We’ve seen quite a bit of traffic on our last post, and we’re even seeing some fun back and forth on the forum – see here. I’m going to go a bit more in depth here. See why charging $1200 for an album that costs $300 does not result in $900 profit. Well  it does if you live on the side of the road and Nikon gives you free gear.

Last week we discussed an iPhone photo pricing app, called PhotoPrice. In that post I had an interview with Laura Novak, the creator. Today, I’ll price out an imaginary album for you to see why professional studios need to charge high prices for albums.

pricecalc

For this example, just to make it easy, I am going to use a fictitious album company and made up numbers.

Let’s say our client orders a 40 page leather album that is 12″x12″. Let’s say that album costs a studio $300. So the cost of the album is $300.

Let’s use PhotoPrice to price out this album.

  • Total cost from the lab $0 (we are printing it at the album company)
  • Shipping $15
  • Album Design Cost $95. Let’s say we pay a designer $15 an hour and we need to add in taxes, etc. If you are designing yourself, you need to figure out how much it would be to have someone else do it. You don’t work for free do you?
  • Production Cost – Let’s add another $50 here for retouching on images.
  • Packaging – $10 (for the nice bag that we put it in).

I’ve been conservative with some of these numbers. In our studio we retouch more than many photographers do , so we’d need to add some time there.

But with these numbers we get the following range $1265 (40% cost of goods) – $2300 (20% cost of goods). If you are at the lower end of your market $1265 is the minimum you need to charge to stay in business and make enough to keep your business going and have a profit to buy a car, pay your mortgage, etc. $2300 would be the ball park price you’d want to charge if you were at the upper end of your market.

Happy album pricing.

Fundy

To see more of the photo price app, go to Photo Price App Website. To try out our FREE 14 Day Trial of the Fundy Touchflow Retouching Palette (to save time and money), visit our website at Fundy SOS. Join the Fundy SOS free Webinar on Pricing on Nov. 11. Sign up here.

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