Do you have a general rule that you use when pricing your products?

I am trying to figure out how to price my albums.

I know that all albums are different... leather, faux leather, 10x10, 12x12, 10 spreads, 30 spreads, etc... but it seems that there should be a general rule to the markup percentage. (Do you take the base price and double it? Triple it? Quadruple it? More? Do you just add on say, $500?)

Perhaps some of you could tell me what some of your album pricing looks like and what those prices get you?

Thanks OSP!

Crystal

3-4x cost, depending on source, est design effort for that size of album, etc.

I only do square albums. All of the vendors I use are roughly the same price so I have a real simple formula-

8x8 album = $800 for 10 spreads (20 pages) + $60 per additional spread
10x10 album = $1000 for 10 spreads + $80 per additional spread
12x12 album = $1200 for 10 spreads + $100 per additional spread

This leaves plenty of wiggle room if I want to throw in a % off additional spreads, or X number of additional spreads free if they order before X date. You know... promotional type stuff.

Guest sign in books are a little lower margin- $400 for a 15 spread 8x8 book. I can wiggle a little bit on the pricing as it's a lower grade album, but not much. Really that is more about getting my work in front of the wedding guests - you never know who is looking for a photographer.

Cost of the product (including allowances for misprints, shipping etc) + my time and wage for design and editing + ~30% for business profit.

We price our albums between $3k and $4k for a 10x10, 20 spread.

I do a similar system to Matt

20 page minimum

8x8= $800 $40 per page

10x10= $1,200 $60 per page

12x12= $1400 $70 per page

I still make a nice profit and it works for my area.

Hope this helps

My pricing is similar to Matt's also. Base price to start, then a per page price.

It really depends on how you are paid in respect to the rest of the wedding. Some people charge a bigger fee for photography, and then let that cover design time, edit time, etc. The hourly fee covers the other time fees. Then you are charging strictly on the cost of the product, whether it is prints, frames, albums, or whatever. I cover my time in production in my fee, so I can do a markup on products, generally 3.5x, unless that is different than what the market will bear either way. For instance, an 8x10 is about $3 to have printed, but are we marking that up 3.5x. No, I sell that at what the market is in general. For me that's $31 for a mounted 8x10. For albums, I know what the total cost is for my normal albums, and I do a 3.5x markup on those. That brings a 10x10 LC to about $1400 with 30 sides or so. I don't do numbers of pages, but numbers of images. I've never believed we should make the wedding fit a certain size album, but instead make the album size fit the wedding. Pricing for one product has so much more in it than that one product.

Thanks so much for all your quick replies! This really helps me a lot!

I like your philosophy! I've had a hard time fitting my images into x# of pages...fitting your # of pages around # of images makes a lot more sense. Thanks!

I have a problem deriving the album price from the album cost only. It doesn't matter to me how I print my album, it still takes X amount of my time, in other words it costs me the same, to design and retouch 8x8 coffee table book or 12x12 leather book. Their cost can be so different that you will be loosing money if you price it only based on the product cost. I would recommend taking all your cost to print the album, get it shipped, etc. + add design cost and retouching cost, revisions, etc., and then mark it up according to your market. Your total cost should be at 25%-40%. For design fee and retouching fee I took the cost of ordering design and retouching from third party. I have my design fee separate from my album cost internally.