So often artists underprice their work. It can be hard not to feel a need to keep your prices low in order to make a sale. However, often it can be detrimental not just in terms of your profit margins, but pricing your art too low can also lead to customers not valuing your art. This article will outline methods for how to price your art at various stages of your art business.

Initially it can be a good thing to keep your prices low, before you have an established brand. It is important to ensure that you are making a healthy profit and being rewarded for your artistic excellence.

In this article I am going to break it down into stages as I truly believe pricing is relative to the strength of your brand.

How to price your art for beginners

For those that have sold little or even no art yet, how to price your art will be very different for those that are already well established. However, this doesn’t mean you should be giving away your pieces.

When you are first starting it, it can be great to share your art pieces to your existing network of friends and family and perhaps at local markets. I would suggest at this stage, you should be pricing your art so that you are close to cost price, but making a very small profit.

To do this, you simply need to add up the total costs of creating each piece. For example with a painting, add up the total costs of the canvas, paints and any other materials you have used. I would suggest marking up at least 10-20% on your costs even at this stage. This won’t drastically increase your sale price, but it will allow for other costs such as your artistic tools and space. Basically you just want to make sure you aren’t giving anything away even at this early stage.

To give an example, a painting that costs you about $100-120 to make might sell for $150-200 at this very early stage of your business.

You can certainly price higher from the start and there have been some very successful brands and artists that do so. Of course there are many other factors at play here as well. If you have been an artist right through school and university and are already known as an absolute expert in your field before you have started to sell, then your prices could justifiably be higher from the start. Alternatively, you might just be learning and playing with your craft so your prices could be much closer to cost.

The customer decides the value

An important point to remember at this and all stages is it is not really you that determines the value, it is the customer. There are many things that you can do to impact the customers perception of the value of your art, which I talk more about in this post. But in the early stages, when you might be relatively unknown, it is more difficult to price your art very high.

There may also be different prices for different settings. For example, displaying your art in a gallery may attract higher prices than at a local market. However, remember that galleries take their big cut of commission and you have much more control of your income when establishing your own sales channels. Again I have also written more on how to sell online here.

The value of feedback

There is a more powerful exchange that can take place, particularly at the early stages of your business in lieu of a higher price. That is asking for feedback on your pieces and what people might want different or instead. 

Using feedback to develop your business and products is another subject that I will soon write in depth about. For now I will say it has been immeasurably powerful in growing my own businesses. It isn’t about changing your products completely through feedback (though you can), but letting it guide you with new ideas of what potential customers want and what they may be prepared to pay. Knowing what your customers and potential customers want and how much they are willing to pay is incredible insight to generating income from your art. Simply ask. It doesn’t mean you have to always listen, but it’s amazing what ideas and creations can come from customer feedback.

How to price your art higher

Once you have started to get a few sales and have some early feedback on your products, now is the time to raise your prices. The first way to do this is to start to incorporate the value of your time. Basically you need to measure how long it takes you to make a piece from start to finish. You may like to use a stopwatch or make notes on when and how long you work on each piece. 

Now you can attach a specific value to your time. A suggested starting point is roughly minimum adult casual wage in your country. For Australia, rounding up that is roughly $30 per hour.

Using the example above of the painting that cost $100 in materials, it may have taken you 10 hours to complete. Therefore the cost to you is now $300 for your time, plus $100 for material. So a total cost of $400. I would suggest still marking up at least 10-20% on your costs at this stage to cover running costs and incidentals. So this example art should now be selling for around $500.

It’s important to move to this level of pricing at the earliest possible time. Whilst getting those first sales through family and friends at near cost price are great, if you get stuck at those price points there can be huge issues to you developing your business. The first issue is you obviously won’t be making any money. You will never be able to quit your job and pursue art as your career if you aren’t at least valuing your time. Secondly, is the perception of pricing by customers.

Perception of cheap

There is a general perception in the world that the most expensive items are generally the best. For example, there are handbags that cost tens of thousands of dollars. Those that can afford them and are so inclined will hand over fistfuls of cash, or more rather melted credit cards because they are perceived as and often are the best (and prettiest). 

