In week 4, we looked at pricing ourselves as designers. Some of the key points that I took from this include that we shouldn’t undervalue our work. Often as designers we think our work is not as good as it is and we under price it, this itself leads to issues of looking cheap/not quality and can reduce sales. As a young designer this issue is heightened as we are inexperienced we often undervalue ourselves further, we need to remember that our ideas are still worth a lot and need to be valued as such.
Also when valuing our work, we need to remember that the more experienced a designer you become the more you can charge. The hour we charge for will not be the same quality as someone like Paddy Donnelly, so we need to price ourselves accordingly. While doing this remembering to price per project, not per hour. Charging per hour can limit us a lot if we state we charge £10 an hour, if we charge per project there is a lot more flexibility and this means we can increase or decrease the price according to what we see fit.
When pricing we need to remember 3 things, the scope of the project, the clients budget and our time. The scope is what needs done within the project or what features need designed, this is a major factor in pricing as instantly it will give an idea of what price you would consider. Next we have the budget, we need to establish where the clients value this project at, for example is it a £5,000 project, a £10,000 project or a £15,000 project - sometimes it is necessary to just ask these questions to your client from the start, this will decide how much time and effort you put into it. The budget will also show how u can price the final product to the client and then finally time, however long it takes you will ultimately play a factor within the pricing process.
When clients feel like they are getting a deal they are more likely to purchase a product, sometimes this can be in the format of a bundle or how Nathan Barry offers two versions of his product, a standard and a deluxe version, this makes people think they are getting a lot more for not much more money.