Raised my prices in January. Same amount of work. Fewer tyre-kickers.
Small printmaker, so this is not some big studio story. I sell at two markets a month and take the odd commission, prints from €35 up to about €280 for the big framed ones.
In January I put everything up by a third. Not because I'd found religion about my worth, mostly because framing costs went through the roof and I was sick of eating it. Didn't announce it, didn't write a post about it, just changed the numbers on the board.
The thing nobody warns you about: the actual sales barely moved. Maybe a few less of the cheap ones. But the messages changed completely. The crowd that wants a €40 framed original signed to their mother in law on a Tuesday for a wedding on Friday? Thinned out. The people who do get in touch now ask real questions, sizes, editions, can they collect it Saturday. One lad last month paid a deposit before he'd even seen the block proof.
I spent years thinking I had a pricing problem when what I had was a sorting problem. The low price wasn't making me sales, it was making me correspondence.
The bit I got wrong though: I still price the small unframed ones too low and I know it. There's a stack of hares on the shelf downstairs telling me so.
Curious if anyone else found the same after a rise, or if it was the opposite and the whole thing fell off a cliff.
3
4commentsSaveFollow threadShare
the cheap ones never actually being cheap is the part people don't want to hear. i used to underprice everything because i thought it'd get me in the door, and all it did was attract people who wanted the most amount of explaining for the least amount of money. the raise didn't lose me buyers, it lost me the back and forth.
the framing cost thing is real too. i was eating shipping and materials for two years before i noticed i was basically paying people to take my work. changing numbers on the board without a speech is the right move, the announcement is always for you, not them.
the "paying people to take my work" bit is the one that got me. i did the same thing with commissions for like three years and told myself it was building a client base. it wasn't. i was just the cheapest option and that's a category, not a relationship.
the part i'd push back on a little: cutting the cheap stuff didn't only lose me the back and forth, it also cut the people who genuinely couldn't afford more. i still think about that. i keep a few small things priced low for exactly that, and yeah those are the ones that eat my time. still worth it to me. but it's a choice i make on purpose now instead of a thing i default into because i was scared nobody would buy.
which is kind of the whole difference, right. the number isn't the point. knowing why you set it is.
ah that's a fair push back and you're right to make it. i don't want to be the fella going on about value like the only thing that matters is what people can pay. my own mother wouldn't have bought a €280 framed thing off me in a million years. she'd have wanted the small one and she'd have counted the coins for it.
so i do keep a few small ones low. the little hare, a couple of the postcard-size lads, they stay cheap on purpose. what i stopped doing was the custom job for buttons. someone wanting a bespoke framed piece sized for their wall at €40, that's the one that was killing me. the small ones off the rack, no back and forth, no messages at midnight about the exact shade of the mount, those i'll keep till the day i die.
funny thing is the folk who genuinely can't stretch are usually the easiest to deal with. it's the ones who could pay and won't that eat the whole evening.
"the most amount of explaining for the least amount of money" is a line I'm going to be stealing, that's the whole thing in one go.
and you're dead right about the announcement. I very nearly wrote the post in January, had it half typed, all about materials and the cost of framing and why the work is worth it. then I read it back and went, sure who is this for? it was for me. I wanted the pat on the head. changed the numbers and said nothing and not one person at the market even blinked, which told me everything.