Raised my price 40% and lost every single client. Now I don't know what to do
Raised my charcoal portrait rate from €250 to €400 after a year of people telling me "you're too cheap, you undersell yourself." Everyone said do it. Everyone.
Lost every single client. All of them. The two commissions I had booked cancelled the next week. Three months now, nothing. I keep checking my DMs like a loser.
And the worst part is I know the work is good. It's not impostor syndrome talking, this batch of pieces is some of the best stuff I've ever made. But nobody will pay the price that's actually fair for what goes into them.
I'm sitting here genuinely considering dropping back down to €250. And I hate that because everyone warned me this is the trap, this is exactly what they said would happen, that I'd cave. But rent doesn't care about my dignity.
€250 for 22 hours of work is €11 an hour. I know that's insane. But it's food money.
Anyone else just... hit the wall and folded back to the old number? Or actually waited it out and survived?
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Oof. I felt this one. The "you're too cheap" chorus is easy to listen to because it strokes the ego, but nobody talks about the part where you can't factory-reset your whole audience overnight.
Not quite the same field, but I went from architecture to painting and had to figure out pricing from scratch. What I've learned is the jump matters less than the lane. If you've been selling to people who value a bargain, raising the price without changing who's seeing the work is basically the same product in a new shop window nobody walks past. The €250 clients were never going to become €400 clients, they were always going to leave eventually.
Maybe the middle helps, not dropping back to €250, but meeting at €300 or €325, keeping the base, and slowly pushing up as new people come in who only ever knew the higher number. And honestly, showing the process helps too. People pay for the story of making it, not just the finished face. Charcoal work especially, people love seeing the build.
Three months of silence is brutal though. I'd be spiralling too. Just don't make the decision from inside the spiral, na. Give it a week.
the "same product in a new shop window nobody walks past" bit is so real. i've watched people do this exact thing and then blame the market, when really they just moved shops without moving neighborhoods.
and yeah, the "you undersell yourself" chorus is basically free advice from people who've never had to actually sell the thing. it's ego candy.
the uncomfortable part nobody says out loud is that sometimes you do have to keep the cheap lane for a while and build a second body of work that justifies the jump, rather than just swapping a number and hoping the crowd follows. easier said than done when rent is a thing, i know. but dropping back to €250 after three months of nothing teaches your tiny audience that the €400 was a bluff too, and that's a hard hole to dig out of. maybe split the difference, keep some pieces at the old price and let the new rate live quietly on a few better ones until someone bites.
the "moved shops without moving neighborhoods" thing is literally what i did, i'm the shop, i'm the neighborhood, i'm the person staring at the empty window. brutal. and you're right, the cheap lane thing is the part everyone skips because it's not a satisfying answer. nobody wants to hear "keep eating the low price while you build the thing that earns the high one" because it means the hard part isn't the email you send, it's the two years of work after. but i think you're right. i just hate that you're right lol
The "new shop window nobody walks past" thing is so painfully accurate it almost hurts 😭 that's exactly it. I put the same paintings behind a higher price tag and somehow expected different people to walk in. Like the work would just... find its people on its own.
And that architecture to painting jump is no joke. Learning pricing from scratch while also learning to trust your own eye? That's two battles at once. How long did it take you to find your actual lane and not just guess?
The part I keep circling is the gap. Not even the money, the gap between what I know the work is worth and what the market I built is willing to pay. Feels like I have to either shrink the work or find a whole new room for it. I'm not ready to shrink it.