THE INSPIRATION PLACE PODCAST
Miriam Schulman: Hey artists, if you’re scared that raising your prices is going to cost you sales, I think you’re worried about the wrong things. By the end of this episode, you’re going to know how to pick a price you can actually stand behind and why raising it might get you more sales, not fewer. I’m going to tell you exactly how I set the price for my very first portrait commission, even though it’s, like, really embarrassing. So brace yourself.
Speaker 2: It’s the Inspiration Place podcast with artist Miriam Schulman. Welcome to the Inspiration Place podcast, an art World Insider podcast for artists by an artist, where each week we go behind the scenes to uncover the perspiration and inspiration behind the art. And now your host, Miriam Schulman.
Miriam Schulman: Hey, in case we haven’t met yet. I’m Miriam Schulman. I’m author of the book Artpreneur, and I’m also your curator of inspiration. Welcome to the Inspiration Place. Now back to my story. I quit my Wall Street job after nine over 11. So this was in the early 2000 and the internet existed, but barely. I mean, like Netscape, remember Netscape and we had AOL on dial up. So yeah, almost no artists had websites back then. I mean, almost nobody. But I went looking and I found an artist, a single artist somewhere out there with a website who painted portraits, and he was charging $300 a portrait. So I charged 200. That was my entire strategy. That was my market research, my competitive analysis, my entire business plan all in one afternoon. Okay, so now here’s what I want you to sit with. I knew nothing, nothing about this artist. I didn’t know if he was any good. Well, I saw what he had on his website, but I didn’t even know if he was selling. I didn’t know if he was a full time working artist or a guy who just painted on weekends and had a nephew build them a website. I had no idea whether $300 was making him a living or slowly bankrupting him. But I built my entire business on a number. I plucked off the internet from a stranger whose business I knew absolutely nothing about. And then I went lower because I figured I hadn’t earned the right to match him.
Miriam Schulman: Now, before you get all smug about that, I know a lot of you are crowdsourcing your prices on Etsy and elsewhere. You’re doing it on Instagram now. You scroll. You see what people are charging. You land somewhere, maybe underneath, and you call that research and you don’t know anything about these people and whether or not they’re making money. So be honest with me. Who are you benchmarking your prices on? Is it the market? Is it what people think that you should be charging? Is it your mom? Let me know. Now I want to talk about the advice that everyone else is giving artists, which I absolutely hate. You’ve heard it to charge what you’re worth. Oh my God, I hate that advice. Now we’ve all heard that a thousand times. It’s on mugs, it’s on Instagram graphics with a sunset behind it. And it’s terrible advice, genuinely actively harmful. And here’s why people don’t have a price tag. People are priceless. There’s no number. You cannot look up what you’re worth. There’s no formula. There’s no appraisal. You are a human being and human beings do not have a price stop. So the next time somebody tells you to charge what you’re worth, they’ve handed you an instruction that’s literally impossible to follow. And here’s what happens when you give somebody impossible instructions. They default to safe, which in pricing means low numbers that nobody can accuse you of being arrogant for. That’s it.
Miriam Schulman: That’s how most art gets priced. Yeah, I know. I know, I know. Not by cost, not by market, not by demand. Artists priced at the number where they feel they can’t be called out. Too full of themselves. That’s not a pricing strategy, my friend. That’s self-protection. Wearing a tuxedo. Okay, so if that’s landed for you, hit subscribe because those are the types of topics I talk about every single week here on this channel. Next, I want to tell you another dumb thing I did not long after I started off in my $200 era, I think I think I was still kind of in the hundreds. I don’t know if I had raised it yet, but I remember the story very well. I was at an open studio, one of those big art buildings where a bunch of artists opened their spaces on the same weekend. I overheard a conversation. There was a woman who was unhappy with a portrait, and she was asking the artist if they could fix the portrait somebody else had started. Now I really respect what the artist told her. She was like, I do not touch other artists work, which is great. But me, with my naivete in the hallway, I was like, you know what? I could probably start it over for you for less than what you would pay to fix it. And yeah, I don’t feel good about the memory of that. And she was not interested, not even the littlest Bit because the woman’s problem that she had with the first art she hired was quality.
