Gavin Stairs on fri 22 mar 02
I know mel can speak for himself, but I can't help noting this: He seems
to have made a comfortable living out of teaching and his art work (clay
and paint, and perhaps other things). We have, therefore, to judge his
comments as coming from a successful practitioner of the art of making and
selling his services and products, whatever may be his merits as an
artist. He chooses to price to sell, and to make a sufficient quantity of
goods that he can make money on the total proceeds. So also does Warren
MacKenzie, apparently. That's great. Others choose to price higher, make
fewer, and come out ahead as well. That's also great. The problems only
occur when you price too low to pay your bills, no matter how many you make
and sell (sell at a loss, and make it up in volume!), or contrarily, to
price so high that your work languishes and never sells. Within those two
limits, it's a personal choice as what strategy you follow. Do you prefer
to make many, or make few? For those who are starting out, and who have
not established a clientele, this may seem a fatuous choice, but it is
truth nevertheless. If you cannot make a living no matter which strategy
you choose, then you will not survive long off your potting, and had better
consider changing your wares, or your lifestyle.
I'd like to add a few hard facts on the economics of potting. The
materials are dirt cheap, because they are essentially processed dirt. At
the moment, I am now making hand made books. The materials for books are
also quite cheap. I price our low cost (trade) line at 5 times material
costs. My material costs are much higher than those of a high volume
publisher, but they still account for very little in the cost of a
book. Even at these prices I am paying myself very little, because it
takes a lot of my time to make a hand made book. I have a choice: I can
account for all my time, make a very expensive book, and sell it for a few
hundred or thousand dollars. I will do this with some of my time. But if
I want to get my wife's poetry out into the hands of people, I have to sell
cheaper books. So I accept the smaller margin, adjust my working methods
to the realities of the market, and try to sell enough to make it worth my
time. Either strategy takes time to develop, because both depend on
different methods of marketing. The key is not only competent and worthy
craftsmanship, but also effective marketing.
Now a book contains words and images. A pot contains space, form and
perhaps some food or flowers. If your intent is the content, then the
container must be priced to suit the consumer of the contents. If your
intent is the container, then the contents are to some extent
extraneous. We tend to choose them to be somehow worthy of the fancy
container. It has been instructive to me to consider the work of book
artists. It is clear that at one extreme, there are those to whom the
contents are mere stuffing, a kind of kapok or foam, to lend a kind of
intellectual bulk to the real object, the book and binding. At the other
end are those for whom the book is a mere carrier for the contents, which
are revered, even held holy. In the middle is a grand spectrum of attempts
to match the two. One such is something like the Bible project that mel
described to us some time ago: a grand container for a holy content. It is
clear that if the object's intent is utilitarian, it can command a price no
greater than its competition, however made, setting aside differences in
utility. If plastic will serve as well or better than ceramic, then
ceramic must compete at that price. If all you are selling is the
utility, you will end up pricing like my trade books, at a slight markup
on the material plus processing cost. If you cannot, or do not, choose to
do this, you must find a way to enhance the utility with some
non-utilitarian property which the customer will value more highly. This
can be done by emphasizing the special characteristics of your offering,
whatever they may be, to distinguish it from the rest, or by building in a
certain clientele the appreciation for a certain esthetic. I have in past
referred to this as telling a story about the product. David Ogilvie
called it selling the sizzle rather than the steak.
Lets face it. The most expensive yunomi or teapot is still just a
container for tea. We may prefer it for many reasons, but most of them
have to do with a developed taste, or an esthetic. This may be abetted by
a functioning after-market.
In the extreme, the object may be non-functional, and exist only for the
esthetic. This is only different in degree from the tea containers, but it
is distinguished by the existence of an established market for such items,
which we call the art ceramics market.
Now see where your argument on pricing falls in this spectrum. Are you
selling pure utility? Few studio potters can be doing this. The purely
utilitarian ceramics market was largely killed by plastics and metals. It
survives now only in high tech engineered ceramics and certain niches. Are
you then selling non-functional artworks? If so, you must build a
clientele based on an appreciation for your esthetic, and a belief in your
work's future value. Are you somewhere in between these? That is where
most of us lie. The customer expects to get use out of the pot, and
enjoyment as well, based on an esthetic appreciation of the object,
developed either culturally or by marketing. Mel's big store mass produced
ware depends on a developed esthetic which prefers that ware, plus mass
marketing. What do you have to compete with that? It is no use standing
on your pulpit and expounding the virtues of the hand made object: you
must convince actual buyers of it. You have to develop the market, a slow
and patient task. Think for a moment on what you actually value in the
ware you produce, and in the ware that you yourself buy and/or use. Is it
a culturally based appreciation? A learned esthetic? A belief in future
value? An appreciation of a superior utility? A peer based conviction of
the superiority of a certain product? What else? Whatever you come up
with. that is your marketing edge. That is what you are selling. So go
out and sell it. Or if you don't currently imbue that in your own work,
develop your work until you do.
Gavin
At 10:20 AM 20/03/2002, Chris Campbell (and Arti) wrote:
>Arti wrote -
>
>' I bet you could sell everything if you priced it at =
>$25......I bet you could sell it all if you priced it at $5...If you =
>will sell at $65.....why not $5?????.....If the object is to sell =
>everything why not....$2?????
>My god!!!!....Shouldn't your stuff be worth at least as much as the =
>commercial made by the thousands Walmart crap out there?....'
>
> It is extremely discouraging to read that a competent potter would
>walk through a store, check prices on machine made pots and decide that his
>is only worth half as much. That is the core of the pricing problem with
>pottery. Our best don't really believe they can charge more for the beauty
>of design and excellence of craftsmanship that comes with the years they have
>spent perfecting their skills.
...
Sharon Villines on sat 23 mar 02
> Think for a moment on what you actually value in the
> ware you produce, and in the ware that you yourself buy and/or use. Is it
> a culturally based appreciation? A learned esthetic? A belief in future
> value? An appreciation of a superior utility? A peer based conviction of
> the superiority of a certain product? What else? Whatever you come up
> with. that is your marketing edge. That is what you are selling. So go
> out and sell it. Or if you don't currently imbue that in your own work,
> develop your work until you do.
Excellent advice very nicely stated.
Sharon.
--
Sharon Villines, Arts Coach
http://www.artscoach.ws
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