Posted 1/24/2025
This is the adage of anyone @ any other creative in the field of making art/work/content for pay. you need to raise your prices, you can't survive on that wage so why are you charging it, people will pay your higher prices, don't be discouraged.
i'm prefacing all of this with a vehement i do not disagree that the price of art should be higher and that artists producing a craft deserve to have a living wage, whether off of their craft or not. what i'm talking about is my own personal thoughts on the matter and i don't want any of this taken as some kind of blanket statement that should be applied to other creatives that aren't me.
i know my commission prices are low. i know i sell my things for very low prices. its not because i don't value my work or my time or my skill. i have in fact raised my prices since i started at this, but they haven't risen at the same rate as inflation, cost of materials, and cost of living.
there is and always has been, at least to me, the issue of accessibility in art. it costs money to enter a lot of museums where a lot of the "master works" are held. it costs money to purchase art, and if money is tight/living paycheck to paycheck, it becomes a lot harder to justify the purchase of art when you don't really have the money to spend on it. i support piracy in this way, being able to enjoy content and art without having to pay for it up front, and if you can later then go support the artists that you've enjoyed. people actually do this, i've actually done this.
people can't pirate art from me. all the commission work i do is a physical product. you can't pick up a plushie and then say "i'll pay you later when i've gotten my enjoyment time out of it" that's not how it works. time and money are a currency that people use to determine value, and that doesn't work as well for a physical object that you have to hold.
when i started, i made plushies out of felt. the 25 cent (now i guess up to like 65 cent) sheets of recycled plastic made into a colored fabric. the cost of my materials was dirt cheap, anything i made on commissions was technically a profit.
now, i make plushies primarily out of fleece. its also cheap (at least compared to other potential materials at $5-10 a yd) but stands up a lot better to wear over time and looks a lot better when it doesn't pill horribly after sitting in your bed for just a year. fleece is a lot kinder to work with than felt, though small parts of plushies are often made of felt due to its rigidity.
my materials have gotten more expensive, my skills as a plushie maker have gotten better, and i have a slowly growing audience that support my work frequently.
and i keep my prices low.
i bring up this story a lot when i talk about why i got into plushie making in the first place. i was really into neopets as a kid and there was a store at the mall that sold neopets plushies. they were over $20 and that was too expensive to get to spend on a relatively small toy.
i wanted toys and plushies that were of things i enjoyed and liked, like neopets and pokemon, but all the "official" merch was so expensive or the things i liked were too niche for companies to want to make stuff for. so i started sewing my own plushies of stuff i liked. and they were rough and bad but they were mine and i liked them. (this included a jirachi plushie that was made entirely out of old socks and colored on with markers. later i discovered fabric came in specific colors.)
i did eventually get the neopets plushie, but it took finding every coin i could in the house and having a 5 pound fanny pack of quarters and other coins that equaled the price of the plushie for my mom to give in and get me it. (sadly i don't have it anymore as it eventually got donated alongside a bunch of other stuffed animals me and my sister had)
my entire reason for making plushies is because i couldn't get the ones i wanted, either out of availability or price. i make a lot of the stuff i make now because of the same thing.
i don't think that art should be a luxury thing, and here i am positioned as an artist that people enjoy the work of, i don't want to price them out of being able to afford me. yes, there are people able and willing to pay me a lot more for the stuff i make, but i know how rough it is out here for a lot of us right now. i think people deserve a plushie of their original character or blorbo or whatever. i can offer that service to those that want it.
and i have the benefit right now of not having to live off of my plushie work either. i have a salary lol. i might not have a job by this time next year (im technically a temporary employee), but until then i don't have to worry about my art being the only income i have. i have disabilities that make it hard to work in certain fields and environments and im really thankful for my current position to be as stable and good to me as it has been so far.
there is that economics "problem" or maybe equation that people that make money doing anything have to weigh. either you keep your prices low and sell a lot, or you have very high prices and sell few. because of the nature of commission work and at the rate at which i produce any of my other sewing work, its hard for me to define myself by this framework. i have had several times where i have dry spells of people requesting work from me and then within the same week 2-3 people all request a commission at the same time all independently of each other. it's happened enough times for me to notice it and its weird.
so, i will be raising my prices, because i "should" and because apparently joanns is gonna go out of business if they can't find a seller and i get a shit ton of cheap material from them all the time. the prices of my materials will go up from having to find new fabric sources. but its fine. i'll be fine.
i just want to keep offering my art to as many people as i can and not having them be blocked from doing so because of the price tag. that's really the whole of it. people deserve to have good and custom art in their lives.