There’s a sweet spot for pricing art. A lot of people are very worried about overpricing art and a lot of people are worried about underpricing art. You should be worried about both. You’re not here to compete on cost. It’s not like searching for a flight or something. Most people are fairly agnostic about what airline they travel on, just looking for the cheapest price. That’s most people’s experience of looking for flights. Art is not like that. People fall in love with your work if you’re doing the marketing correctly and so it’s not about competing with some people who are selling A4 prints for $30. If they’re competing on price then their art is probably not distinctive enough, or they are not doing a good enough job of marketing it.
The way it works out with our prices is that if you hit about 55% profit margin on average across your art sales then you’re probably pricing in the right ballpark. For example, with our recommended prices in USD, it works out to be about $250 for an A1, $180 for an A2, $130 for an A3, and $90 for an A4 unframed print.
If you’re pricing lower than that, you are leaving money on the table and you’re underpricing your work. The price should be fair for the quality of what you’re supplying. Obviously if you fulfill through theprintspace the quality is very high. You get a certificate as well. The frame quality and the print quality is very high. You can have signatures, numbering on prints, inserts, branding on your envelope, and that whole experience is reflected in the price. And that means you can follow our recommended prices.
We always recommend charging a little bit for delivery when we are running print drops. It would be $19 for delivery to everywhere apart from Rest of World which includes New Zealand and Australia. At the end of the day, when you are delivering to Brazil, Indonesia, Namibia and other places that are expensive to deliver, you should be using courier as well because otherwise it will take you weeks, if not months to get the work into people’s hands. And that’s not a good customer service experience. So it is important to use couriers for the rest of the world.
Our methodology for tactically deciding the pricing is to target a 55% margin as a minimum for print sales to the United States. As a result the average margin to everywhere, based on likely volumes to each continent will be 55% also. This is because the United States fits in the middle of the spectrum of margins.
