Making Buyers Happy

Making buyers of your giclee prints happy is all about communication. The other day a photographer stopped in to pickup a print. During his visit he mentioned how one of his very demanding clients had been testing his patience. Specifically for the print which he was picking up, it was the third attempt of a 16×20 portrait on canvas. He said first the client had waited forever in making a decision on the photo to be printed. And when it finally was turned into a print she noticed it had an error in the actual image which he had forgotten to remove. After making the correction and reprinting it, the customer decided she wanted a different photo from the photo shoot to be used. Because the new shot she had decided on was a little out of focus he suspected she would not be happy with that one either even after he had warned her of the potential problem. He had spent quite a bit of time correcting it the best he could, submitted it to be printed but as he was on his way to pick it up, she called him and said she was thinking about switching to a different image. His frustration with the client was obvious but fortunately this photographer is really good at putting on a good facade in front of his clients and he bends over backwards to satisfy them with the appearance of both grace and professionalism without a hint of his personal feelings being known. I knew that eventually this client would be a happy client as a result even if in the end the barely broke even as a result of the time and effort he had placed on this particular portrait session.

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How Much is Your Time Worth

One of the beauties of prints versus originals works of art is the simple fact it has the potential to pay dividends in the form of ongoing revenue that only stops when you decide it has to stop. If you sold a painting that took you 50 hours to complete and then turned around and sold it for for $1000, later prints have the potential to allow you to continue to resell the concept behind that original work over and over again. Let us assume that over the course of a few years you sold a hundred prints at $100 each, your total gross from that one painting would be $11,000. That is $220 per hour. Not bad! But in the real world it is not quite so simple. It may have taken you 50 hours to complete the painting but what about all the time devoted to placing those prints for sale, not to mention time it takes to fulfill or have the orders fulfilled.

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What’s in New November 2015

We have plowed into our busiest time of year at full speed. We have at least two things to announce which have come about quite suddenly. First, and most exciting to many of our customers is that we changed to a higher quality gloss canvas that many of our professionals who have used various high end color labs will likely be familiar with. Second we because we are getting much busier, we are extending our hours into the weekend both for production and customer service.

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