It’s early September, and I always find this the proper new year. Not January. January is dark and everyone is tired and nobody really means it. September is the one where something shifts. The light changes, the mornings have an edge to them, and there’s a feeling of everybody going back to their desks at once and deciding how things are going to be from here.
And something else happens quietly at this time of year, in kitchens and studios and at tables covered in fabric samples. People are working out their prices. Nobody announces it. It’s just that autumn arrives, enquiries start coming in for next spring, and somewhere in the middle of a Tuesday you find yourself looking at the back of an envelope thinking, right, so what am I charging for this now.
I’ve done this more times than I can count. And I want to write about what actually happens in that moment, because I think it’s one of the most quietly important moments in a creative business, and hardly anybody talks about it honestly.
The moment at the kitchen table
You’ve finished something. The bowl is out of the kiln and it’s the good one. Or the bouquet is in the bucket by the door and you keep going back to look at it. Or the shoot is done and the images are on the screen. Or the room is finished and the client has just walked in and made that small sound people make.
And then, later, on your own, you sit down and try to work out what that thing should cost.
Notice what you’re doing there. You’re looking at the thing. And you might find yourself doing the sums in a very particular way. Materials, plus hours, plus a bit on top. Perhaps you have a look at what two or three other people seem to be charging. Perhaps you land on a number that makes you slightly uncomfortable, and then you take it down a bit, and then it doesn’t make you uncomfortable any more, and you decide that must mean it’s right.
You know what I mean? That specific little wobble.
I don’t think the problem in that moment is confidence, and I don’t think it’s arithmetic. I think it’s much simpler than either, and much more fixable.
I think you’re looking at one thing, and pricing four.
Four layers, not one
Over the years, first in my own business and then alongside a great many other creative business owners, I’ve come to see that there are four distinct layers in what a client pays for. They’re quite separate things, doing separate work, carrying separate value. But from inside your own business they collapse into one another until they look like a single item with a single price.
Layer one is the visible deliverable. The thing itself, the thing they can see and touch and photograph. The bowl. The bouquet. The images. The finished room. The set of six tumblers. This is the layer that has a physical presence in the world, and it’s the one everybody thinks of first, including you, because it’s the only one you can point at.
Layer two is the immediate expertise. The direct skill that made the thing. The throwing, the wiring, the sewing, the way you hold a camera, the technical ability to draw a plan a builder can actually work from. This is the craft. It’s the part you trained in, and it’s the part you can just about believe has value, because you remember learning it. You remember it being hard. So you’ll grant it something.
Most people I speak to are pricing layer one, and if they’re feeling brave, a bit of layer two.
Layer three is the accumulated and natural knowledge. Everything the years have built in you. Pattern recognition. Judgement. Taste. The eye. Knowing at a glance that the scale is wrong. Knowing which client will change her mind in week three and quietly building room for that into the plan without mentioning it to anybody.
And layer three includes something people almost never count, which is everything you brought with you from before this business. The years in another career. The organising, the negotiating, the writing, the teaching, the years of looking after small children, which is where a startling number of the very best project managers were made. All of it came in with you. And because it didn’t arrive with a certificate, you’ve quietly decided it doesn’t count.
Layer four is the invisible foundations. Everything that happens before the work is even touched. The listening. The first conversation where somebody tells you, in a slightly muddled way, what they think they want, and you’re already hearing what they actually want underneath it. The interpreting. The problem solving, which is often problems the client never even learns existed. The coordination, the suppliers, the trades, the timings, the person who was meant to arrive at eight and arrives at eleven. The reassurance. Being the calm one.
Layer four is very often the actual product. It just doesn’t look like one.
So there they are, the four. And this is the sentence I’d love you to take away.
Most creatives are trying to price all four layers using only the first one.
Why two of them are invisible
There’s a good reason for that, and it isn’t a failing on your part.
The layers where most of your value lives are invisible from the inside, precisely because they cost you no visible effort.
That’s the whole thing, really. When you’ve done something for eleven years it stops feeling like doing something. It just feels like being you on a Tuesday. And we have this deeply unhelpful instinct, all of us, that value should be proportional to strain. That if it was hard it’s worth something, and if it flowed it can’t have been.
So the two hours wrestling with the technical part of the job feel valuable, and the four minutes at the start of the meeting where you asked the one question that redirected the entire project feel like nothing at all. They feel like chat. They don’t even go on the invoice, because in your mind they weren’t work.
What feels effortless feels like nothing. And so it gets left out.
There’s nobody standing outside your business making this mistake, by the way. Your clients aren’t confused about it. They know exactly why they chose you, and it very often isn’t the reason you think. They just don’t have your language for it, so they say things like, oh, you were so easy to work with, and you say thank you, and neither of you realises they’ve just told you where all the money is.
Somebody doing this entirely in public, and doing it beautifully, is Florian Gadsby, the ceramicist. His bowls sell at £150 and upwards and his collections go within minutes. And for over a decade he’s shared his process almost daily, including the long videos where you watch every stage, and including the pieces that crack. You learn, watching him, that it’s roughly seven weeks from clay to finished piece. So by the time a bowl goes on sale, nobody is looking at just a bowl. It isn’t possible to. All four layers are visible, and the price needs no paragraph of justification, because the value arrived before the number did.
What the flowers were actually for
I learnt all of this slowly, and rather late.
When I started I did bud vase rounds. Small arrangements, delivered weekly, to rural pubs. And for a long time I thought I was selling flowers. Obviously I was selling flowers. There they were, in the vases, on the tables.
But I can see quite clearly now what those pubs were actually buying, and it wasn’t only the flowers. They were buying the fact that it arrived. Every week. On time. Without them having to think about it once, or chase it, or wonder. And they were buying the fact that when they asked for something, anything, a change, a different colour, could you do the other room too, it was handled calmly. No fuss, no sense that they’d been a nuisance.
That’s layer four. In my very first, smallest bit of work, most of the value was already sitting in layer four, and I had no idea. I thought I was a person who did flowers nicely.
And it stayed true as everything grew, right through to the largest and most complicated work. What people were paying for was the eye, which I’d had all my life and therefore assumed was ordinary. The interpreting, hearing what somebody was reaching for before they had words for it, and often being able to say it back so they could recognise it. Being calm when a great deal was happening at once. The supplier relationships built over years, which meant I could get things other people couldn’t, on the day they were needed. The judgement about scale, and colour, and timing.
The flowers were the deliverable. They were always the deliverable. They were never the whole of what was bought.
I underpriced my work for years, and it wasn’t because I was frightened, and it wasn’t because I didn’t know my numbers. It was because I couldn’t see three quarters of what I was selling.
Your clients have been paying for all four layers the whole time. That was never in question, and it isn’t something you have to earn or build or become. The only thing that’s been missing is that you couldn’t see it from where you were standing.
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