:: 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.

:: administrative notes ::

i forgot to tell you: my new shop comes with its own new blog, so i've decided to try splitting things up a bit more than i do now. stuff about me me me and my life and what i think and feel about being a business owner will go here. stuff about new products, items, etc. will go there.

i've added a little link-list to the left sidebar of thishereblog so you can see what's new over at thatthereblog.

:: experiments in radness and contrariety ::

i've worked up post after post trying to get at what's going on with me lately, and by me i mean me-business-me, not plain-old-regular-me.

up up creative things just aren't going well this summer. something hasn't been feeling right. things aren't clicking into place. sales are (way) down. i've been doing quite well lately me-personally, spontaneously dancing like i used to in the days before the post-partum depression left me not-quite-me.  but business-me has been all soul-searchy and angst-y and overall just kind of yucky.

there's a lot to it but mostly i think it's that i don't feel good about the changes i made to my business in the name of attending the national stationery show in may. i had to restructure a lot of things, change my pricing, adopt a different perspective. but more than that i think i had to do a lot of mold-fitting as in "fitting into the stationery industry mold" and i was faced with a lot of not-quite-fitting-the mold and it has left me a bit woozy.

which is weird because i usually totally love not-quite-fitting-the-mold.

i'm the girl who when told the sky is blue likes to say, "well, but let's think about it. in a way isn't the sky really just no color but then when light rays bounce off of" yadda yadda yadda. i'm the girl who likes to complicate things. who likes to do things differently.

i'm the girl who didn't want to plan her wedding until she realized it could be whatever she (and her fiance) wanted it to be.

i'm the girl who works at home AND stays home with the kids AND has the kids in daycare. i'm the have-it-all-and-have-it-my-way girl.

i like being that way. i like being a bit contrary. a bit different, but so relatably so.

going to nss made me start to focus so much on what my peers were up to. to focus on "how things are done" and whatnot. and it has left me with a bad taste in my mouth. and all summer without entirely realizing it, i've been unsure what to do about it.

until finally i decided. the best way to get the bad taste out of my mouth is to do something awesome. to do something totally me. totally simple in a way that aims at complicating things. to do something completely unlike anything i've ever seen. to take off my business-owner hat and put on my taking-on-the-world hat.

i'm not totally ready yet to reveal what i'm going to do, even though my experiment will be debuting at the very-near end of this month. but i'm ready to tell you that it's going to be scary and hopefully really really awesome. and maybequitepossibly a total flop. and also i'd love it if you think you might like to help spread the word and otherwise make this experiment completely rad.

are you in? if so, leave me a comment and i'll be in touch via email.

:: going through the (e)motions ::

i don't remember now where i first heard about the idea of resentment-free pricing. i want to say it was actually on a photography blog i stumbled across in a way roundabout enough for me not to even bother explaining, even though you know as well as i do that i like a good ramble.

i know kelly diels also writes about it, this idea.

the idea is that your fee (be it the price you charge for a physical product or the fee you charge for a service provided) should be enough that you won't end up resenting the customer, the project, or any bumps along the way.

when i used to charge less for my custom design work, for example, i'd stress over the projects and put off working on them and i'd get so darned frustrated with my clients who were only asking for what i'd be asking for: the best possible outcome.

but over the years i've learned that it's not the custom design work i hated, it's the ridiculously inadequate amount i was being paid to do the custom design work. the ridiculously inadequate amount i was asking for, mind you. as in, huh, it was my own damned fault.

now i set my fees so that i won't resent the work. or the customer. and while that may price me outside some people's budget, at least the one thing i can promise the clients who do hire me is that i'm going to love working with them and i'm going to do what it takes to ensure that they love working with me.

but there arises a problem, from time to time. what happens, for example, when the price it takes for me to not resent the order is more than the price the market will bear? in a way this is what i was dealing with a few weeks (months??) back when i wrote about my wholesale wedding book (although there was another piece to this, too, which had to do with my conflict about who i really want my end customer to be).

and what happens when you realize that you'd have to charge a pretty ridiculous amount in order not to resent a product? an amount not borne out by hourly wages or cost of goods sold.

your choice is to charge less or to stop offering the item/service/product. in other words, your choice is to start resenting that item, or let it go.

i have a few things i'm feeling that way about right now. things that i'm resenting for no good reason other than i just don't love doing them. things i'm resenting because they take my time away from things i do love doing.

but the letting go is hard. and sometimes complicated. and certainly emotional.