Being able to create work you’re excited about and understanding Why People Buy Art can help you cultivate collectors. There are many nuances to pricing your art that you can learn and harness to have better sales, like applying specific pricing strategies.
When it comes down to it, you can use all the pricing methods and formulas but getting your buyers to agree to purchase at your set prices is all about how your prices look together, from a marketing perspective.
Once you figure out what you sell your artwork for so it’s profitable, you can take your pricing to the next level by making adjustments based on tiered prices, the wow factor, and the framework of your overall prices.
Your Most Accessible Pieces
When pricing your art, it’s great to have a wide range of choices to accommodate a range of buyers. Lower prices for smaller items are a great entry point into your work. They’re also an excellent way for people to support you when they don’t have a budget or the space for a larger piece.
Or these less expensive pieces can be a souvenir of the buyer’s experience of seeing your work and visiting your studio or show. Think of this analogy, the Eiffel Tower is an art piece that you visit when you go to Paris. You know the tower is out of your budget and you don’t have room for it in your backyard so you may get a souvenir that does fit in your home for a much smaller, more budget-friendly price. Your small affordable art pieces can function in the same way.
Your Core Body Of Art Work
The next pricing tier up from your most accessible pieces are likely a collection of works that you gravitate toward creating most of the time, so you may have a lot of these more profitable artworks (vs your most affordable art offerings) on hand. They may also be what you sell most. Generally, they’re the best representation of what you’re trying to say and do with your work. They really get at the core of your message and exemplify your art.
In this pricing middle tier of your art, you’ve really worked through a lot of ideas and problems and solutions so the work is generally very well resolved. For example, if you do murals, you might paint a giant mural on the side of an entire 40’ building every once in a while when you win a public art grant but usually, you make and are commissioned to create murals for much smaller residential spaces. In this example, those smaller residential murals are priced in the middle of your overall pricing framework.
Wow-Factor Art Work
And lastly, your magnum opus or your highest priced tier of art. These are a few of your statement pieces that draw the most attention to your art. When pricing this work, you’ll consider that they are valued as your most significant and most exclusive offerings.
These are pieces that pique someone's interest, whether they see them in person or through your marketing. It helps the art buyer understand your pricing framework and they use it to identify if they want the highest-priced item because they're a luxury buyer or, if they really can't afford it, it will drive them to buy something from your core body of work.
Much like the Eiffel Tower draws your attention to Paris, these are usually big, bold, and prominently displayed feature pieces. They’re also the most costly items to make and therefore come with the highest price tag. This is because they require more effort to create, more specialty materials because they're large, and they may require more design and concept time.
Why Choose A Tiered Pricing Framework?
This framework of pricing your art includes small, medium, and large price tags. When they are used together in a single setting, much like the bread machine case study (if you’ve got a few minutes, this is a great example of how a pricing framework works), they can work together to sell more art than if you just sold one kind of piece at just one price. When you have a framework for all the different sizes and prices for your art, it can encourage more sales.
If you’d like to validate your prices to make sure they’re profitable so you can utilize this framework more effectively, let’s hop on a quick call and get you ready for your upcoming art events.