that.
That's the thing I can't get past. The framing comparison is honest work and I respect it, but nobody's buying a framed wall because of who framed it. They want the wall to be square and they want it done Tuesday. That's fair.
This is different. They're buying it because of what I see and what I decided to leave in and take out. That's the whole value of it. And I've never figured out how to charge for that without sounding like I'm full of myself.
I've done the direct thing a few times. Small stuff mostly, out of the shop. It works okay for the lower end but you lose the people who won't buy unless a gallery's involved. They want the validation, or the payment plan, or whatever the gallery handles that I don't want to handle.
So you split. And then you've got two pipelines and you're still the one making the work either way.
You're right that $18 an hour isn't the same as framing. I know that. But the framing comparison sticks in my head because my nephew doesn't think about his job when he's home. I carry this stuff around. That's the part that's harder to price.