There’s a term I’ve borrowed from the IT industry: yak shaving, and this blog entry is a big hairy yak that I’m going to shave for a few minutes.
See, it’s time for me to order more inventory. I’m finally starting to come to grips with the fact that while I may spend my days living like an artist, I actually earn my money by being a retail shop, and part of accepting that reality means worrying about things like overhead, profit/cost margins, and the popularity of my products. Gah, I hate that term: products.
When I first started, I sold nothing but 8×10s of my images, and didn’t even bother to keep track of which individual images were selling. Then, I started caravan’ing with other artists to these shows, other people who make their living doing nothing but art sales, and I began to realize that if I wanted to be serious about this, I would have to treat it seriously. I expanded my “product line” to include Original Size Limited Editions, 20×30s, 13×19s, 11×17 poster prints, as well as my old 8×10s. I took those options directly from my good friend (and erstwhile business mentor), Nigel Sade.
Nigel is an oil painter, and this creates some pretty major differences between the value of our originals. His original work are paintings on various types of hard panels, some large enough to require easels, others small enough to fit in his satchel while he goes on his frequent walkabouts. The reproduction process he uses is inherently an analog-to-digital conversion (his originals, after all, are analog).
By contrast, my images convert to digital sometime before the finishing process. They may start as digital images, or they may start as analog film which gets converted to digital in order to be processed. It’s sort of obvious, really, that they get turned into digital images before they are done — my medium of choice is digital, these days. Oh, I still love making Black and Whites (though I prefer using the French term for such analog darkroom work: Argentine Prints, after the silver halides) but they’re expensive to produce and the audiences I sell to won’t buy them for the prices I need to charge, because they think of photographs as inherently reproducible.
But this really only makes a difference to those unicorns of the Artistic Forest, the Collectors. For the main body of my income, I depend on selling the reproductions, not the originals. And since this is, after all, a retail shop, and the size of my shop is dictated by my vehicle’s carrying capacity, my income is dependent on making wise inventory choices. Simply put, if I don’t have a 20×30 version of an image, I’m never going to sell one for a hundred bucks. But which 20×30s should I bring? Which should I hang up?
I recently calculated the total sales numbers of each image, regardless of print size, to try to get an idea of which images I should show in the larger sizes. There are a huge number of flaws with this theory, and my artist side screams bloody murder at the thought, but I’m trying to be all business like here.
Number 1
Number 2
Now, right here I have a major problem. I’ve been selling copies of Geminatrix since 2007 or earlier. Raver Lady has been on the market for something under a year, I want to say. (I don’t actually know because my records look like an artist’s records). On the other hand, I knew exponentially more about *selling* when I first produced Raver Lady. As a result, Raver Lady has actually earned me more income, because I sold it in a greater variety of (more expensive) sizes.
Regardless, I’ve got both of those in stock, and so I shouldn’t shave that part of the yak before ordering stuff.
Number 3
Number 4
My 3rd and 4th most successful pieces both have, to my mind, obvious target audiences. But since I knew instinctively what demographic they would have appealed to, I feel like they should have outsold the other two. There is some kind of Inherent Awesomeness Vs Inherent Audience math at work here, but there are too many complicating factors for me to figure it out. What’s more, Bread Winners was only ever popular at its first show. Ever since then, it’s sales figures have been below average.
Also, while I’m counting things out, I’ll note that my entire night photography collection taken as a single item lot, ranks below these in sales. Now, is that because I haven’t stocked them in a variety of sizes, or displayed them properly, or is it because they’re so different than the rest of my work? Either way, they take far longer for me to finish (perhaps because of my unfamiliarity with the subject matter) than the rest, and cost more to produce initially. Because of these various factors, I’ve been subconsciously phasing them out. Should I add them back in, and do it properly, to see how they’ll work?
As a convention vendor, who spends a scant 4-8 days a month with an open store, these are dangerous questions to flirt with.
These images are count as “clear winners” in my fine art sales portfolio. But what about images like this one?
When I finished Depths of Desire and showed it to my friends and colleagues, we all thought it was going to be clear seller. Yet total sales of that piece, both in quantities and profits, has put it among the lower half of my images, even after taking the relatively few number of shows it’s been to into consideration. Did I misjudge the quality of the image? Or merely its sales potential?
This is where being an artist gets tricksy. The last thing that I want to do is produce images simply because they’ll sell, but I have to balance that with the need to be shrewd about the business aspect of my self-employment. Finding that balance is usually painful, often terrifying, and a regular part of my career.
Originally published at Amul Kumar Photography. Please leave any comments there. |
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