Treat everything you sell as a precious object
The title is a quotation from the book “Selling Luxury” by Robin Lent and Geneviève Tour. The book’s content focusses mainly on retail environments, although does refer to some services as well. The authors go on to say that we demonstrate our respect for something when we treat it as precious - setting the example for others to establish value. This is easy when we imagine a store manager at a luxury jeweller gingerly handling a timepiece or a necklace with kid gloves, placing it on a luxurious velvet display mat, to showcase the piece to a client. But how does this translate to what we offer as photographers?
Our photographs are precious. Our time is precious.
When I first started my career, I did a family photo session for a client. When I delivered a small album to her, she asked me if I did any photo restoration. The before and after photo at the top of this post is what I accomplished for her. When she brought out this photograph, it was stored carefully in a folio. She carefully unwrapped it, held it gently at its corners and placed it on the table for me to see. She handled with care because it was the only photograph of her great grandmother that she had. It was also fragile with age. And it was very important. It was precious. The way that she handled it demonstrated how precious it was - she didn’t have to say a word.
We don’t need to wait until something is in a deteriorated state, or the last of its kind, in order to understand how precious it is. The photos that you take for clients deserve this exact same treatment - indeed the content of those photographs are already precious people in their lives. You may not be revealing prints while wearing kid gloves (although you could - if that doesn’t convey the concept of being precious and highly valuable, I don’t know what does) but you can still treat your work with the importance it holds.
Three elements that determine preciousness or value
Price
Price demonstrates importance, doesn’t it? If you look around your home and want to sell things off, then that kid’s toy can go for a few bucks, but grandma’s fine china is going to be appraised by the local antique store. When buying, the price tells you a story of something - craftsmanship, quality, rarity, status, or lack thereof.
When you price low, what message are you sending to your clients about how precious those photographs are? Do you feel they espouse value? Or do you think they are run-of-the-mill and the same as the millions of photos being uploaded by users to social media channels daily? You have created something for a client that will have longevity and that no one else can ever reproduce exactly as you did and at the time you did it. You have given them a gift and just as my client’s only photograph of her great-grandmother was precious to her, the photographs you have taken are precious to your clients. Treat them that way, with a price that reflects the time, care and skill of producing that work, as well as its inherent value as a freezing of time that can never be retrieved otherwise.
Appearance
When someone cares for something on the level of appearance, it demonstrates that the object is precious to that person. This could be a car that’s kept in impeccable shape, a home that is well cared-for, even how someone presents themselves. How are you presenting your photographs - burned as .jpegs on an office depot usb and mailed in a plain white envelope, or are you creating a beautifully branded online gallery for your clients to view their magnificent creations in full screen? Are you delivering prints in a yellow manila envelope or are you nesting high-quality prints in a felt-lined, gift-wrapped, engraved box? Do you present your work in a well thought-out, clear and inspirational website, or do people see you as a fleeting post while scrolling a never-ending social media feed? How you handle the appearance communicates a lot about how you feel about the work.
Treatment
How do you speak of precious things? I know that a lot of loving, amazing words come from my lips when I speak about my daughter, as she is precious to me. Treatment is a layer of energy overlaid upon appearance, or could be considered an approach. How do you speak about your work - do you sell files? Are they high-res files? Or are they family photographs, heirlooms, legacies? What about your prints? Are you speaking of archival quality papers and special inks to produce those heirlooms, or are you speaking of prints with a release? The copy on your site and how you treat the work conveys if you believe it’s precious. A note here: your work does not have to be accoladed or of award-winning caliber. While treatment of your photography in that manner would be great, it’s not what makes a photograph precious. Yes, you need a level of skill and creativity to produce well-taken imagery, but the preciousness is found in how it’s viewed by you and your client and by the way it moves people. And we see it all the time - photographers with high skill giving their work away for nothing, and not treating it as precious in general.
Let’s just break it down if all three of these elements are lacking; let’s say on a pricing page, versus if we take care and attention in those three elements:
Holiday minis: 10 edited high-res files delivered by usb. Print credit for the set of 4x6 photos included. $50
or
Limited Edition holiday session: Ten finished photographs will be available through your private viewing gallery. A set of complimentary 4x6 prints presented in a walnut-finish keepsake box with your family name engraved, delivered to your door. 500
Arguably, these 2 packages are similar to the client in terms of deliverables, a short session with 10 images and a corresponding set of prints. If you put the price tag of 500 on the 50 one, how do you think people would think of value for the price? But modify the appearance and treatment, and another zero seems in line, no? Conversely, drop the zero in the second one. How would people read that? Exaggeration as that kind of appearance and treatment at that price sounds like bait and switch or some catch on quality or hidden costs. Which one of these would you like to be? Do you think the second is really that far out of reach in terms of price when it’s all positioned that way? It could sound pretty lucrative and worth the price tag to an ideal client. And with the larger price tag, you can afford to pay for the gallery software and for the production costs on the prints and box, ten times over!
For some unknown reason, many photographers do not consider their work or their time precious. In fact, they consider their work crappy or sub-par, especially as compared to others and sometimes don’t even calculate time in their costs. If you feel that way, then it’s unlikely that you’re conveying any sort of preciousness through the three elements above and thus, clients do not perceive the work as precious either. They look to you to establish value, and you are establishing it as crap, or if not, then mediocre. So how would that surprise us then that clients treat it exactly as we have conveyed it — asking for discounts, complaining that they’re dissatisfied, texting you at all hours wondering when their photos will be ready? If we aren’t establishing the value, then this kind of client behaviour shouldn’t be a surprise, but expected.
I will go further than the quote and say this, because it needs to be said.
“Treat yourself as precious.”
It all starts there. You are precious too. You are the only you on this planet - that right there makes each of us a precious thing. When the world loses us, there is no replacement. How’s that for being a rare piece of art? Only one in the world! What do one-of-a-kind art pieces sell for - low price, or high? Thus, you carry a load of value and what your unique self produces into the world is precious. For us, it’s photographs.
If you read this article and immediately raise price on your work, start taking measures in the appearance and treatment, but don’t internalize the lesson into yourself, then you might make it, but without an authentic change at the source, it’s always an uphill battle. But, fake it til you make it if you need to, because mindset change is harder than external change, so sometimes you need that external boost to challenge the mindset, Really it doesn’t matter how you do it, as long as you do it!