Product Development
It seems obvious at first: a photographer who wants to earn money from his craft needs to sell his photos. Well duh.
When I first started selling my stuff, it was at art shows, and I thought there was pretty much only one option: fine art prints. I didn’t even think about other possible formats. No, no, I just printed out a bunch of photos, matted them, mounted them on foam-core boards, and popped them into plastic bags. I framed a couple more for good measure and that was it.
I actually did pretty good at my first show, but looking back on it, I think that was mostly due to the fact that the show was in a swanky neighborhood in LA. Since then I’ve done a number of shows in leaner markets where I’ve had days where I sell diddly-squat. That’s really disappointing, but with a bit of analysis, it can actually be a very illuminating experience as well. It can help you refine everything about the way you sell, from how you talk to people, how you set up your booth, and even what you sell, which is the subject of this particular post.
Here are a few of the lessons I’ve learned about what to sell:
- Have a wide price range of products available. When I first started out, I didn’t have anything cheaper than $45. Then I did a few weekends out at Venice Beach in LA, where there are 10,000 tourists a day, but they’re all looking for $3 kitschy crap. My first weekend out, it was obvious that people didn’t want to buy expensive art, so I printed out a bunch of smaller photos and slid them into bags without any matting or mounting and started selling them for 10 bucks. The next weekend these went like hotcakes and at the high point of the day I was selling about 8 an hour. I’m sure I would have made a killing, but for the annoying tongue whistler dude next to me driving all my customers away. God I hate that guy . . .
- Make your products as easy to buy as possible; don’t make your customers expend any more effort than they absolutely have to to have a finished product. My first prints were 8×12’s and 12×18’s, both of which I matted with a custom-sized 2″ mat with a 1/4″ black inner mat. They sure looked great, but unless you got a custom frame for the custom-sized mats, they were impossible to frame! D’oh! Same story with those unmatted prints I sold for $10 at Venice Beach. I printed them out at 6×9 inches to preserve the aspect ratio, but for the purposes of framing, I might as well have printed them at 4.73×294.3 inches. No one could get this stuff easily framed and put up on the wall, so it wasn’t worth the effort for them to buy a print, even if they really really liked it.
Since then I’ve learned my lesson and have since moved all my fine art prints to standard sizes which use standard size mats. It’s kind of a pain to have to resize my prints and crop them, but ultimately it’s a change for the better for a couple of reasons: 1) It saves me a ton of money since I no longer have to buy custom-cut mats or custom-sized frames. 2) It also saves my customers time and money because since all of the photos and mats fit standard size frames, the customers can go down to any frame store (or Wal-Mart for that matter) and pick up a cheap frame to fit their photo perfectly.
- Sometimes it helps to have a gimmick. As much as it pains me to admit it, a mediocre photo can be a best-seller if there’s something cute about the way it’s presented. It reminds me of a little corporate nugget of wisdom I heard as an engineer awhile back: A bad design with a good presentation is doomed eventually; a good design with a bad presentation is doomed immediately. And that is certainly applicable to the sales world as well, as I learned at a recent art show:
I was having slow sales all weekend, which was made even more frustrating by the fact that I kept noticing people walking by with photos from another photographer, who (all false modesty aside) had inferior quality photographs. However, this photographer had a great gimmick that was working in her favor: she took three rapid-fire, not-great-but-still-cute photos of things like sea otters, or grizzly bears, or coyotes, and arranged them together in one frame in sequence. And people really ate it up.
So the point is that sometimes you need a neat little gimmick like this to catch people’s attention. A novel presentation of your images goes a long way towards making yourself stand out from the crowd and be memorable.
For myself, at my next show I plan to offer a similar triple-photo type of thing, as well as gallery-wrapped canvas prints, and a very cool new photo-finishing option called a fotoflōt. I’ll keep this site updated with my findings and how the new novel presentations treat me.
- In tough times, try to make your products have some use other than just decoration. Over the past few months of our economic downturn, I’ve had people tell me that they’ve lost 40% of the value of their 401k and aren’t buying anything, and then go on and buy a hand-made stone bowl or jar of garlic dip. So it turns out that people are still buying things, it’s just that they’re things they feel are useful, and not things they feel are frivolous. And art is slightly frivolous: after all, the purpose that most people see in it is just to hang on a wall and look pretty.
- The good news is that it’s possible to sell your art in a way that is pretty and useful. At the last show I did, I had another photographer tell me that he typically earns back his entire show entry fee just by selling greeting cards with his photos on them. Any prints he sells above that are just profit. Genius! People always need cards, and I think that extra usefulness helps people break that buying barrier.
Again, this is an idea I have to try out for myself before I can say that it’s a sure-fire tactic for making money, but providing your customer with some utility in addition to your beautiful prints will really push them closer to making a purchase.
Ideas I have to try out along these lines are: greeting cards, calendars, and possibly photo coasters. Will post more once I know how well these ideas work.
Dang, that’s about all I can think of right now. The bottom line here is that it pays off to give a lot of thought into how you are selling your photos. Put yourself in your customers’ shoes and ask yourself if your products are novel, run a wide gamut of prices, and have a great presentation, because these things will really help you start to earn the bucks.
