:: floored ::

the name your price orders are starting to come in. four yesterday, i think. several more earlier in the week. it's going well so far and the emails i'm getting are awesome. like, seriously awesome.

but last night i got my first really discouraging order and i'm just not even sure how i'm going to do it. the price the customer named is more than $1600 less than the usual retail price.

even if i only account for the cost of supplies and not any of my time (and since this project includes custom illustrations plus things like folded cards and strung gift tags, the amount of time we're talking about is really significant), i'm staring down the barrel of maybe a $600 loss.

i do not have an extra $600.

and i knew this was a possibility but i just didn't believe it would happen.

or maybe i thought that some of the other orders would make up for it - you know, kind of "give a penny take a penny" style. but honestly the other orders are all break-even propositions. they're certainly not making up for this crazy loss.

i'm not totally sure how to approach this. i guess i thought that any really low-ball prices would be SMALLER low-ball prices. I thought maybe someone would offer $20 for $200 worth of stuff. I expected my own out-of-pocket to be less. but $600? for just one order, supplies only?

i'm a bit floored. disoriented.

it's going to take me awhile to really comprehend this one.