raised my canvas price from $450 to $600 and lost two regulars, still not sorry

so i finally did the thing everyone tells you to do. 30x40 acrylic, used to be $450 flat. someone on here did the math for me without knowing it, or i did it to myself reading their post, whatever. at $450 i was making about twenty bucks an hour if you count the hours i actually spend, and way less if you count the staring at it part, which i do count, because that's the job.

so $600 now. two people who'd bought from me three times each just went quiet. one said "totally understand!" and never came back. the other one said nothing at all which is honestly more honest.

the annoying part is i'm not even sure $600 is right. i priced it off a number that felt scary instead of a number that felt correct. i might do the math again in a month and find out i should've said 750 and then i get to have this whole feeling all over again.

anyway i have a 36x48 on the wall that i'm about to list and i've been avoiding opening the notes app for four days

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Margaret Hsu·2h

The staring at it part is the job. That is the sentence I would put on a studio wall.

I work in watercolor, which is slower and cheaper in materials than what you are doing, so my numbers do not translate directly, but the arithmetic you are describing is the same one every serious maker eventually has to sit down with. Twenty dollars an hour including the thinking time is not a business, it is a subsidy you were paying out of your own pocket so that two people could feel good about the transaction. You have simply stopped doing that.

The two quiet ones are the interesting part, and I would resist reading too much into it. People who buy three times are not usually lost over a hundred and fifty dollars spread across a year. More often they are startled by the change in the relationship, because a flat price for a long time starts to feel like a friendship rate. Some of them come back. Some of them were never going to keep buying regardless, and the price rise just gave them a clean exit they were already looking for.

What I would watch is whether the people who do say yes at $600 are better to work with. In my experience they frequently are.

Teddy LinOP·2h

"the staring at it part is the job" is going on the wall whether i like it or not, right above the sink where i rinse brushes, so it can judge me daily.

and yeah the subsidy framing is the part that stung. i was basically running a buy one get one free on my own time and calling it "building a collector base." at least a subsidy is a decision someone makes on purpose.

the watercolor thing is interesting though, i always assumed you all had it worse on the material cost side, not cheaper. is it just that you're not burning through a $30 tube every two canvases

Mateo Serrano·2h

the part where one said "totally understand!" and vanished is the bit that would eat me. i'd rather the silence guy, at least you know where you stand.

i do ceramic, so it's a different math, but the same lie: i used to price by "what feels fair" and it's basically a way of not paying yourself for the thinking time. and the thinking time is the actual work, you're right. i've got pieces i've sat with for weeks deciding if a glaze is done or ruined and then charged like it took an afternoon.

i think the honest thing is some buyers were never buying the work, they were buying the $450. which stings but it's not a loss, it's just a correction.

Teddy LinOP·1h

the glaze thing gets me because ceramics has that whole extra layer of "i can't even see it properly until it's fired" which sounds like a nightmare i'd somehow still sign up for. watercolor people say the same thing. basically every medium except acrylic has a "and then you find out later" phase and i picked the one where the mistake is just sitting there, being a mistake, immediately.

but yeah the "$450 customer" bit is the whole thing. they weren't buying the piece, they were buying the deal. and once you're the person who does the deal, you're the deal, and the work is kind of beside the point. which is a weird thing to realize about people who have three of your paintings on their wall.

the silence guy is honestly fine. i respect it. he's not pretending anything.