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View Full Version : Selling homemade miniatures, prices and thought?



Legendairy
2016-08-02, 09:59 PM
So I have a question for the playground, I recently decided most minis are way over priced so I started making my own. (I will attach a picture of the one relevant) Well my wife is big in social media she is a a renowned photographer in our area and owns her own business, she posts pictures of household stuff and posted some pics of a mini I made, now people want me to make them miniatures based on this one. I need to know what fellow gamers and playgrounders would be willing to pay as a fair price?

It is made of air dry model clay and is fairly fragile but similar plastic minis go for outrageous prices (hence me making my own). If this isn't the place please direct me to somewhere. Other relevant details are its a large maybe huge creature for 28-30mm minis, fairly fragile takes a few days to make (due to having to dry and whatnot), I live in the US.

I do not need CC as this is literally my first attempt and I will improve, just curious as to what would be fair priced in a majority opinion.

If this is not the right place for this, please redirect me!

EDIT pictures
EDIT2working pictures
http://i1383.photobucket.com/albums/ah286/sykoh_one/booga_zpsyjzhouys.jpg (http://s1383.photobucket.com/user/sykoh_one/media/booga_zpsyjzhouys.jpg.html)

http://i1383.photobucket.com/albums/ah286/sykoh_one/8796A5CDABE828E57506C177129ED72F8364691376C12B65E2 pimgpsh_fullsize_distr_zpsqro2q4mf.jpg (http://s1383.photobucket.com/user/sykoh_one/media/8796A5CDABE828E57506C177129ED72F8364691376C12B65E2 pimgpsh_fullsize_distr_zpsqro2q4mf.jpg.html)

Arutema
2016-08-03, 12:11 AM
I'll repeat advice I've seen on pricing other handmade goods: Figure out how many hours it took you, and multiply that by a reasonable hourly rate for your work. Then add in cost of materials.

You'll probably find this works out to a lot more than a mass-produced mini of the same size and paint quality. Don't be surprised by this.

Legendairy
2016-08-03, 12:20 AM
At minimum wage here that would be roughly 40$ I dunno if it's worth that much, makes sense but it's cool not amazing.

Arutema
2016-08-03, 12:24 AM
At minimum wage here that would be roughly 40$ I dunno if it's worth that much, makes sense but it's cool not amazing.

Given that I've often paid $20 just to have an unpainted mini of that size custom painted, it sounds about right to me for custom work.

Legendairy
2016-08-03, 12:35 AM
Yeah, I think I paid about 20$ to get the painted back in the day. So I suppose, thank you so much.

Edit: beholders and the like are generally expensive from what I have seen.

Mutazoia
2016-08-03, 01:45 AM
You may want to make a mold of your original, so that you can quickly make more, from a more sturdy material (either resin, or pewter, which ever you can get cheaper). Not only will this cut your cost per item down (Your overhead) but will allow you to drop your sales price, while offering a consistent and sturdy product.

If you really wanted to get into the mini-making business, your start up cost will be a bit high, but if you are confident enough in your sculpting skills....

Save up some starting scratch (or GOFUNDME some) and get an SLA digital printer. SLA printers have a much higher "resolution" compared to FDM printerss (what most people think of when they think 3D printers). For example:

https://all3dp.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Formlabs-Resolution1.jpg

The piece on the left is printed with an SLA printer, the right with an FDM printer. Both were printed at 0.1mm.

Next, invest in an Ipad or similar tablet with a camera, and download a program called "123D Catch". This is a free app for apple and android OS, that will allow you to make a 3D photo of a physical object...one that you can print on your SLA printer.

Then you get yourself a few clay model forms (They look like stick figures made of wood, with bendable arms/legs). Make as many different models of "Characters" and animals/monsters as you can. Make them as detailed as you feel comfortable with (it should be easier with the increased size). When you are done, use the app to create a 3D image for your printer, set the scale what ever size you want to offer, and print.

After you have your new 3D printed mini, make a mold (I would suggest a plaster mold, so you can cast in pewter) so you can rapidly re-produce a solid, paintable mini that you can sell.

Make as many different kinds as you can envision, and even offer some custom ones for a higher price.

