Learn the Secret Way to Price your Stuff

Remem­ber pric­ing is more art than science.

To work, you need to know your mar­ket and lis­ten to your intu­ition. There are no quick fixes or mag­i­cal for­mu­las only a few ways to help and here’s one I know works. But first…

There isn’t one per­fect price for your stuff that you can apply uni­ver­sally no mat­ter where you sell. If you sell your work in dif­fer­ent venues your pric­ing struc­ture may be dif­fer­ent depend­ing on the market.

It is not a good idea to set your prices by your lone­some, because you CAN’T BE TRUSTED! How’s that for bluntness?

If you are com­pletely friend­less or live alone in east Tim­buktu the tech­nique I’m going to describe can work but you have be vig­i­lant about your own bias.

The best tech­nique I have found is one I learned from Mark Sil­ver, except I have mod­i­fied it to fit the needs of artists.

The rules.…

Find some friends and get them to help you, bring them together one day for a pric­ing party.

Have a rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the range of your work dis­played when you have your party.

Take some time to decide on a price range for your stuff. Base your range on your cost of doing busi­ness and your base profit mar­gin. Set one end of your range as the absolute low­est you’d accept and the other end the high­est you’d love and… don’t worry about reality.

Set the incre­ments within the range you feel com­fort­able with. So, if your range was $25 to $200.00, is a $10 incre­ment between price points com­fort­able or would $20 be better…

you get to decide!

The Game

Get one of your friends to guide the group and announce each price incre­ment begin­ning with a price below your low­est. Make sure your guide takes her time so each group mem­ber can focus on her reac­tion to the price announced.

If its not to freaky have the group close their eyes as a price incre­ment is announced I and pause for sev­eral min­utes for each mem­ber to take the price in and become con­scious of their reac­tion. OPTION: Allow them to record their reac­tions on paper.

Share the reac­tions, using the price point that had the most favor­able feel­ings asso­ci­ated with it as the high and low of your range.

If you are using your entire body of work as a range … the high and low will be the low­est and high­est you might charge for all work with the entire body of work..

If you have sets or prod­uct lines within or sim­ply a range of  one off items, you could do this for each piece that is rep­re­sen­ta­tive of a par­tic­u­lar tier. So…you would do this for all large paint­ings and do it again for smaller ones, or by com­plex­ity of work involved. You get to decide…just be hon­est with your­self and mind­ful of the hid­den traps.

Once you have your price range you can adapt it as a tem­plate for dif­fer­ent venues by just mod­i­fy­ing it with your knowl­edge of that market.

Rais­ing prices the unscary  away

Most cre­ative types have hard time think­ing about rais­ing their prices, mostly because we think in terms of extremes like dou­bling our prices. There is an easy way…

If you increase your prices incre­men­tally say 10% to 15%  across the board your buy­ers will hardly notice. After all, 10% of $50 is $5 or 15%is a mea­ger $7.50, so, if your buy­ers are will­ing to pay $50 for some­thing they value $55 won’t make them turn around and leave,where $60 might.

Be con­scious of the mar­kets in each venue you sell and price accord­ingly, don’t use bar­gain prices in a hoity toity venue and vise-versa.

The thing to remem­ber is

Buy­ers who go into freak out mode over 10, 12 or even 15 per­cent increases are not your buy­ers they are the ones you tell to head on over to Wal-Mart.

Your buy­ers will will­ing pay for your work because they like it and value it.