Pricing of pots

[Robert spicer]

Am wondering how potters decide on the worth of their work. I only do 1 show a year and also sell on ETSY. When I look at others work their prices seem to be all over the map. Do you price high and hope to sell items or low in an effort to sell more pieces. I find beautiful vases prices in the $40 to $60 range and next to it is a tea bowl priced at $55. Finding it hard to rationalize the size of the items with their respective prices. Any thoughts?

[John Saare]

This is a nearly 2 year old thread, but I thought I'd throw in my 0.02USD, since it's from the perspective of a noob.

I did three craft fairs last year (my first year).  My only real expectation was to chat with folks and try to get a feeling for the craft scene in my county.  Etsy et al is not a near-term plan.

I felt it appropriate to start with low pricing, preferring to get the exposure and experience.

The actual pricing was more or less a discounted version of prices of similar items I had seen in the area.

The last fair was the county's xmas fair.  The two prior shows had been using 1 6 foot table with misc shelving.  For the xmas fair, I was required to fill 2 10 foot tables.  Gulp.

By that time, I had accumulated a fair number of pieces I (heh) hoped would never see the light of day..., but I ended up having no choice..., so...

I pondered which strategy I was gonna employ to display it all.  Apart from having to display things I would rather have not, I also ended up displaying all the pieces unmarked wrt price (another long-ish story).

I really wanted the nice pieces (in my opinion), to be highlighted, so I simply divided things into "the nice table", and "the table of deplorables".

Apart from that separation, there was no signage or markings to suggest which was which.

I bet you can see the punch-line from a mile away.

Yah..., the table nearly EVERYBODY gravitated to was the Table of Deplorables.  It was the first table they would walk up to, they would pick up and bond with the pieces, and then ask "how much?".  Sigh..., I had decided that everything on the deplorable table was $5..., so I stuck to that.

It is true that the few customers who knew something about pottery tended to gravitate to the "nice table", and some sales (and the nicest conversations) did happen from there, but they were the exception.

In the end, the vendors around me got a nice chuckle from my puzzled and bewildered looks.  The recurring recommendation I got from all of them was that I really should not try to understand it too deeply, and focus on making the pieces from which I learn and which make me happy, and somehow, they will find a home.

If I had to go out on a limb regarding specific prices, it's only this:  if you live in a rural area with a marginal economy, there is a significant difference in price resistance between single and double digit prices.

[Norm Stuart]

I haven't actively sold any of my work from the past five years, but I can share some experience with price discovery - it takes some experimentation. Bear with me and I'm sure you will think of ways to adapt this.

I owned a consulting firm marketing services to real estate developers. I came up with the idea of selling adapted work from one of our client projects as a report - a way of marketing ourselves which would pay for itself while impressing potential clients who took the time to read the report.

Knowing the potential clients the offering and the actual report with delivery had to look very professional. So with the art now out of the way I calculated the break-even cost around $15 per report depending on what the purchase rate was from the initial mailing - later in retrospect it turned out to be $16.35, so I was pretty close.

So I decided to do 100 test mailings each at four different prices, $15, $32, $47 and $68.  Fifty of each hundred had metered postage with the other fifty hand stamped with the stamp placed with slightly imperfect alignment. Of each fifty 25 were personally signed, and 25 were signed with the Laserjet which printed out the letter and envelopes.  To get really good statistics, each group should have been 65 or greater, but it was good enough.

Hand-stamped envelopes generated five times as many purchases as metered mail, regardless of price or signature. Machine printed signatures generated more than twice as many purchases as hand written signatures,

As to price, the top seller was $15, losing $1.35 per sale.  The second best seller was $68 which sold about 1/3 fewer reports, but cleared a profit of ~$50 per report sold.  $47 was the least popular price by far with $32 not much better.

My next step was 200 mailings all with postage stamps slightly askew and Laserjet signatures, 100 offering the report at $85 and 100 offering the report at $147.  The $147 was slightly more profitable with fewer responses, but the response to $85 was 27% greater than the earlier high price of $68.

So the story I used to describe these results were these letters were going to important busy people for whom the actual stamp distinguished this letter from regular business mail, and a digitized signature would most likely come from another important busy person who would not have the time to personally sign this letter or have their  secretary sign them.

At $15 many people took a chance.  But a product price of $68 to $147 best fit the perception of these clients of what they should be receiving. So balancing getting our name out with profit I would make, I sent out 12,800 mailings offering the report at $85, making $37,000 - which was a lot better than paying for advertising.

Most interesting is I received 6 returns for a refund, 5 reports sold at $15 and one return sold at $32.

No returns at any of the higher prices, most likely because those spending more were more committed to the purchase, and possibly because the price they paid influenced their perception of their value.  More importantly for a consulting firm selling services at $185 to $227 per hour, report buyers who became clients at our hourly rates came exclusively from the buyers who paid $68 or more for the report.

So price discovery is a process, the results of which are likely to be somewhat different from your initial suppositions going into the process.  Obviously the results would have been different if I were marketing to a different demographic.

In our studio sales I've definitely seen the general public choose ceramics with bright colors, regardless of the quality, in fact pieces with slight defects going for more due to the perceived hand-made signals it gives off in a world of cheap slip-cast alternatives from Viet Nam.

Other potters and educated collectors choose completely different things, favoring items say with glazing which clearly took hours of handwork, or glazes they've never seen - and this crowd is not keen of defects and prefer small perfect artist signatures or stamps.

Both types of buyers prefer either small items, or occasionally a larger presentation size if it's exactly what they want.  Small things with bright colors find the most number of new homes.

The traditional way to appraise the price pf commodity items is to compare the quality and attributes of your work to other offerings and their prices - but I don't think this will get you to where you want to go, because only Vietnamese imports are priced using this method, so you'll end up with statistical noise of people choosing their own random price based on who knows what.

Just based on a hunch, I think the most consistently profitable potter I've seen online may be the woman who makes and sells custom ceramic buttons.  I don't know how they sell, but the low price-point is high relative to the costs of production with easy shipping. But that's just a guess. 

Price discovery takes time and is dependent upon your presentation venue and target audience. Being recognized as an artist takes persistence and finding the place where you connect with buyers in a profitable way.  Too bad for Vincent Van Gough.

In Los Angeles artists of all sort start with prices low enough to attract buyers and slowly raise their prices over time. Collectors love to see the value of their purchases has risen, something you largely control.

One last thing, in face to face selling once the buyer picks up a piece you're 90% of the way to having it sold.  Never discourage people from touching.