BTW GoDaddy.com has some pretty good deals on websites with all the tools you need for an online store. They'll even help you design it.

EDIT: I SHOULD, however, point out that you may have some legal trouble if WOTC finds out that you are selling Beholder (or any other licensed and Trade Marked IP) statues, figures, or what-have-you. You may want to either re-name the creature, or stick to public domain/personally created ones.

Legendairy
2016-08-03, 11:59 AM
Yeah, beholders or eye tyrants or what have you have been around for awhile, I am sure I could find something to call it, if I wanted to actually start selling these things, I know about molds and resins.....I however do not want to go into any kind of business, owning one is enough for me lol. I have been asked by a select few how much I would charge to make some figures for them to collect, nothing more. Thank you for all the advice and if I were to actually get into it I would absolutely follow your options, I however, am just a DM with like 400 minis and tired of buying larger ones that I can make for a fraction of the cost.

cobaltstarfire
2016-08-03, 12:32 PM
If you feel ok charging only minimum wage for them that's fine, but if you find you're making more than you originally anticipated you should definitely increase the wage you give yourself.

Segev
2016-08-03, 01:40 PM
Reiterating others' advice, with emphasis: Don't worry about what people will pay. Worry about what it costs you and how long you have to spend on it. Price it accordingly. Then see if people will pay that for it. If they will, great! If they won't, either figure out how to do it more cheaply, or don't sell them.

If you don't do it as a business thing, they still might make good gifts, if you enjoy the activity and know people to whom you'd give presents that would enjoy them.

My sister makes phenomenal soft-sculpture dragons, but the time they take combined with the materials are just so much that she could never find buyers if she wanted to sell them. It's a shame; I think they're awesome. But there's a reason professionals make the money they do, and why mass production is more the rule: it's cost-effective.

cobaltstarfire
2016-08-03, 03:40 PM
I'm a little curious what the prices are around where you are?

I've never seen mini's going for "outrageous" prices. Most of Reapers are under 10 dollars (unless they're really big/complicated designs), even cheaper (less than 5 dollars) if you get their resin version.


Legendairy at least already has the demand. I would suggest researching hardier materials for the ones you make for other people (and yourself really!) I would recommend Apoxie Sculpt...except it's gotten to be fairly expensive stuff, and best if you have an underlying armature. It's pretty good for making all sorts of figures and dolls. It's also air dry, inert, and waterproof once it's done drying.


Segev, does your sister have a gallery or anything for her sculptures? (I want to seeeeeee).

Segev
2016-08-03, 04:16 PM
Segev, does your sister have a gallery or anything for her sculptures? (I want to seeeeeee).She does not, sadly. She considered one, but didn't want to create/maintain the web site when she realized it would cost money she didn't have. If I remember, I'll ask her if she's got photos of them she can send me; I have web space I could host them on.

The originals were done in felt and not even stuffed, back when she was 9 or so. Then she started stuffing them with standard stuffed animal fluff, and then adding eyes made of plastic "gems." Eventually she started ribbing the wings with pipe cleaners, and stuffing the tails and necks and heads to give them structure, and then moved to pleather for the skin and stuffed "wing bones" with a different material for the membrane.

...and I'm moving way off topic, here, sorry!

Legendary, regarding your sculptures, I wish you luck, but it's not an easy business to make money in because people love the look...but are rarely willing to pay for the labor. They don't realize how much goes into it, and, even when they do, they rarely have the money to spare. (They think they do when they undervalue the labor.)

As a general tendency.

This is why you don't ask "what would you pay?"

You figure out what it costs you in time and material, and then see if people will pay you what it costs.

BayardSPSR
2016-08-03, 06:15 PM
It is made of air dry model clay and is fairly fragile but similar plastic minis go for outrageous prices (hence me making my own). If this isn't the place please direct me to somewhere. Other relevant details are its a large maybe huge creature for 28-30mm minis, fairly fragile takes a few days to make (due to having to dry and whatnot), I live in the US.

Side question: is it at risk of breaking during delivery?

