Art and Creativity Journal: Passing Time, Inflation and the Price of Art

Since we just had the turn of another year, I've been spending a little time looking over my stock of items that we take to shows, as well as the items I have had listed for sale online.

I realized — particularly when considered against the backdrop of a world in which the cost of living for most people is probably increasing by 15-20% a year — that I am essentially selling my work for approximately the same price I was 15 years ago, when we first started this venture.

Taken in isolation, it's obviously an equation that really doesn't work.

From a purely practical perspective, the small quick "pickup impulse items" that I made because we should have them and we sold them for $6.00 in 2012? Well, we're still selling for $6.00 in 2026. All things considered, we should be selling those for $10.00-$12.00 today. Maybe more.

But real life is not that simple. The thing about art is that it typically has virtually zero “price elasticity.” That is to say, handmade things are often one of those areas in which people don't regard it as something that should go up in price. Ever.

That might not be a significant issue in situations where nobody's ever seen your work before, but when you have a lot of regular followers who come and seek you out when you go to events, they immediately hone in on the fact "I used to be able to get these for $6, how dare you price them at more?"

This, even though they are living in a world where they paid $1.99 for a carton of eggs in 2012 and they're paying $8 for that carton of eggs in 2026... but somehow artists should be exempt from feeling the pinch of that, or maybe we just shouldn't eat eggs!

Now, I'm not writing about this because I want to get into a pity party over the difficulties of being in the handmade goods trade, but rather as a bit of an exploration of something that's very real and potential approaches to at least help recover a little bit of the relative shortfall.

Of course one obvious way around the problem is to simply not offer anything similar to what you had before so the comparison becomes more difficult.

One thing we did do to muddy the waters so to speak was to pretty much just let those little $6.00 stones sell out, and then replaced them with the same little $6.00 stone except only making them Chakra Stones and putting them in a special display and making them $8.00 each. When anybody protests, yes we still have the little stones but now they're Chakra Stones and that's worth an extra two bucks. Even though there is effectively very little change the perception of value has been changed.

Another thing we did was to take all less expensive but individually priced stones, leave the price tags on but put them in a sort of "bargain bin" basket where people can just pick through and find what they want with the basket marked "everything in this basket is $20.00 or less."

That way we still have lots of options that are under $20.00, with their mechandizing reflecting them being one step down from the individually displayed items. It's purely a psychological construct because it's the exact same thing as before, but it was fairly successful during holiday sales.

Perhaps the most successful thing I did was to focus on having a much broader selection in the $50-$100 range, borrowing from the idea of relative value that we used to employ at our art galleries, way back when.

To phrase it in plain English the psychology of buying a $40 item from a store where $40 is pretty much the average price and the psychology of buying a $40 item from a place where the majority of items are 50 to $100 is just different even though you're buying the exact same item!

At times like these, I'm actually grateful for my business education that I have not otherwise used for anything, and I'm grateful for having 18 years of art sales experience selling other people's work!

That said, I am not happy about tha reality of having to "play games" in order to make sales... but it's just part of the business, I guess.

Thank You!

If you enjoy painted rocks, do check out The Hive Rocks Project and help spread the word about Hive, while also being creative!

Because I am trying to make some semblance of income — a part time living, even — I now add this footer to all my posts, in the hope that someone, somewhere, might decide to take a further look at my work, and perhaps consider supporting independent art.

Thank you, in advance, for your consideration and support!

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Thank you for supporting independent art & creativity!

2026.01.11 AS-TXT-357/327