Why do people charge so much?

Well, i guess the first thing that pop in my head is how long it takes to get materials and complete the outfit. Second would be how fast one cuts and sew the outfit.
So I am lucky enough to have shops near me and have all the machines i need. I can't draft patterns either so i only have to do is sew and handsew little snaps or buttons.
So think of if you have to drive and spend time picking materials out and then time drafting, it can takes hours. People charge what they spent and how much time they put into one.
People clothing are easier to make as meat and skin can move a not like resin, the only thing is that it requires more materials and if you or company makes alot at a time, it is as cheap as dirt sometimes.
I got alot of people saying i sell my outfits cheap, but to me i think i priced them fair and good so i wouldn't change that.
x.

 

I'm interested to note that very few people are taking into account the time it takes to become accomplished at something. For example, why are doctors so expensive? Because it takes a long time and costs a lot of money for them to get their training.

I've been sewing for 6 years. That's a lot of time and effort and money invested into getting this far. So is my time worth more than someone who just started making tees a month ago?

Yes. It is.

 

well from business point of view:
If it's a doll company that has to deal with warehousing, wages, research, bonus, rish from on-line transaction, tax, insurance, resin mold, etc, probably it has a good reason to charge high price although cost of goods is not that high. They are doing business and has to make profit or make their investment worth.

If it is the artist, he/she has to do his job to make a living. Selling small quantities of dolls hmmmmmm he/she has to charge high price. dont you think

 

I'm sure what I'm going to say is just adding to what other have said but from my personal experience:

I make wings for dolls. I charge hundreds of dollars for them, some the same price or more than your average doll. I'm sure many people will look at my price tag and blow it off, thinking I either I think I'm something special or I'm charging it because I can.

No, that's not the case at all.

My materials can cost me hundreds of dollars per pair I make. I have to buy twice as many feathers as I use to get perfect sets and good matches. They come from often unreliable, very limited sources and are not something I can just order off a website prepackaged any time I want. My quality standards are stupid-high and my labor can span for weeks at a time. Most people aren't going to know this and that's fine. As Brennil mentioned, yeah, you are also paying for a skill that took a hell of a lot of trial, error and money to accomplish and I'm still learning and improving as I go.

One of my best friends in this hobby does aesthetics and clothing. Her clothing costs more than the average stuff you'll see because she puts in hours of labor focusing on all the tiny details. She uses quality materials that aren't cheap and never cuts corners. You pay for that. You also pay for the 50 times she has to wipe a face up to get it just right and the cans of MSC wasted in the process.

And that's just how two of us work. Some people hand dye their own fabrics, work metal, shape wood... it's really endless what people can put into their craft. Doing it on such a tiny scale just makes it ten times harder.

Time, labor and quality all get accounted for in the end price. For many of us, this isn't how we make our living, but it's using our free time. We want to be compensated appropriately. If people think that someone is charging too much for their end product, normally they won't have good or repeat business and will either lower their prices appropriately, or change the quality to match the price asked, [or simply stop producing the product all together].

 

I don't think this is a silly question, I wondered as much myself because I would never pay more for clothes for Gwenllian than I would for clothes for me (an exception would be for a full sweet Lolita outfit for her, I'm dying to find one because my sewing skills don't extend that far)...however, after spending two hours painstakingly making a hat for Gwenllian so her wig doesn't keep falling off, I appreciate the time and effort that goes into making something small and pretty as well as functional.

Gwenllian's hat was a bit of a rush job because I'd never made any kind of hat before, but it was fiddly and took up my time and if I were to seriously sell hats I probably would mark the price up from the time and skill it took to make it, rather than the materials because wool is fairly inexpensive for me.

I also think, from the opposite side of the fence, that something is only worth as much as the consumer is willing to pay. If you don't like the price of bread, go to a different shop. It's the same with BJD clothing. If you can't justify the price of a pair of jeans from one dress-maker, shop around. If everyone goes to the less expensive places, you force prices down so everyone can offer competitive prices.

A hobby shouldn't cripple anyone financially, it's important to strike a balance between seller and buyer so that the buyer isn't paying over the odds and the seller's skill and time isn't being ripped off.

 

I'd imagine that it's all to do with the small market, the fact that there aren't enough different places to buy these things for there to be much competition. Therefore prices can stay high.

Also, who doesn't want more money? In simple terms, if you make something and sell it for 5$ when people will pay 10$ for it, you'll take twice as long to get that new doll or whathaveyou

 

That's the thing about striking a balance, because you do get what you pay for and no one's skills should be sold short, but it is up to the buyer to set a boundary really. Sometimes sellers will be more likely to sell more items and make just as much money if they price their items a little lower. Of course for OOAK things, like Syrinxfox's wings, a high-price is expected, but for everyday items like dolly jeans or t-shirts I've nearly had a heart-attack from the prices.