Miriam Schulman: She had paid money for her portrait. She was disappointed by the work, and she was standing in that hallway wanting reassurance that the next one would be good. And I walked up to her and offered to do it for less, less money, which in her ears meant less of everything. I offered her more of the exact risks she was standing there regretting, so I was trying to pull the only lever I thought I had, which was cheap. And when prices are differentiator, the only thing you can compete on is something that actually can scare a lot of people away. So you know what I was, I was basically that Sesame Street Muppet in the trench coat lefty. Did I did they still bring out lefty? This is something from my generation, remember lefty? He’s the one who slides up to Ernie and offers him, hey, buddy, do you want to buy the letter O? That is what discounting sounds like from the outside. It doesn’t sound like a bargain. It sounds like something’s wrong. Here’s what’s really happening when somebody runs into your price. And I want to say this like without apology, because it’s the whole subject of this episode. A price that’s unusually low does not read as generous or accessible. It reads as a warning. It quietly says this artist isn’t established yet, or nobody else has bought from him yet.
Miriam Schulman: Or there might be a reason you don’t want to go there. Now, that does not mean a high price automatically means better. Nobody’s Fooled by a big number sitting there on its own. But when the price matches the art, the photography, the way you describe it, the way you run your business around it, that combination tells the collector something different. It says, take this seriously. This isn’t a risk. So your price is never just a number. It’s an instruction. It tells the person looking at your art how seriously to take it. What cheap actually costs you. Here is the part of this episode that I think you really need to hear and stay with me, because it might go against everything that you believe. You think low prices help you close the sale. And I get that because that’s exactly what I thought too low prices cost you sales. And I’m going to give you some examples. Let me show you what I mean. If you’re a loyal listener of this channel, you’ve heard these stories before, but I’m going to tell them again. Story one this was the woman at the holiday boutique who commissioned portraits of three kids, and she handed me $750 on the spot for three portraits. Those were the deposits. And she considered it a donation for the school, and she never returned my calls. Following up for the portraits, never scheduled, the photoshoot never followed up, and I’ve never answered my calls.
Miriam Schulman: His portraits never got done, and she just simply forgot about the whole thing. Now, for many of you out there, you’re probably more like me $750, whether it was then or now. Yeah, that’s a lot of money to us, but not to her. And that’s why she was able to just forget about it. To her, it was just. I made a donation to the school, Hundred and $50. She made donations much bigger to the school than that, and maybe she found someone more expensive to do the portrait, who she could trust. Okay. Second story. This woman commissioned a landscape of her backyard. Do you remember that story? I told it on the podcast. I’ve told it in my book, Artpreneur. And I already started painting it, and that actually finished it. When she came up to me and told me, oh, don’t start it. I decided to buy my husband a set of golf clubs instead. Now that one I saved because I was able to turn around and say, hey, I’m going to give this to my gallery to sell if you’re not interested. And then she bought it. But I’ll tell you, it took me years to understand the reason she wanted to buy golf clubs for her husband is because that felt like a more substantial gift, because it was more expensive than what I was charging her for the portrait. So she hadn’t even given me money yet. But in her mind it was like, oh, it’s not a good enough gift.
Miriam Schulman: Now, I don’t know if she actually ended up buying the golf clubs in addition to buying the portrait, but this isn’t stories about clients being flaky. This is about what happens when your prices are too low for the customer. They’re low enough that walking away doesn’t cost you anything. Not financially, not emotionally, and abandoning doesn’t feel like a big deal. Now with a higher price. Have guaranteed that both of them would have followed through. No, it may not have. Of course not. Nothing guarantees that people abandon expensive things, too. But the real price turns a purchase into a deliberate decision, the kind that you don’t casually forget or swap for a set of golf clubs without a second thought. A price isn’t just what you get paid, it’s what tells your client that this is worth it, that you’re worth it, that this is worth it. Knowing that low prices can make collectors question your work is one thing, but knowing whether your prices are too low and exactly how and when to raise them is another. And yeah, that’s the problem with general advice. It can show you what matters without telling you what applies to your business right now. And knowing what to do doesn’t change anything until you’ve made the decision. Now, every month that you wait to raise your prices, launch a collection approach. A gallery is another month you spend researching, second guessing, and wondering whether you’re about to make the wrong move.