Legendairy
2016-08-04, 12:11 AM
Ok whew, I am on my phone so bare with me. The cost to make is maybe 5$ the sculpting and painting can be a few hours or more. As has been said I don't want to go into business by any means, just more hassle. Maybe a few aquitances at best, shipping isn't a concern as they are fairly local, in the right container I wouldn't worry about it breaking tho. General minis do only for for about 5$ up to 10$ for the more expensive 28mm but beholders and larger minis generally go for about 30-80$. Well when I did my last Google search anyway. I also made a purple worm that's on a massive scale with tons of texture and when I priced them a bit smaller than the one I made they were about 50-80$

Edit:Just a quick google of beholders and some smaller ones go for 15$ on up, and I enjoy sculpting and painting them so I don't feel it's labor as it relaxes me lol

Edit:worms
http://i1383.photobucket.com/albums/ah286/sykoh_one/Mobile%20Uploads/image_zpsskif4gmr.jpeg (http://s1383.photobucket.com/user/sykoh_one/media/Mobile%20Uploads/image_zpsskif4gmr.jpeg.html)

Solaris
2016-08-20, 08:16 PM
I'll repeat advice I've seen on pricing other handmade goods: Figure out how many hours it took you, and multiply that by a reasonable hourly rate for your work. Then add in cost of materials.

You'll probably find this works out to a lot more than a mass-produced mini of the same size and paint quality. Don't be surprised by this.


Reiterating others' advice, with emphasis: Don't worry about what people will pay. Worry about what it costs you and how long you have to spend on it. Price it accordingly. Then see if people will pay that for it. If they will, great! If they won't, either figure out how to do it more cheaply, or don't sell them.

This is... risky advice. Bad advice, even.

Skip right to the last sentence on what I quoted from Segev's post. You should be doing that right from the beginning if you're even casually thinking about selling your work.

I'll be blunt: Nobody cares how long it took you to sculpt something. They really, really don't. Your average customer doesn't care how many hours of practice, how much training, how much overhead you have to put into each figure. That's not their concern, that's not why they buy something. That's why you shouldn't be looking at it from your perspective, but rather from the customer's. The customer is going to decide how much something is worth to them, and that's going to be based not on the hours you put into it but rather the quality of the workmanship and the quality of the materials. That's why you'll see painted minis going for ~$20-50 for a 28mm hero fig, despite the work taking in the ballpark of eight to twenty hours on a high-quality piece. If I put price tags based on the hours involved onto any of my pieces, they'd never sell. (We're going to ignore the examples of people drastically overvaluing their work and putting similar price tags on slapdash jobs; those only sell to schmucks.)

And if you're going to say "But I'm only selling to friends, they'll pay me what I think I'm worth!" - that's an awful line of thought to follow, seductive as it may seem. That's taking advantage of your friends and family.

I would, however, like to point out that silicon rubber molds are a thing and you could definitely look into those as an alternative to 3D printing. The startup cost is significantly lower, too - I got a neat little starter kit for about fifty bucks, and it provides me mold materials that I can use to make either hard plastic or white metal minis.

cobaltstarfire
2016-08-20, 08:37 PM
If I put price tags based on the hours involved onto any of my pieces, they'd never sell. (We're going to ignore the examples of people drastically overvaluing their work and putting similar price tags on slapdash jobs; those only sell to schmucks.)




Plenty of artists get along just fine by valuing their work roughly based on a combination of how long it'd take them to do it, and how much they think their time is worth. It's not a bad or incorrect way to work out your pricing.

Yes, pricing also has to be based on the things you mentioned too, really you need to take both things into consideration, because undervaluing your work is also bad. The price should be fair, to both the artist and the buyer.

The most important thing to selling art at the end of the day is finding and maintaining an audience, OP has already found an audience. And from the various threads he has posted, he's already come to a price point that he feels is fair for himself and his potential buyers, which is all that really matters for someone who wants to sell their work.

Solaris
2016-08-20, 08:55 PM
Plenty of artists get along just fine by valuing their work roughly based on a combination of how long it'd take them to do it, and how much they think their time is worth. It's not a bad or incorrect way to work out your pricing.

Yes, pricing also has to be based on the things you mentioned too, really you need to take both things into consideration, because undervaluing your work is also bad. The price should be fair, to both the artist and the buyer.

