Dear clients, you get as much quality from a creative resource as you put in. The quality of output is directly proportionate to the amount you pay for, and If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys.
Very often, as an independent studio owner/ entrepreneur, we grapple with financial issues- not just with respect to budgets, but also our time, and I would like to put forth the point of view we, as designers and communication professionals hold on the subject of pricing.
You can’t have the budget for Janpath and expect a designer outfit
Then why, dear clients, do you expect an independent design house backed by 25+ years of experience to be cheap?
As the famous story goes:
One sunny afternoon in Paris, Pablo Picasso was sitting alone at a small café, enjoying a quiet moment. As he sipped his drink, he doodled absentmindedly on a paper napkin — a few confident lines, a bold curve, a flourish. Just a few strokes, and the napkin bore the unmistakable magic of his style.
A woman, seated nearby, had been watching him.
She stood up, approached his table, and said with excitement,
“Maestro Picasso! I adore your work. That sketch — may I have it? I’ll pay you for it.”
Picasso paused for a moment, looked at the napkin, and handed it to her.
“That will be five thousand dollars,” he said.
The woman was stunned. “Five thousand dollars? But it only took you five minutes!”
Picasso smiled gently and replied,
“No, madam. It took me forty years to draw that in five minutes.”
So what you’re paying for is not just a small design job that ‘should not take more than 5 minutes’. What you’re getting is a design created by, or at least supervised and directed by a senior designer with 25+ years of experience. So what the price tag includes is their 4 years of education + 25 years of experience + the 5 minutes it took to create your design. And no, we are not giving you recycled, rejected ideas, we are customising solutions for you. Please appreciate the pedigree and be willing to reward its worth.
You can’t hire an uber from point A to point B but expect it to go travelling via points C,D and E!
Every little thing we do as a service provider- yes, read that carefully, ‘ service provider’- comes at a cost. We do not have tangible products to sell- only our talent and mental faculties- our commissioned work for you is our product. The time we spend on your work is what we bill for. Then how could we include that half-day consuming ‘translation only’ task into our project cost? If it means stretching my tasklist in time or labour cost, we will have to charge you for it. We don’t always ask for this, but when we do,please pay for the extra mileage.
So you want to eat a Michelin-starred meal, but want a free sample first?
Why do you expect us to just give you freebies?
We would not ask you for ‘free samples’ of your furniture, or jewellery (or even optic fibre), why would you expect us to just ‘throw in’ a few promotional posts or a ‘small leaflet’? Again, all we have to sell is our brain-time, so yes, we charge for every small task. Not sure of our work? Try us out with a small job before you hand us your entire mandate.
We don’t pitch for this same reason – why give away our biggest asset- our ideas, for free for anyone to use, without getting paid for it?
Please know that we are not artists, but commercial artists- we create art and design for money, so yes, even that small sticker should be paid for (unless we’re feeling real generous).
What you do get for free, always…
Is an open mind and open ears.
We always approach our projects and clients with empathy, and that’s completely free.
Of course, we don’t expect you to know every little detail of design or advertising, we will break every little thing down for you, finish your sentences when you’re unable to form cohesive creative feedback and give you a sympathetic hearing when you say you haven’t time to approve our invoice.
All we ask in return is respect.
So open up dear clients, appreciate the creative professional in front of you, and appreciate the effort they will be putting into ensuring YOUR brand building. Do your due diligence, but learn to trust them. With your budgets and your brands.
Cos what you pay is what you get.
