Howdy Do It came from “how do you do It,” the question Ellie & Margot found themselves asking about their freelance lifestyles, and so Howdy Do It was born, a weekly column about the things we do to keep ourselves organized, inspired and on track. Ellie will be here each Monday, and Margot will be over on Mint at the same time.

If you have any questions for Margot or Ellie, you can ask them on formspring.
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One of the most frequent questions I get asked is how one should go about pricing their work. I’m going to start this off with a big fat disclaimer: I am not an expert on this. I have only been freelancing for a couple of years, and have only been doing it full time for 6 months. I am constantly thinking about my pricing, evaluating it, and nudging things around. There is also a very informative article on Design Sponge, which is more scientific and expert-like than what you’re going to hear from me.

I do two different kinds of design work, and I price them differently. The first is my freelance design work (non-wedding). To come up with an hourly rate, I did not use the handy, informative
FreelanceSwitch calculator I found via the d*s article. I just asked around. I asked probably 6-8 freelancers what their hourly rate was, and that combined with working in a design firm who occasionally hired freelancers, gave me a good idea of the range. In my area, it seemed to be between $35-$75/hour. A big note: I live in an area that is pretty affordable, and so you need to ask freelancers in your region to get an accurate idea for hourly rates. I guarantee there are 0 freelancers in New York City charging $35/hour. You never want to be the cheapest freelancer, because if you underprice your work, people will undervalue your work. You’re also effectively telling clients “design is cheap!” So, when figuring out where you land on the scale, you want to think about your experience, skill level, cost of living, and your expenses. Your expenses will include rent, insurance, your computer, software, office supplies, advertising, etc. You’ll need to remember that while $75/hour (or whatever) may sound like a number you can get rich off of, you can’t bill 40 hours of every week because you have administrative work, marketing efforts, etc.

Another tip: If you’re doing print design, you’re going to be managing the printing of your project. You can markup printing costs by 10-20% to cover the time print management takes and the expertise you have in print management. Remember that if you’re a designer and frequently use certain printing companies, they’re probably giving you print quotes that are much lower than what they give the average guy off the street.

The second kind of design work I do is invitation design. Pricing an actual product seems a lot more straight-forward to me than when you’re pricing something intangible like design hours for a website. So, the first thing you’ll need to do is figure out your materials cost. If paper is $35 for 250 sheets and you can fit 2 invitations per page, that’s $.07 cents per invitation for paper. Figure out your materials cost for everything—envelopes, printing cost/ink, cutting, etc. You’ll also need to figure out your assembly cost. Say you’re putting in envelope liners, and you used that handy rate calculator to find out that your break-even hourly rate is $25/hour. (Since assembling envelope liners takes very little skill, this is a good place to put your break-even rate to work). Say you need to do 100 envelope liners, and that will take you one hour. $25 divided by 100 liners is $.25. Alright. So now you’ve added everything up and you should have a materials cost, and let’s say it comes out to $1.75 per invitation suite.

The next step is to do some market research. Find companies who offer products similar to yours, keeping in mind whether you’re talking about custom or non-custom work, and the type of printing method used. Let’s say the going rate for invitations like yours is $6/suite. That means if you stick with that price scale, then after cost you’ll have $4.25. Finally, you need to figure out if that’s something you can live on, which of course depends not on that $4.25 figure but how many invitations you can actually sell per month, and I can’t help you there.

Someone on formspring yesterday asked, “How can I simplify & structure custom invitation pricing? With all the various elements, paper type, envelope type & size, etc, it takes me forever to price out an invite. How do you factor in design time?” I think if you’ve calculated your basic invitation cost using the steps above, calculating the extras should be fairly easy. Let’s say you spend $.04 cents per basic white envelope, and $.14 cents per fancy envelope. That just brought your cost up by $.10, plus the extra time for a special order. So, I’d come up with a standard rate sheet that said something basic invitation suites (white envelope) are $6 each and invitation suites with fancy envelopes are $6.20 each.

To keep things simple, I’d try not to offer a million options to your customers. Find a vendor who sells fancy envelopes at a good price, and stick with them. So if a customer wants to know what colors your fancy envelopes come in, don’t say “what color would you like?” Show them the list of colors that are available with your vendor. That way, you have a set price for plain envelopes and a set price for fancy envelopes, and you don’t have to change that price if they want a certain shade of blush pink. Keep things simple for both you and your customer.

For design time, you need to refer to the hourly design rate I talked about above. If it takes you about 8 hours to design a custom invitation and your design rate is $50/hour, then maybe you add a flat $400 custom fee on to the “pre-designed” invitation price of $6/suite. Again, I don’t think there is a single right answer for how you price completely custom work. It’s going to depend on whether people will pay that flat custom fee at the rate of $50/hour, or if it makes more sense to just bump up your per suite price by a dollar or two. If there’s anyone out there who has an opinion on this, I would love to hear it!

