:: introducing: my insanity plea ::
in my head i've been calling it "up up yours" and then just recently i started thinking of it as my (wedding) industrial revolution. whatever you want to call it, i'm finally ready to announce my crazy idea.
in september, i'm going to be letting my customers name their price for wedding invitations.
like, real actual in-your-hand invitations. with envelopes. on cotton paper.
it's a major (and majorly scary) experiment. it's my way of reaching out to real customers to start a dialog about value: the value of handmade, the value of good design, the value of working with someone who gets you and who wants to make sure you're happy. the value of having what you want.
i've done a lot of research about the whole "name your price" model and i've discovered only one instance of someone implementing this pricing model with tangible goods: a guy in kettering, ohio, who bought a cafe during a failing economy and made an attempt to thrive by removing all prices from his cafe menu and having his customers choose how much to pay for their coffees and croissants and such.
he got tons of press and buzz, but i've discovered that his cafe has since closed.
which isn't all that encouraging.
but despite everything, i still just want to try it. i want to see what happens. i want to see what kind of response i get and what kind of things i learn and what kind of dialog ensues. i'm not interested in doing it for the buzz (or, maybe, not only interested in it for that reason) but rather for the potential to reach out to an audience that i know is out there but that isn't looking for me: an audience of people who aren't sitting around just planning their weddings all day and scouring the internet for some up-and-coming-but-still-relatively-obscure-girl-from-rochester. people who care about supporting an indie economy.
i'm so not looking to reach out to people who want to get something awesome for free (and in fact i'll be asking very kindly that people not ask me to do this for free, although i won't be able to control that), but if some of those people find me i'll be interested in learning from those customers, as well.
i'm ridiculously excited about this even though it has the potential to be so very awful in so many different ways. i just can't help thinking that's it's going to be so awesome in really interesting and possibly even unexpected ways.
i hope you'll help me spread the word and all. the experiment starts on september 1st, officially, but i'll be getting things rolling a bit early for those in the know. you can get in the know here on the blog or by subscribing to the update list here.