A dress for $50 is going to look very different to a dress for $20, but I'd be more likely to go for the $20 one. It's not because I've got moths in my purse and I don't want my dolls to have nice things , it's because I just couldn't spend $50 on one piece of clothing in one go, (and until Gwenllian goes out and finds herself a job to support her growing wardrobe that's the way it's gonna stay!)

Sometimes it makes me ill to think about how much I've already spent on Gwenllian, am going to spend on Lleucu and have yet to spend on Enfys

 

I think, and I'm sure it's been mentioned in passing, is that each of these outfits (especially the ones made here) are made for that doll's size. Say one person has a U-Noa, and wants to commission a beautiful dress. That dress will fit the U-Noa body. Just the U-Noa body. It will probably be tight or loose on another body. Having to take into account that between companies, mold changes in body sizes, will also jump the price, in my opinion.

I plan on buying a skirt for my Beryl. Now, I'd love to find pants for her, but I know if I were to ask somebody for it, they'd have to take into account that she's got digigrade legs, and will have to alter the pants accordingly. I'm paying for that willingness to alter what they have to fit my doll perfectly. To me, that's worth a lot more than me just going to a store and buying something that can fit SD13 girls. You're fitting your doll, not just the doll's size.

 

It's the price of having something handmade.

You can't compare a seamstresses custom sewing to walmart or whatever mass retailers. Mass retail clothing is often made very cheap in less fortunate countries, where the patterns and all the specialty work is done before hand and it's simple mass production. You just can't compare specialty professional work to mass retail.

I'm a seamtress, more specifically, a costumer. I went to school to learn what I do, I make for people, as well for dolls. My prices will always be higher than general retail. When you have something custom done, it can have a design that you won't find in stores, as someone previously noted, there is no dolly wal-mart. Even if there was though, while it may bring the value done of some everyday clothing such as simple tshirts and pants, specialty designs would still be just as expensive.

If you compare the amout you pay for a custom made doll oufit, which often is fit specifically to a certain size doll, and then compare the price of that outfit if it were made to a person, considering you use the same seamstress, I guarantee the human sized outfit will cost a lot more. The difference is where mass production comes into play, and if there is no mass production there will be no 'cheap' alternative.

Trade work is very frustrating, and while I considering designing to be an art, and I consider myself an artist above all; Sewing and being a seamstress is still trade work. It's often undervalued and underappreciated because people don't understand the amount of work that goes into something.

Things to consider when you look at prices would be the prices of materials, the difficulty of the job, the amount of time that goes into the job, and all things that need to be done. When you have a pattern it cuts down on time, but some people, like myself, draft their patterns from scratch. If you're having something made to fit a certain mold or size specifically, you have to draft to that size. There are some people who have put their patterns online and such, and you can try those yourself if you like, but without further knowledge on knowing how a pattern is drafted and made, altering and adapting it is usually impossible. This is all knowledge that shouldn't be overlooked in payment, just because most people overlook the step because they themselves do not sew.

Just throwing my two cents in, this is a constant question for me; both in doll clothes as well as human pieces.

Have a nice day!

 

I like all the opinions here and they all make sense. I do a lot of my own work and I have to say sometimes after all the effort, I KNOW why people charge what they charge! Yes, the clothes seem high at times and are more expensive than ours, but they are smaller and more time consuming, more precision I think.
Remember how every summer we all scoff at the prices of bikinis? Why does this tiny piece of material cost soooo much???

 

Well, I can imagine why people charge a lot for the clothes they sew or knit for BJDs. I'm trying that myself (especially knitting, don't really like sewing) and it does take you quite a while to finish even something as simple as a pair of boxer shorts.

The reason why I haven't bought any really expensive clothes for Luken, yet, is a very simple one: I simply haven't found anything, yet, that would have made me go "Ooooh, %THAT's it!!!" and dash for my credit card. Most of the time, I think along the lines of "Looks neat but it's not exactly right - I guess I'll have to try myself."

The only exception: shoes and boots. I might try making a pair of boots for Luken eventually but never EVER for the Neo-Guys. Their feet are just so small I know I'd go bonkers trying to make shoes for THEM! And I'm willing to pay quite a few dollars if that means I got shoes that fit and look great.

 

The bottom line is we're used to cheap prices for things because we're used to mass production. Not that many things are handmade anymore. And as everyone has said, you have to take into account the amount of time it takes for something handcrafted to be made.

 

After attempting to make a simplified kimono and destroying lots of fairly expensive fabric over the course of several hours, I no longer think they are expensive to buy... I'm about to try one more time (with cheaper fabric!) and then just give up and order one.