It is not always the case however that the most expensive equals the best. I’m not someone that frequents expensive restaurants. However, in my experience I have occasionally enjoyed some pretty incredible food at such places. I have also sometimes been left disappointed, wishing that instead I had gone to my local cheap Indian restaurant that I know is delicious and filling. 

The point remains though that higher expense perceives higher quality. On the flip side, less expensive perceives lower quality. It doesn’t matter how good your art is, if you are pricing it too low, then people will perceive it to be of lower quality.

That is why it is important to put your prices up as soon as possible. Effectively as soon as you are selling online, your prices need to give a perception of higher quality. So somewhat paradoxically, pricing your piece higher may well mean that you make the sale. 

How to price your art even higher

Once you are established with solid online sales, pricing becomes a bit more fluid and subjective. Many other factors can drive and guide how to price your art.

The first consideration is your experience and quality of work. This requires a bit of feeling and awareness, but do you feel like your products are becoming really polished, or are you still developing your skills? Note that it is absolutely fine to still raise your prices when your art is still developing. I definitely understand that art is a lifelong growth process.

The next is customer demand. Do you have a product that is selling out so fast that you can’t keep up? Or are sales just drifting along calmly. Note that if you aren’t making enough sales then please read my post about how to sell art online here. But what you might see in your sales is that some products are more in demand than others and there could be an opportunity to increase prices for those products. Again this is a fluid and subjective process. 

Another guiding factor that you can use is competitors pricing. If your competitor is charging triple for a piece that you think would take around the same amount of time and materials to make, then you should seriously reconsider your pricing. Note that if they have 100k followers and you have 500, it probably shows that their brand is stronger and can therefore charge more. Again please read my post about how to sell art online here that will show you how to grow your brand so you are able to charge more in line with those competitors’ pricing.

You may also have some customer feedback around pricing. Don’t ignore those comments when customers say that your products are so cheap!

How to price your art with an extra zero (or two!)

This is the really fun part. It is a different game of how to price your art when you have masses of fans and repeat customers, begging to buy from you before you have even released your next piece. To highlight this, I will use the example of three qualified but different health care professionals;

1. Any anonymous online counsellor;
2. Local psychologist; and
3. Dr Phil.

It is fantastic that in Australia at least there are mental health support lines available for free. The staff that work these phones are doing an incredible service to the community in an area that is desperately in need in our stressful modern way of living. Even more amazing is that these staff are often volunteers, or at most on low government wages. The point for this article though is that because such workers are anonymous and without reputation, the price point needs to be kept very low or free. This is particularly as each time you call, you may well be speaking to a different support person. Again, these are fantastic services, particularly at the acute stages of care. But there is arguably not much room to charge high prices with such anonymity.

The second option is a local reputable psychologist. This person will be more known in the community. Perhaps you were once referred to them and you may have referred them to others. It might be harder to get an appointment with them. But you are prepared to wait and probably spend a little more money, particularly when you have particular challenges that you want to discuss with someone you can get to know and trust more.

Now I can’t say that I have watched much of Dr Phil, but he is obviously a globally known psychologist. Appearing on television to discuss and give guidance on different mental health issues has positioned him as arguably the pinnacle of his profession, or at least the most famous. He may well not be any better than your local psychologist or even an anonymous online counsellor. But by being on TV helping so many people, it creates a perception that he is one of the best psychologists in the world. 

It is this positioning as a globally known expert that allows him to charge huge prices. A quick google search found that to book him for a speaking event would cost up to $300,000USD!

Similarly positioning yourself as a globally known expert is the same principle for your charging high prices with your art business. If you want to be able to charge extremely high prices, of course the quality needs to be there, but you also need to be perceived as a global expert. The way to do that is to authentically show your process as I discussed in more detail here. Then as you grow your brand you can concurrently increase your prices.

If you want a free chat with me to discuss your pricing or how to grow your art business, book in for a free no obligation initial consultation with me now.