The most important thing to selling art at the end of the day is finding and maintaining an audience, OP has already found an audience. And from the various threads he has posted, he's already come to a price point that he feels is fair for himself and his potential buyers, which is all that really matters for someone who wants to sell their work.

If you price based on quality of workmanship, you're not going to be undervaluing your work. You're going to be avoiding overvaluing it, which is a mistake I see a lot of artists making... and why they never really get past selling a couple of pieces on Etsy or DeviantArt. I mean, if you're happy with what you've got, great... but if you want to do better and turn more of a profit and sell to more than just a couple of customers, that requires being a bit coldblooded about the calculations and refraining from taking too much counsel from feelings rather than analysis of the market.

cobaltstarfire
2016-08-20, 09:35 PM
I can't properly communicate what I'm trying to communicate, the people that you said are wrong, are not wrong, but you're not wrong either. Using time and energy spent is a good starting point, it's also a good way to determine whether you should be trying to sell art yet, though that's completely irrelevant to this thread since the OP already has buyers, and isn't interested in making a business out of it.


I'm not sure if you're arguing past me, or just treating your own personal ideals as the only correct way of doing things, and I'm too fuzzy in the head to try to work it out.

Thrudd
2016-08-20, 10:12 PM
It is important to consider what price your market will bear, but you shouldn't undervalue your work, either. You especially can't place what you think the customer will pay above the cost of materials and a decent profit margin. I had a neighbor who decided that designer wreaths were a thing she was passionate about, like the sort you might see Martha Stewart make or in a high-end home décor catalogue. But the cost of the materials she chose, let alone the labor intensive process of folding and tying hundreds of feet of ribbons into place, meant that she needed to charge multiple hundreds of dollars on each wreath. She decided, probably correctly, that nobody would pay that much and just decided to take a loss on everything she made.

Even if you're not trying to start a business and it's just a hobby that you would be doing anyway, you need to charge enough to recover all the material costs and enough profit that you can buy more stuff and keep funding your hobby.

ImNotTrevor
2016-08-21, 07:16 AM
If you price based on quality of workmanship, you're not going to be undervaluing your work. You're going to be avoiding overvaluing it, which is a mistake I see a lot of artists making... and why they never really get past selling a couple of pieces on Etsy or DeviantArt. I mean, if you're happy with what you've got, great... but if you want to do better and turn more of a profit and sell to more than just a couple of customers, that requires being a bit coldblooded about the calculations and refraining from taking too much counsel from feelings rather than analysis of the market.

Actually, based on the prices/time spent you listed, unless you're making a whole bunch of these figures at once within the given times, then your profits would be terrible.

At 20 bucks coming out of 8 hours of work, you have the equivalent income as working a job that pays $2.50/hour. At 50 dollars for 20 hours of work it's the same. This does not include the cost of materials. NOW, if you are producing these models en-masse, 10-30 at a time in 8-20 hours, then it looks better (but that's still before cost of materials.)

Basically, unless you have a mass-production ready injector mold or similar, that's a horrible profit margin as given. I hope you're making more than 1 at a time.

Segev
2016-08-21, 02:45 PM
Yeah, in case it wasn't obvious, my advice is predicated upon the assumption that you're already making stuff, and you've got one or more pieces you're already willing to sell. Or that your "test pieces" will be ones you'd have been happy to make for yourself and your own use anyway, or to give away as gifts, if they don't sell.

The point is to determine if the amount of work and material investment you put into them is worth an amount for which you can sell them.


In truth, if you're doing these for friends and you don't mind the labor being a gift of love to them, you could charge as little as the material cost. If you want to do them as gifts, they make EXCELLENT gifts for friends who would value them as such (but who may not be able or willing to spend what it would cost to sustain you in doing it professionally).

With gifts, the value of the labor is "allowed" to be as high as you like it, and friends who receive such can appreciate that labor and the generosity it represents. The moment trading or money enters it, they have to consider their budgets.


So, in short, doing it as a "side business" to support your hobby is fine if you can. But be realistic about what it costs you in time and material. If it doesn't work out financially as a business (even a side business), consider its potential as gifts, because if you were going to give birthday or other presents anyway, these might make excellent "expensive" gifts that don't cost you budget-straining amounts of cash.