Miriam Schulman: And there’s my friend. So you don’t need ten more opinions. What you do need is someone to look at your artwork, your numbers, your market, your niche and help you see which decision matters now, not which. Ten things you should stop worrying about. Not ten new ideas, but the one thing that will fix the problem for you. And that’s exactly what we’re doing inside Chelsea Artpreneur studio. It’s two days and it’s in person in Chelsea, New York, October 28th and 29th. It’s for working artists who are already selling but are ready to stop circling the same decisions and start making moves that will grow their business. You’ll get my eyes on your specific business so we can identify what’s actually holding you back and decide what happens next. It is by application only because there’s only seven spots to learn more and apply now to see if you qualify. Go to SchulmanArt.com/Chelsea. Okay. The merit ladder does not exist. Now, let me take away the other thing you might believe. Every artist wants a formula price per square inch. Price per linear inch. Their multiplier. Some equation you plug in your years, your experience, your training. And out comes the number. But here’s what I actually see. Coaching artists at every level. Less experienced artists routinely asks for, asking for and getting higher prices than some of my more experienced artists. Yeah.
Miriam Schulman: So like the number of years you’ve been doing it or totally doesn’t count. Every week, somebody with three years painting. Learn to paint in the pandemic. They confidently are asking double what somebody with 30 years is asking, and they’re getting it. And let me tell you, yes, skill absolutely matters. I’m not telling you it doesn’t. But price is not an automatic readout of skill or experience. There’s no scheduled raise that comes when you’re 10th year at the easel. Nobody reviews your CV and mails you permission to charge more, and the market doesn’t automatically reward the most experienced artists in the room. It rewards the one who can set a price, explain it, and be confident about it without flinching. That’s what I see over and over again. And I want to give you some real examples of without flinching actually looks like because it helped a few of my inner circle artists. First, let me tell you about an artist inside my inner circle. She did a show and she didn’t sell her artwork. She was the most expensive artist in there. Here’s what I want to tell you, though. She had a 40 by 40 inch painting hanging up, priced at $6,000. Yes, her art was the highest priced in the entire show, even though a lot of people had no idea who she was. And the other artists in the show were very cranky about it. A few of them came up to her and were like, that’s too expensive.
Miriam Schulman: Do they have other artists telling them it’s too expensive? That seems to be a common theme with the artists in my inner circle, that other artists seem to have a big problem with them raising prices. So this artist came up to I was like, hey, that’s too much. And she held her ground and there was a little audience of other artists listening. She said, this is what my art is selling for. And I’m not just local. I have originals in Texas, California, Boston, Michigan and Florida. Now, she didn’t sell anything at the show, but before she left, a woman came up to her and said, I want to recommend you to a gallery in Rockland, which is a serious art town, and it’s right across the street from the Farnsworth Museum. So this person walked over and handed her a slip of paper with the gallery director’s name on it and said, tell her I’m recommending you. Your work would do so well there. Now, she got the referral because her prices were the highest in the room. One artist publicly told her it was too high, trying to shame her into lowering her prices. Another person decided she belonged in a better gallery. That’s what happens when your prices are doing the work for you. You might be standing there worrying about what other artists are thinking, but meanwhile, that’s not who’s buying your art. Okay, that’s not the problem you should be worrying about distorts you towards the people you actually want.
Miriam Schulman: Now let’s talk about how I actually raised my prices. What finally moved me because it wasn’t confidence. It wasn’t a mindset breakthrough. I didn’t have an artist business coach. I didn’t know that such a thing existed then. It was definitely not somebody coming to tell me, charge what I’m worth. I was getting $200 a portrait, and one of my early customers ordered multiple portraits of each of her children, and that’s when I raised each portrait to $750, which I want to be clear, was still too low. That’s the price that a woman forgot about her three commissions. It was a start. And then a while later, something else happened that had nothing to do with self-esteem. I got bored. I got really bored. I was painting the same children over and over again. Same kids, different poses. Again and again. And I remember thinking very clearly. I do not want to be a human photocopier. And the same thing kept happening again. Like with pet portraits. I’m sorry, I love animals, but I really didn’t like doing dog portraits, and that’s mostly what I was getting. And so I told my assistant, Anna, please double the prices. This is not a made up story. I know it sounds made up, but this is absolutely true. Anna doubled my prices and it was on Etsy and my website, but I’m pretty sure the sales came through. Etsy doubled my prices and I got three new orders at the doubled price, and one of them was from a client who had paid half before.
