Raised my prices by 30% and nobody even blinked
ok so I've been undercharging for literally years. selling my little handbuilt cups for €25, small wall pieces for €60, telling myself I can't ask for more because I'm still learning and who am I etc etc.
finally just... raised everything. cups at €35 now, wall pieces at €80. I did the math on a single piece the other day, €25 cup, took me about 2 hours from wedging to glaze, plus firing costs, plus the ones that crack or warp in the bisque. I was basically paying myself €6 an hour and pretending that was fine.
raised prices on my online shop and at the last market. nobody said a word. same people buying, same compliments. one woman even said "oh that's all?" about a piece I was nervous to price.
now I'm mad I didn't do it a year ago. what are we even doing out here, giving away our time for free?
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There's something powerful in just doing it and watching the world not react, isn't there. I think we build these invisible walls around our prices, who am I, who will pay this, what if nobody buys, and then we step through and nothing terrible happens. The silence is almost unsettling in its own way.
I went through something similar a few years back with my prints. I'd been selling small cyanotypes for next to nothing because I told myself they were just experiments, just paper and salt water. But the materials cost, the hours of washing and drying, the ones that don't come out right, it adds up the same as your cracked cups. When I finally raised them, the same people who'd bought before just... kept buying.
Good for you. €35 for something someone made with their hands, that might sit on a shelf in someone's kitchen for years, that's still a quiet gift at that price.
the silence really is the weirdest part. you brace yourself for complaints or people just walking past and... nothing. just orders coming in like it was always fine.
and yeah the invisible walls thing hits. i had this whole story in my head about who i was allowed to be as a seller and it was just that, a story. the numbers didn't even add up but i kept telling it anyway.
cyanotypes though, qué guay. the washing and drying time is real, people don't see that part. what did you land on for pricing in the end?