what's your worth?

Ahh... running a studio...

As a business owner, pricing decision is really important. As a right-brain-operated business owner (me), pricing is as confusing (and at times painful) as trying to solve rubik's cube. In the movie Spanglish, Téa Leoni's character said something to the effect that pricing too low shows how much you didn't value yourself or if it's too high then you just took advantage. Well, but really there's no winning in this situation, isn't it? Unless you can read mind and know exactly how much your customer/clients/buyer would like to pay.

And this is how I feel about pricing.

For products, the decision can be reached a little bit easier. Do the research, look into expenses, find a formula out there to calculate how much you are supposed to charge, and then  compare the pricing to the competitor. Even then, there will be people who will question your pricing just because they are comparing what you have to the same products with different factors (where its made, quantity, quality, etc etc). What about as a designer when your time and talent is the product? How do you determine? How do you justified the meticulous work that you do behind the scene?

Negotiating seems to work for me for now. And repeating "it's business not personal" seems to have keep me sane (for the time being). This is the only solution I have for now. I'll write more once I learnt more. I do, however, have found the solution for the rubik's cube. So may be ... may be ...  that one of those business for designer books can help me (... may be).

img source can be found here.


Happy Friday!