Somebody gets in touch, and somewhere in the message they mention, quite pleasantly, that they’re getting three quotes. There’s a particular drop in your stomach at that.
It’s the same drop that arrives the moment you start taking your own value seriously. You begin to see everything that sits inside your price beyond the finished thing itself, and then one thought turns up and takes the wind straight out of it. They’ll just compare my price with everybody else’s.
That thought isn’t silly. Comparison is real, people do it with everything, and nothing here is going to pretend that price doesn’t matter, because it does.
But comparison needs one thing in order to work at all, and it’s so obvious that nobody ever bothers to say it.
Where you feel it
For a service business, it’s the three quotes message. Or it’s the proposal you were really pleased with, that never got a reply, and later you found out they’d gone with somebody cheaper. So you assumed the price was the reason, and the next time you quoted, you came in a little lower. Not as a proper decision. You just did it.
For a product business, it’s the moment somebody has your piece open in one tab and, in another, something that to an untrained eye looks close enough, for a third of the price. Or the message that arrives asking why yours costs what it does.
And there’s a quieter version that catches almost everybody. It’s having a look at two or three other people in your field, making a private note of where you sit, and never quite letting yourself drift far from it.
That last one is the most expensive, because it settles in and stays.
What a comparison actually needs
You can only compare two things that can be read as alike.
That’s all a comparison is. Two things held up side by side, close enough to the same that the difference in price tells you something. Two identical bags of flour, different prices. Easy. You would be silly to pay more.
So take two bowls. One is £40 and yours is £150.
Now, you can see the difference between those two bowls in a second. The weight of it. The line of the rim. The way the glaze sits and breaks over an edge. That difference is real, and it’s substantial, and it’s right there in front of you.
But somebody buying their first proper piece of ceramics hasn’t learnt to look yet. They see two bowls, roughly the same size, roughly the same colour, and one costs nearly four times the other. They aren’t being foolish. They simply haven’t got the eye for it, and your eye took you years.
So the comparison isn’t wrong, exactly. It’s being made on the only information they have, which is the part of your work a photograph can carry.
And this is where it gets interesting, because when somebody can’t yet read the difference between two options, they don’t shrug and pick one. They still have to decide. So they reach for the only thing they can measure, which is the number.
Price becomes the decider by default. Not because they’re mean, or bargain-hunting, or don’t value creative work, but because nothing else in front of them is measurable and they need something to hold onto.
And price is doing a second job in their head. It’s standing in for risk. If they can’t tell what separates the two, the cheaper one is simply the smaller mistake. Not “I want the cheap one”, but “if this goes wrong, I’d rather it went wrong for £40 than £150”.
Which means that when somebody pushes on price, quite often what they’re really asking about is whether this will be all right. Whether they can trust it.
You can’t answer that with a discount. You can only answer it by letting them see what they’re getting.
I find that thought a real relief, because it means the problem was never your nerve. It’s information. They haven’t got enough of it yet, and that you can do something about.
Which also means the work isn’t defending your price. If somebody is comparing you on the finished thing alone, no amount of arguing changes what they’re looking at. They’re still seeing two bowls and only two bowls.
The work is much earlier. It’s letting everything underneath become visible before anybody reaches the number at all.
Because the more clearly somebody understands what they’re actually choosing you for, the less useful it becomes to compare your price with somebody else’s.
Less useful. Not impossible. People are still allowed to have budgets, and some will still go elsewhere, and that’s completely fine. Being specific doesn’t make you immune to price, and anybody who tells you otherwise is selling you something. What it does is stop comparison doing the work it was doing. It stops being a like-for-like sum and becomes a choice between two different things.
deVOL, in the open
There’s a British company doing this so plainly that I think about it often.
deVOL Kitchens make kitchens, handmade, in England, and they’re not cheap. And they do the thing most people at that end of the market refuse to do. They put the prices on the website.
This matters most if you sell a product, because deVOL are a product business. Nobody is on a call talking a customer round, or writing a considered proposal, or answering worries one at a time. All the work of making the value visible happens before anybody arrives.
They say it themselves, that they’re very transparent on pricing. An average Shaker kitchen is around £15,000, and they tell you plainly that’s cupboards only. An average Classic is around £35,000. And rather than leaving you to find out later, they name what isn’t included: worktops, appliances, delivery, installation. They even tell you what those add, which is somewhere between 35 and 40 per cent of the order.
No coyness. No prices on application. No little dance where you book a consultation to discover whether you can afford to be in the room. And no defensiveness either. No paragraph explaining why the kitchens cost what they cost, no apology tucked in beside the number.
Most creatives believe those two things can’t coexist. That you’re either transparent, which means affordable, or you’re at the top of your market, which means quiet about numbers. deVOL are both, comfortably.
And the reason it works is this. The transparency arrives second.
By the time you get near a price on that website, you’ve already been shown what the price is made of. The workshops. The people who make the things, with their hands in shot. How long a piece takes, how it’s put together, that it’s meant to last a lifetime rather than a decade. Everything underneath the number, long before the number.
So nobody compares a deVOL kitchen with a flat-pack quote. Not because deVOL argued them out of it. Because by the time you reach the number, you understand you’re choosing a particular way of doing something, and the other thing is a different thing.
The comparison hasn’t been won. It’s stopped being the relevant question.
What changed for me
In my own first creative business, I was rarely the cheapest florist anybody had spoken to. Rarely. And in the end that mattered far less than I had spent years fearing it would.
It took me a while to get there, mind. For a long time I went into every pricing conversation braced to be told I was too expensive, and whenever somebody went elsewhere I took it as proof and shaved a bit off the next quote.
What changed it was seeing what my work actually contained, and then letting clients see it too. And once that happened, people stopped weighing me against a cheaper quote, because it had become obvious the cheaper quote wasn’t for the same thing.
The conversations changed completely. Instead of being asked whether there was any movement on the price, I was being asked when we could start, and whether I’d take on the other thing as well. People were arriving already understanding what they were choosing, which is a lovely way to begin a project.
And the business grew from there, with the clients I’d always hoped for. Not because I found braver clients, and not because I got better at defending a number. I never got good at that, and I don’t think anybody does. It grew because the value was visible before anybody reached the price.
There’s one thing worth sitting with this week… work out what somebody would actually be comparing, if they put you next to somebody cheaper. Then write down the three things the cheaper option doesn’t include. Not quality, not experience, not attention to detail, because everybody says those and they mean nothing. The particular thing you do at the start that nobody else asks about. The supplier relationship you’ve spent eight years building. The judgement that means it works in the space, or the fit that’s right because you remade it four times. The fact that it arrives when you said it would, properly packed, with nobody having to chase you.
It isn’t a script, and it isn’t copy for the page either. Nobody wants a list of reasons their other option is worse.
It’s so that you know them. Because when a creative can name her three things, something changes in how she talks about her work without her planning it. It comes out in the first conversation, in how she writes about what she does, in what she chooses to show.
Comparison needs two things that can be read as alike. And the clearer somebody is about what they’re really choosing you for, the less alike those two things turn out to be.
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