 

... of course it's funny that my doll's chair cost several times as much as my own dining chairs (it's much nicer though!) and that the outfits cost about as much as my nice professional work clothes. Too bad they don't sell bjd size at Old Navy (not that it would be my boy's style, but still...).

 

How I admire you who can sew well. It's something I tend to learn in the future but I know I won't consider my first efforts worthy of my dolls. I too have bjd's outfits which are better made than my clothing. As long as these tiny little clothes sell for highish prices the makers should charge them. Would we rather the government price fix this too ?

 

That's a good point. For each new doll body I have to draft new patterns, and it can take hours to draft and test a pattern depending on its complexity (I'm a perfectionist). Also keep in mind that you have to have access to many different kinds of doll bodies. If you can't borrow them you have to buy them. That adds up too.

 

okay, this is kind of an aside, but where on earth are you people shopping that you can find $50 to be an unsupportably high price for an item of clothing? obviously not in canada! if I found a dress for me for $50, I'd count that a bargain...not a big bargain, but good enough to go for, especially if it was nice (double especially if it was designed and hand sewn by some cottage industry designer). I can agree that the prices of doll clothes can sometimes seem pretty high, but...my mind boggles whenever I hear people say things like "$30 for a shirt? I would never spend that even on myself!" because I live in a world where even at Wal-Mart, lots of regular price clothing is around $25...and if you want to shop somewhere marginally nice, be prepared to haunt the sale racks or shell out $50+ for a blouse...!

 

I second? third? this statement.

There are some people in this forum whom you can commission for faceups and clothes and who ARE professionals in their field or in related fields, like Illustration or Animation or Fashion Design or Character Design.

These people have invested a lot of their time and energy into doing what they do, oftentimes investing money along with it to get the proper/formal education for it.

To commission these people for their time - people who are professionals in their field or in a related field - will cost more money as you're paying for their expertise and skill and the time they've invested into making what they're doing into something on a professional level. Additionally, these people more than likely already have a fulltime job of some sort (or had) and there's the issue of factoring in the whole 'how much is my time worth to make XYZ versus how much is my time worth to do ABC for my job/business'.

For example, Bill Gates' time and energy is apparently worth more than the effort taken to bend over and pick up a $100 bill on the ground.

Professionalism aside, other reasons one might end up paying more money for a commissioned good or service is the individuality/uniqueness the commissioned person might be able to provide.

For example, and please correct me if I'm wrong, customizers like Morbidollz have a very unique 'this is a faceup by me' style to their faceups and though she is not a 'professional' so to speak (if she is, correct me and I mean no offense if I made a mistake), her faceups have such a unique look to them that people are willing to pay for.

Pepstar is another example off the top of my head of someone who provides particularly unique faceups AND she is a professional/at a professional level, having done aesthetics like these for many years before moving to BJDs.

To me, the price points for both these artists (and other artists on this board!) match their skill and what they can provide and if I ever commissioned them, I wouldn't hesitate to pay that price.

I'll be honest here and state that as an(other) artist (of the visual designer sort), I sometimes feel discouraged and/or frustrated to hear discussions like this.

I certainly am not out to cheat people of their money and firmly believe that my pay rate should be what it is based on what I can provide and what experience and knowledge I have, but sometimes...

Before I started concentrating more on Illustration, I was a freelance visual designer who did web design (layout design and handcoding) and graphic design who had been in the business for over five years and had taken supplementary classes. In my personal opinion and in the opinion of the people who commissioned me, I stood out in my niche because of the clean yet unique way I designed and coded websites and I got paid for projects accordingly.

In the last year or so, I can't tell you how many emails and inquiries I have received and continue to receive asking if I can be hired for a project at a pay rate much much less than what I am normally being paid.

The reason?

'There are other visual designers out there who are only charging XYZ amount (some amount that's lower than my current pay rate.'

Okay, I'll bite.

Yes, it's true that you can commission another visual designer to potentially do the work for you at half my price, but here's everything ELSE you can get from me when you commission me:

1. I will code a site to be as functionally accessible to everyone as possible while being aesthetically pleasing to the eye. I can also tell you if a potential website design idea would or would not be a good idea in terms of accessibility. For business sites, [this] is especially important. I adhere to W3C standard coding because W3C means, in layman's terms, 'accessible for as many browsers and as many different versions of browsers as possible'. I researched it, learned, and keep up to date with the current trends and changes to the standards.

2. If/When I manage the content of your site, you can guarantee that it will be as free of grammatical and semantic errors as possible. I have a B.A. in English and I like to use it and use it often and unsparingly. It doesn't mean I am infallible; it just means that after years of writing paper after paper, I have been trained and taught to write 'correctly'.