Miriam Schulman: And so now when people reach out to me, I tell them it’s $1,000 to do one dog. Like I just don’t want to pick up a paintbrush for less than that. I’m much more interested in making a YouTube video or, you know, people say you’re teaching because you can’t sell your art. It’s not true. I’ve been doing this for now, 30 years. It’s my time to teach you. I still accept portraits, but my time is so scarce. My coaching business is growing. I have other things I want to do. Other projects. Pulling. So suddenly, every hour that I spend at the easel has has a real cost attached to it. So my last two commissions, yeah, were $1,000 each. I will show you each of them. The first one I did was a dog and a bunny for a thousand. It would be 2000 if I were to do that today. And then I did a landscape. I’ll show you that one. Also $1,000. 11 by 14in. Yeah. I don’t pick up my paintbrush for less than that. So here’s the actual advice that I want you to hear. Instead of charge what you’re worth. Worth is not measurable. Willingness is measurable. You’re never going to know what you’re worth. That question doesn’t have an answer. Chasing it will keep you at $200 forever. But you can’t answer three much more useful questions.
Miriam Schulman: What price makes this piece worth making? What price can I actually hold consistently without discounting it in one place and charging full price in another, or apologizing for it? When I talk about in my book, Artpreneur is what’s the price you can say out loud without choking on a little vomit? I might have edited it out. I don’t remember. Those of you who have read the book, you can let me know if that’s still in there. Start with the number that makes you glad to pick up the paintbrush, not resentful of the person who hired you. And then make sure everything else about how you sell the work tells the same story as the price. That’s the strategy charged with your worth not a strategy. Now you have the map. If you’ve watched my videos or you’ve read Artpreneur, you understand the big picture how pricing, positioning, collectors, and visibility all fit together. But what that general map can’t give you is the red dot that says you are here. This is the problem you need to solve next. This is where you need to go. So without that red dot, you can have all the right information, all the right advice. And it still feels vague because you don’t know which move to make. So inside Chelsea Artpreneur studio, we’re going to put that red dot on your map for two days. October 28th and 29th. I’m bringing a small group of working artists together in person in Chelsea, New York City.
Miriam Schulman: Now, this is not for beginners looking for more information. It’s for artists who are already selling but want my eyes on their work, their numbers, and their marketing. We’ll identify where you are, what’s actually holding you back, and what you need to do next so you can stop second guessing every single move. Space is limited, so it is by application only. Bring your problem. Leave with the solution. You can apply now at SchulmanArt.com/Chelsea. Now I know that some of you are probably thinking, okay Miriam, but if I raise my prices, I’ll sell less. Now there’s a show I’ve talked about before my daughter’s music holiday show in 2019, I did $9,500 there in two days. Best show I ever did their best show of that year. And part of why that happened is that I had just started coaching other artists, and I decided to take my own advice, and I tested higher prices on everything, including my prints, which up until then I thought, oh no, $68. That’s the price. That’s the sweet spot. I was like, no, you better test this. Make it $75, and I’m not going to stand here and tell you that a $7 bump on a print single handedly created a $9,500 weekend. Definitely. There was other things going on that year, too. But here’s what it did prove. I did not sell less prints, I sold more, and I’ve proven that over and over again.
Miriam Schulman: And my clients have too. What I was most afraid of that raising my prices would collapse. How much I sold. But people kept buying and they kept buying it. Every tier prints originals, commission deposits and that’s why it turned it into the best show of my year. Higher prices did not manufacture demand out of nowhere, but they sure didn’t turn off anybody either. And honestly, my read on it. Not that I can prove, but what I believe is that higher prices make the art feel more established. It’s something I talk about before. It’s called reassuringly expensive. Your want your art to feel reassuringly expensive so you don’t have lefty coming up to you saying, hey, you want to buy this used car? You want to buy a letter O? You want to buy a cheap portrait? No. Nobody wants to waste their time on a cheap portrait. They don’t. And look, I’m not the only data point here. I have now coached literally hundreds, if not thousands. I was looking at my client roster. I think we cleared like a thousand clients already. So I want to share the one recent client, a New England artist in my inner circle who has doubled her average sale price this year. Last year she was selling these little paintings for $300. The gallery got half and she sold Not enough money. Last year she sold so many paintings, but she was stuck. This year, her average sales price is $779.
