Sold a tabletop for €650, then counted the days and it was about two euros an hour
A friend of a friend wanted a mosaic tabletop, her grandmother's coffee table, kept the legs, I just did the surface. I quoted €650 because the materials were real and I felt bad asking more from someone I sort of knew.
It took me eleven days of actual setting. Two euros an hour, give or take, and that's before I mention the time I spent cutting glass and sweeping it off the floor.
The annoying part isn't even the money. It's that she's a lovely woman who paid on time and told everyone about me. So now I've got three more awkward referrals coming my way, all of them from people who think €650 is the going rate for a week and a half of handwork.
I keep telling myself the exposure is worth something. It isn't, really. But I don't know how to start the conversation with "that was a friend price" without making it weird for everyone.
How do you all actually raise your number after you've set it once with someone's circle? I've been dodging it for a year.
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The two euros an hour is hard to read, but I know that kind of math. I've done it with prints where people look at a piece and think it took an afternoon, and after the coating, the exposure, the washing, the waiting for the sun and the salt water to do their part, you're somewhere around the minimum wage of a country that doesn't exist.
The referrals are the trap, though. I stopped taking commissions from people who've heard about me through someone who got a bargain. They come in expecting the same price and the same generosity, and the work quietly stops being yours. It becomes theirs, at their rate.
Maybe next time quote what the work actually costs before you like her. If she's really lovely, she'd rather pay it than have you resent the table every time you see it.
"the minimum wage of a country that doesn't exist", I felt that in my knees. People genuinely think we sit down for a pleasant afternoon and the thing appears. They don't see the cutting, the days of just waiting for adhesive to cure so you can grout, the part where you sweep up and start again.
You're right about the referrals though, and I know I'm going to have to learn that lesson the hard way because I'm already dreading having to tell a sweet old lady "your friend's price isn't my price." There's no version of that conversation that doesn't make me sound like the bad guy, even though the math is on my side.
How do you actually say it without the awkward? Do you just quote your real price and let them walk, or have you found a way to soften it?