Pricing Intarsia Help

[StevensonDesigns]

I just started scrolling 2 years ago and this is the first large intarsia I have ever done. I created this intarsia based on a picture of St. Michael defeating Lucifer. It has 111 pieces using 11 different woods (aspen, bacote, honduran mahogony, padauk, walnut, basswood, poplar, bloodwood, zebrawood, cherry, and pine). The frame is 2' X 3', so the piece is fairly big. I put about 100 hours into it.
My question is: How do I come up with a price for something like this?
Any help would be appreciated.

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[dragyn]

First off I want to take the time to tell you that this is a wonderful intarsia piece. The wood selections are wonderful.

As to the pricing of such a piece, a lot depends on the market for the area you are in, the cost of materials and time, and how much you are expecting to make. There will be others that will give you a better idea of what to charge, but these are things that you need to consider.

[wood-n-things]

Great job on choice of woods and the assembly and finish is superb...I'd want it displayed in a gallery, to maximize it's potential.

[Jediscroller]

The way I price my items (labor + material + margin) would mean a piece like that would be well over $2600. Of course, this is why I don't make stuff like that. My labor alone would be ~$2000. I know some intarsia folks charge $3 - $5 a piece but even at that you're only looking at $555. That would mean your labor is only worth about $4 an hour. Hopefully some of the intarsia folks will chime in. The only intarsia piece I've sold had about 80 pieces in it and took me 5 hours to do. I sold it for $175.

[Magpie]

It totally depends on your area and who you are going to sell it to. My best idea is to go to a nearby art gallery or gift shop and find something similar in respect to time and materials and see how much they charge.

I recently knocked out some simple segmentation pieces and gave some as a donation to an auction for a cancer patient on the other side of town. I've been selling them for $100 and thought they were overpriced at that. They auctioned for $185 apiece. Sell to rich people ;p

[Janette]

There should be quite a few threads in the intarsia section archives talking about this exact subject. You should be able to get quite a bit of info from them. Just don't sell yourself short when pricing your work.

[workin for wood]

Pricing is a touchy subject. $2600 for materials and labor sounds good on paper but if someone paid that I'd have to see it to believe it. It should not take 100 hrs to cut, shape and finish 110 pieces either. But...you are still rather new at this, and things get faster each time you do it. You have to learn techniques to speed up your work without sacrificing any quality. Your feathers for example. Having them all separated, most would disagree, but I too prefer them all to be separate. But, you should be able to cut all those individual pieces almost as fast as a person that just plunge cuts the veins on feathers. Lets say you have 20 feathers wide. Measure the width of your sawblade and multiply that by 20. So..as an easy example, if a sawblade was 1/32 wide, then you would lose 5/8 in width due to saw kerf if you were to lay them all out and cut them from one single board all at the same time. So what you need to do is trace your wing pattern onto a piece of wood using carbon paper. Just the single feather pieces that all string together, not the solid top piece. Then what you do is you measure out 5/8 toward the outside of the wing and put a little mark there. Erase most of the feathers off the wood with an eraser..not completely erase them, but rather erase them so the lines become faint. Now come back with a pencil and redraw the feathers, making several of them slightly wider until you have taken up the original area plus the extra 5/8 in width. You number each piece then cut out every single piece. They will fit back together perfectly. Use some masking tape and tape them all tight together. Get the pattern back out and trace the top section onto your next piece of wood. You hold the taped feathers over the spot where the original drawn feathers where and use that as a template as you trace. A bit more creative penciling to match the end of the wing to all your feathers. Cut that and the entire wing is finished, a perfect fit too. The pattern is a guide, not a law. You have to work smart not hard. I will step up and tell you that I would sell that piece for $150-$200. It is not that detailed, it is larger than it should be for that number of pieces,the wood selection is good,and shaping is fine, but it isn't above and beyond the norm. Come see me this weekend. I'll be at the Wood Expo, Johnson's Workbench, Charlotte, MI. I'll be easy to find, all day this Friday and Saturday. You can talk to me, see what I do, see my pricing, compare what you do and what I do and there's sure to be some others there that you can compare yourself with as well. Feel free and pick my brain. It's only 20-25 min from Ionia.

If you don't come...well just remember, woodworking is not about money. It's about passion and fun. If it was about money, it would be a job, and that's not so fun.

[Jediscroller]

Originally Posted by workin for wood

well just remember, woodworking is not about money. It's about passion and fun. If it was about money, it would be a job, and that's not so fun.

Maybe for you woodworking isn't about money, but for some of us it is our source of income. You're obviously charging a lot less than many other intarsia folks which hurts all of them as I've seen the $3 - $5 a piece quoted numerous times by very well respected intarsia artisans. Maybe you don't place much value on your time but please don't denigrate those of us that do. Underpricing of work hurts ALL crafters, not just woodworkers. It devalues the market for true handmade crafts and affects our incomes.
Who says that your job can't be fun also? After all it's not work if it's something you enjoy doing.
As far as your comment about something selling for $2600, that's about what the Amiens Cathedral or Dome Clock would run. If I spent 100 hours on a single project, I would rather keep it than devalue my time and material.
I have a couple of customers who routinely spend several hundred dollars in my booth and I could easily see them spending that kind of money on the right item.

[StevensonDesigns]

Working for wood, I'm pretty sure that I know how to cut out my intarsia pieces, but thanks for 500 words on how to do it. I don't remember asking for help cutting, but thanks anyways. The time that it took me to do this was in the shaping, as it takes awhile to do it with a dremel. And you are the first person to tell me that it isn't that detailed, but I appreciate your opinion. Your $150 to $200 price range is a bit off. The piece sold 3 days ago as I was taking it into a gallery in Royal Oak for $950.

And on a philosophical note, I keep telling my daughters to find something they love and make that their career. Jobs can be fun! I get to kick the crap out of child molesters for a career, that's FUN!

I can't wait to visit you in Charlotte and critique YOUR work and YOUR pricing and tell you how to cut YOUR stuff.

Terry

[workin for wood]

Originally Posted by Jediscroller

Maybe for you woodworking isn't about money, but for some of us it is our source of income. You're obviously charging a lot less than many other intarsia folks which hurts all of them as I've seen the $3 - $5 a piece quoted numerous times by very well respected intarsia artisans. Maybe you don't place much value on your time but please don't denigrate those of us that do. Underpricing of work hurts ALL crafters, not just woodworkers. It devalues the market for true handmade crafts and affects our incomes.
Who says that your job can't be fun also? After all it's not work if it's something you enjoy doing.
As far as your comment about something selling for $2600, that's about what the Amiens Cathedral or Dome Clock would run. If I spent 100 hours on a single project, I would rather keep it than devalue my time and material.
I have a couple of customers who routinely spend several hundred dollars in my booth and I could easily see them spending that kind of money on the right item.

I didn't know we where discussing how much a professionally built Cathedral clock would cost. You are getting carried away by making this a personal issue Kevin. There's exceptions to every rule and you are one of them.

Oh..and you say I devalue the market..but do you know any of my prices? $2600 won't buy you much at my art fair booth, but I had to work my way up to where I am now with years of hard work and attention to details. Everything I sell is original, one of a kind, and nobody thinks crafts when they enter my world.