The simple answer? It depends. I wish I could give you a mathematic equation for this, but seeing as I’ve got an artist’s brain instead of a mathematician’s brain, you’ll just have to bear with me.
There are three basic ways that I price my work:
Each of these can add or subtract cost to a piece. See (poorly drawn) diagram below.
Pricing diagram
Although this is the easiest way to explain pricing, there’s still quite a bit more to know. Artists tend to grossly undervalue themselves. I’ve struggled with undervaluing my work many times, but I am refusing to continue doing so. In fact, my prices have risen drastically and people still want the work. I could say it’s even improved my sales.
When you’re buying a piece of pottery, you’re not just covering the material and labor. A lot of customers want to know, “how many hours did it take to make this?” Sometimes, they are just curious. With others, I can see that they are trying to put their own value on the work strictly based on the amount of time it took to complete it. To them, I say with a smile, “ten years.”
These pieces are far more than material cost and labor hours. Along with labor goes emotional labor- the time and searching it took to find this particular design, the care it took to ensure the piece survived every step of the process, the decade of building the skill to accomplish the design and making it reality. Oh, and my studio’s rent! And even after all of this, I have to put it out into the world. It can be a scary thing! I am opening my doors to rejection every time I put a piece out there, but it’s also a wonderfully energizing thing.
So, what I am selling is not a piece of clay that may have taken three hours or 50, it’s an artifact that has taken a decade to appear with countless hours of practice and emotional energy that I am so grateful to be able to share with you.
I write this as an example of how I price work, but I have a feeling that other artists who have been brave enough to say, “I am not going to undervalue myself,” have a pretty similar concept.