3. If you commission me for a web design project and I design logos and other graphics for your website and you later want to turn these graphics into a printed reality, I can take the graphics I made for the web and make the proper alterations to make them suitable for print. I can do this because I am very familiar with the process involved in creating and publishing/printing desktop publishing projects.

4. If you tell me you'd like a graphic of a girl with her hair blowing in the wind as part of the flyer design, I will hand-draw the picture myself. I don't trace. I don't copy. I don't use base images unless the base images came from my own previous designs/graphics/photographs. This is my own creativity at work and my working knowledge of the human figure.

5. If you want special lettering for your project - for print or otherwise - that isn't available on the market, I can and will design the lettering myself. I enjoy doing calligraphy and have created many of my own fonts as a result of different project requirements.

Can other visual designers do this?

Maybe. Maybe not.

A lot of the younger ones in the field without the proper experience or background or education - formal or self-taught - would not be able to or haven't bothered themselves to do so... yet.

All these things, and more, help to determine my pay rate and I'm sorry to say that I refuse to go any lower just because somebody else can do a similar thing at a cheaper rate.

With that said, I hope all the customizers out here on DoA believe the same thing about themselves.

Have faith and confidence in your skills and abilities and remember that there IS a good reason (or three) you put the asking price on your services that you did.

Just because these reasons aren't always so evident at first glance doesn't mean they aren't worth it.

... And no. This post definitely wasn't meant as a smack-down on anyone. If I managed to offend anyone, I apologize. If nothing else, I am GLAD that this question has been aired and that it's being discussed as it gives everyone - the outsiders looking in and the insiders looking out - a chance to share their thoughts and experiences with this topic.

Many thanks to the OP for what I think to be a very important and relevant topic!

 

Beautifully put, every last word of it.

I usually find that there are two primary reasons for the confusion over pricing on handmade goods.

First, there's the issue of perceived value -- someone would never think twice about questioning why they pay top dollar for a doctor, a lawyer, or someone in a similar essential profession based on their skills, record, and experience. Really, that principle is best applied across the board rather than reserved for 'essentials only'. If I need something done, I'm going to look for the best qualified person for the job, whether it is regarding an essential or a luxury service or item.

I suspect this comes from a few different sources; for people in the US at least, arts that don't come from Hollywood, a game company, or a prominent gallery are frequently dismissed as not having much value -- or at least not anywhere near as much value as a designer label. (Note that I'm talking about mainstream society, not People With A Clue.) The great irony there? They forget that many of these now-established design houses started out in a very similar fashion and built themselves up based on the same things that are being dismissed when they come from an unknown source: skill, experience, talent, and so on. Think I'm kidding about the pop culture and/or label lunacy problem? At the next show, I'll count the number of people with identical Coach purses or Gucci sunglasses or Tiffany chain bracelets that look at a OOAK pair of freshwater pearl, silver, and handmade lampwork glass that took an hour to make for $21-$35 and turn up their nose at them being "far too overpriced" and report back to the thread with the data. (I'll give you a hint -- I run out of fingers to count them on within the first two hours at almost every show.)

The second big issue, and one I know isn't going to win me any friends to bring up, is that a vast number of hobbyists will only charge for their materials, not labor, let alone skilled labor, without markup considerations for wholesale or much in the way of profit. All of these things are issues real issues for professionals who support themselves in the arts. This trains buyers to expect that they don't have to pay for an artist's time or related expenses. "Cousin Suzie doesn't charge me for overhead or labor or profit, so where do you as a stranger get off asking for it?" is commonly overheard at any given art show -- and we do ones that are rather high end. My stock answer to, "But the materials didn't cost that much!" is now: "And if I was selling you the raw materials, you are correct, they would not cost you that much, but you're not buying the raw materials, you are buying a finished piece."

 

Personally, i do the mathematics, and sometimes, it adds up, and sometimes it doesn't. There's just no way i'm paying over 40.00 for a face-up. I just can't bring myself to do it. That is in no way to demean an artist and say that their face-up work is not worth that in the industry, but to me, it's just not worth it for ME to do it. I can paint my doll's faces myself. When i charge for faces, i charge 35.00 for a face-up on SD sized. that averages down to about 17.50 per hour, and subtracting out supplies, probably about 10.00 an hour. That is (to me) not overcharging. I would never, and COULD never bring myself to charge some of the huge amounts that some do for faces...75.00 and 100.00 is just TOO much. On the law of averages, i take about 1.5 - 2 hours to paint a head....I won't deny that i'm a bit jealous that some can sell their face-ups to everyone and their mother, from all over the country and world, and i struggle just to get mine sold here among locals LOL I just am not a hugely popular artist or anything LOL