Miriam Schulman: Her commission average is over $1,200. And she’s told me she’s booking more, not less. So the first six months of the year, she made as much money as she did all of last year. This is a big difference. And she told me that at one point she was selling those little paintings for $50, and now she sells them for 400. The good news is, so far this year, we’ve doubled the average price, which is fantastic. So average is running 779 now. So I’m getting closer to my goal of not wanting to roll out of bed for less than a thousand. And my commission average is 1229. Now, did she lose people? Maybe. Maybe some of those early friends and family buyers are not going to come with her on her journey, and she’s at peace with that. But here’s how I’d frame that for you because I said it to her too. Those $50 buyers, they were buying like a little souvenir. We love her. Let’s get this little thing. That buyer was never competing with the over the sofa piece or the dining room statement piece. Those are completely different purchasers. Now, a sculptor I work with also raised her prices, and she built shipping into her numbers. And her orders are still rolling in, mostly from existing clients, but the same people who bought at her old prices. And every single one of those numbers has gone up across the board. She’s killing it. She’s killing it. She’s having such a great year.
Amber Klinsky: Something has obviously changed because like I said, this is existing clients, but every single one of them across the board, the numbers have gone up. I’ve jumped the prices up a bit. I’m shipping everything with shipping included, but the price is actually higher. So yeah, something’s working.
Miriam Schulman: And another artist I coach had a buyer at a show ask her to come down from a $2,000 original set. Her budget was only $1,000. And what this artist did was she explained to her the difference between why an original cost 2000 and a print cost 1000. And guess what? Once she heard that explanation, the client budget was no longer $1,000. She thought the $2,000 original full price hung it up, loved it, sent her a photo of it hanging up in her bedroom the same day.
Bo Sapphire: So I asked her, what price are you comfortable with? And then she said, $1,000. But the original was $2,000. So I explained to her the differences. And then she said, oh, she had no idea. And then eventually she went for the original. And then she sent me a picture of it in her bedroom above her bed. One hour later.
Miriam Schulman: And now here’s one more story that might sting. And I almost didn’t include it, but I’m going to. Another artist that I coach told me she just sold a 48 by 48 for $3,200 through her gallery. Great sale. Except what she told me was this was before I raised my prices, and I wish I raised it on this one. So she completed the sale and that’s a win. But she sees the money she left on the table. So that’s what starts happening when you raise your prices and you own them. And this is what happens when you don’t raise your prices. You quietly under earn on every piece you sell. Until one day you look back at your best sales and realize, oh yeah, that could have been a lot higher. That’s what my $200 portraits were. But I didn’t know it yet. Okay, I want to hear from you. I know in the comment section, there’s a few people who’ve told me just listening to this YouTube channel, you’ve raised your prices and you’ve made more money. And if that’s you and you haven’t, let me know yet, share it in the comments. Or if you’re inspired to raise your prices now, share that with me too. So let me bring this all the way back around. I priced my first portrait at $200 because a stranger on the internet charged 300, and I thought mine should be less. And I chased a woman down a hallway and I offered to undercut another artist.
Miriam Schulman: And she was not impressed because she does not reassure anybody. It worries them. I watch clients forget commissions and trade paintings for golf clubs, and I blame the clients when the truth is, I priced my work into a category that was easy to walk away from. And none of that changed because I finally believed in myself. It changed because I got busy. I got bored. I decided I wasn’t lifting a brush for less than $1,000. Now stop trying to figure out what you’re worth. You’re priceless. That question is a dead end, and it’s been keeping you cheap. Figure out what you’re willing to do the artwork for, and make sure everything around that art backs that number up and then charge it. If the number scares you a little good, that’s usually the first honest price you’ve ever set. And if you want help setting that number, Not the general answer, but the right one for your work, your market and collectors. That’s one of the things we can do together in Chelsea. Two days in person. Love to see you there. SchulmanArt.com/Chelsea. You’ll be with a small group of artists who are serious about selling their art and done guessing. Now you don’t have to be famous. You definitely don’t have to be cheap. Okay my friend, I’ll see you at the same time. Same place next week. Until then, stay inspired. Bye for now.
Speaker 2: Thank you for listening to the Inspiration Place podcast. Connect with us on facebook at facebook.com/SchulmanArt, on Instagram @SchulmanArt and of course on SchulmanArt.Com.
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