Pricing while learning and getting into a market

[junquecol]

No matter what the business, you can always lower your prices, but it is hard to raise them. Market value is described as what a willing buyer will pay to a willing seller. Once I almost lost an insurance claim job because I was less than half of the next two bidders. Made money "hand over fist" on that job.

 

[CarvedTones]

No matter what the business, you can always lower your prices, but it is hard to raise them.

I take it you are not in the oil business. :rolf:

With all due respect, raising prices drastically as you gain experience and a following is fairly common in luthery. And I do mean drastically; I think Gilchrist and Monteleone have gone up an order of magnitude at least. Had they tried to sell their first instruments for half of what they get now, they would probably still have them.

 

[Trent Mason]

Andy,

I've thought a lot about this and to me the solution is simple. You still have some time before you retire. You have a passion for building, playing and listening to instruments. Use this time to do research and experiment. Just go out to the shop and make some sawdust. If you end up with something that you're satisfied with, then cool. If not, then figure out how to improve it. You can always sell them on ebay. It seems that you are only seperated from your destiny by time and research. Once you get something really good, you can charge whatever you want.

Cheers, ccasion1

Trent

 

[CarvedTones]

The research path is pretty well trodden. I have a few books and the Internet resources are sparse, but a few are very good. If you have reasonable bandwidth, some time to kill and are interested in this sort of thing, check out this guy's site:
http://crab.rutgers.edu/~pbutler/instrum.html
I am going to use his plan and instructions to build the citole. That guy really needs a bandsaw! He uses a lot of hand power tools, so I don't think he is opposed to it, but I don't think he has a dedicated shop. Kind of makes you wonder about all this stuff we "need" to make things. I will be pretty pleased if I build as well as he does.

 

[jerrye]

Andy,

Just tossing in MTCW. A friend used to hang wallpaper for extra income (yeah, I know, much different-but principle the same). He was having a hard time cracking the "fancy" neighborhoods in town. A friend of his in the business full-time told him "Your price per roll to hang it is too low. Charge almost half as much more again." He didn't have the gumption to do that initially, so he went about 25% higher. The first job he quoted after that he got, but with this reservation from the homeowner. She said "Your price sounds low, but your references say you do good work, so I'll take a chance on you."

You can raise prices later, but it will probably involve selling to a different market and re-marketing yourself. As you stated, luthiers regularly raise pricing as work improves, so you can too!

HTH

Jerry