272 - 5-Minute Mentoring: Knowing When to Raise Your Prices

“Your prices are too low!”  they say.  “You need to raise them!”  But that’s easier said than done! 

In today’s episode of 5-Minute Mentoring, I’m sharing some clues you can look for to know when - and how - to raise your prices to ensure that you’re building in profit so you can sustain and grow your art business.

Are you an artist struggling to price your art in a way that feels authentic to you but still returns a profit?  Check out my new book and resources below for help!

How to Price Your Art: Pricing with Confidence for Sales & Profit (Book Just Released!)
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B097XBP733

How To Price Your Art:  The 2021 Definitive Guide to Pricing Your Art for Visual Artists
https://www.matttommeymentoring.com/how-to-price-your-art.html

Connect with me online: https://www.matttommeymentoring.com
Instagram and Facebook: @thethrivingchristianartist
Watch this podcast on YouTube!  https://www.youtube.com/mjtommey 

Fuel Your Creative Calling with Weekly Encouragement
Join thousands of Christian artists who are growing in faith, creativity, and purpose.

Subscribe to The Thriving Christian Artist Weekly and receive powerful, faith-filled content every week—designed to encourage your heart, spark your creativity, and equip you to walk boldly in your God-given calling as an artist.

👉 Click here. It’s free. It’s faith-filled. And it’s just for you.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Have you ever wondered how to know when to increase your prices for your art? Well, I'm going to give you some clues here today on 5-Minute Mentoring. Hey, my friends, so glad that you're with me here today on 5-Minute Mentoring. You know, maybe your prices have been kind of sitting there for a while and you're like, I'd like to increase them, but I don't know when, don't know how, by what rate, you know, what do I do? So, well, one of the time-honored traditions among artists to know when to increase the prices of your art is sales volume. There's a number of things that you can do, obviously, to throttle the amount of sales that you have in a month or in a year in order to keep that in production. The amount that you release, new collections, limited opportunities for pieces, that sort of thing. But one of the things you can do is also use your pricing as a way to be a throttle as well so if you are finding that your art is selling too quickly and you're like i wish i had that problem what does that mean too quickly well if every time you open the doors for your art like if you do an auction on facebook or instagram or you go to a show and you're just selling out or selling super quickly and people are not even there's no bulking at the prices you're guaranteed it's time to start raising your prices on that. I would say if you're in that kind of position, you could probably even consider 20% or more in raising your prices to begin to get a little bit of throttling on the amount of pieces that you're selling, especially if you're talking about original artwork. Because you never want somebody to come in and they'll be like, oh, I love this piece. How much is it? Oh, you know, it's 200 bucks. You're like, great, I'll take it. Take three. not what you're looking for. You want there to be a little bit of like, okay, you want to be hearing on a normal basis. Wow, I would love a piece of your art. One day I'm going to have to save up for that. You want to hear those kinds of things because that lets you know, yeah, it's affordable for most people, for many people. It's also not affordable for a lot of people as well. And that's a good thing. All right. So raising your prices in that position, you know, anywhere from, you know, 10, 15, 20, 25% to give a throttle is absolutely a strategy that I've used and that you can use to begin to manage the amount of pieces that you're having to make and also having to keep in inventory. Just as a general rule, I would say that if you're just kind of going along, things are good, you're not selling too much, too little or that sort of thing, you can always and always should be raising your prices at least 10% every year in order just to keep up with increases in cost of doing business, cost of living, just as a general business rule. That's a good thing to do. Most people are never going to even notice that. Many people won't even notice the 20%. And by the way, this is not something that you need to be all freaked out about and be like, well, do I need to send out a big email and I'm increasing my prices? No, you don't need to do that. All right. Just increase the prices. The interesting thing I think that you can do on a yearly basis, for example, is just look at it. If you have a slower time of year, like right after Christmas or whatever, begin to look at how the year sales were, begin to look at the seasonality, begin to look at the flow of your sales, and then just think, okay, am I going to go ahead and raise prices? And when you put out that new collection, or even if you just wanted to go on your website and just increase all the prices right there, you don't have to tell anybody make a big announcement, anything like that. Just do it. The only time that you would need to, I think, let your galleries and things like that know is if you decided to go down on your prices, all right? If you decided to go down on your prices, and honestly, I can't think of a reason why you'd ever want to do that if you're pricing correctly anyway, then you would definitely want to let galleries, wholesalers, anybody that's selling or representing your work, you'd want to definitely let them know because you wouldn't want to be seen as somebody that's underselling your work for what they're selling it for. All right, so that would be really important for you to understand. But in general, like I said, at least 10%, sometimes up to 20, 25%. If things are really selling and popping and going quickly, you can do that. But the key to all of that is making sure that you're starting out in the right place. Most artists don't have the problem of pricing their art too high. They have the problem of pricing it too low and not considering all the expenses that you have, both fixed and variable costs every month? What are the things that it takes for you to actually do business? You got to make sure all of that is included in your pricing strategy. You know, that's a lot to manage. And that's actually why I wrote my book, How to Price Your Art, Pricing with Confidence for Sales and Profit. When you get that book, and you can grab that right here in the show notes on Amazon, and you can also get an invitation to watch a two-hour training video that I did on that same subject that goes really in depth. Listen, when you get that, the training or the book, you're going to be able to walk through and understand all of the details that you need to be including in your pricing and also how to actually have a formula and a pricing worksheet to be able to work through all of that yourself so that you're starting in strength. You're starting at a reasonable price so that you know you're making money. You know you're making a profit on every sale. All right. Hey, I hope that's a benefit for you. I hope this This has been a blessing to you today as well. Until next time, I love you very much. And remember, you were created to thrive. All right, bye.