Another thing to think about when coming up with a rate sheet for invitations is whether you want to charge the same “per suite” price for 50 invitations as 300. Keep in mind that you will spend less on materials with the smaller order, but you’ll spend as much time on the client who needs 50 invitations as the client who needs 300.

All that said, it’s not always about the formula and research. As Meg Mateo Ilasco says in her book Craft, Inc., “it’s about creating a perceived value for your goods. If your [product] is as special as you think it is, it should have a price tag to match.”

{images by elizabeth sarah}

To read Margot’s Howdy Do It posts, click here.

Howdy Do It came from “how do you do It,” the question Ellie & Margot found themselves asking about their freelance lifestyles, and so Howdy Do It was born, a weekly column about the things we do to keep ourselves organized, inspired and on track. Ellie will be here each Monday, and Margot will be over on Mint at the same time.

If you have any questions for Margot or Ellie, you can ask them on formspring.
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Last week I talked about my latest self-employment hurdle, the freelancing blues, and this week I thought I’d touch on a few more things that helped me get over it. If you’re feeling the same way, I hope these will get the wheels turning.

• I realized that my home office, the room I sit in for probably 10-12 hours a day, is also my least favorite room in the house! It’s the room that we put zero thought into, and where we dumped all of the “what should we do with this?” stuff when we moved in last year. Major bummer. So, I’ve been brainstorming ways to rearrange furniture, cut down on clutter, and have been scouring craigslist, thrift stores, and yard sales for furniture bargains to replace the pieces I hate. I’m also working on finding better lighting and purchasing some plants. If it’s going to be cold and dreary outside, at least I can have some green inside! I can’t wait to have a yard sale of our own to get rid of all the extras.

• I haven’t actually told anyone this yet… but why not. I started a little etsy vintage shop called west + plum. I realized that I’d turned all my former hobbies into a full time job—awesome, but I hadn’t replaced them! Visiting lots of thrift stores and flea markets gets me out of the house, and it’s so exciting to have a new project that doesn’t involve designing or blogging. Plus, my indoor photography skills are way improving and the past couple Saturdays I’ve jumped out of bed to find new treasures. I’ve promised myself that this project is just for fun and the moment it becomes a chore, I’m done.

• Redesign! A couple weeks ago, during the worst of my slump, I sat down and just redesigned Mint. I was actually pretty afraid to do it, and thought I had no idea what I wanted. I even begged my husband to do it for me but then I got impatient. Since my redesign budget was slim, I kept the structure basically the same, and was able to hire a programmer to make my design functional without breaking the bank.

• Another way I’ve been forcing myself out of the house is to use my car less and walk more. There are coffee shops, a mail shop, book store, and grocery store all within walking distance of my house, but for some reason I used to always take the car to run errands. The 30-40 minutes of extra walking every day or so has been a great way to clear my head, get some fresh air, and cut down on gas expenses all at the same time.

So how about you, what tricks do you have for beating the freelancing blues?

photo credits: 60/365 by perminna / west + plum / sandra juto

Howdy Do It came from “how do you do It,” the question Ellie & Margot found themselves asking about their freelance lifestyles, and so Howdy Do It was born, a weekly column about the things we do to keep ourselves organized, inspired and on track. Ellie will be here each Monday, and Margot will be over on Mint at the same time.
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In a couple weeks, it will have been six months since my last full time, salaried job. If I’m feeling brave, I can say I’ve been self employed for six months. But in all honesty, the last six months have been an emotional roller coaster. The first few months I was completely overwhelmed with all the “should do” things on my list. I made the mistake of starting to read a couple business books right off the bat, which made me feel frozen with the long list of things they said I need to do in order to be successful. A few months in I put the books down, and started focusing on the “must do” lists instead. Life became a whole lot less stressful. But in the past few months, my stresses have come from other places. Although I’ve got lots of great clients, all of whom feel like good fits for me (something I wasn’t used to when I worked for a firm), I want more. Although I love not having a boss or coworkers, I miss having people in the same room to vent with, brainstorm with, and take a coffee break with. Although I feel like all of my projects are going really well, I want to do better.

A few weeks ago, all this culminated into a total lack of motivation, which has been the hardest hurdle for me yet. I keep wondering, “if I’m really doing what I love, why aren’t I working harder? longer?” The truth is, I’ve come to a point with my business where I’m going to have to do things that are really hard for me and… well, hello procrastination. Networking, for one. Spending some money on advertising, and maybe even renting a studio space to garner some of the montly art walk traffic and get out of the house (eek! lease!). Loosening my vice grip on my blog.

I think I’ve moved past the frozen/lack of motivation feeling. For now. It took me leaving my house, notebook in hand, and doing a few hours of brainstorming. A friend suggested I do some journaling, which I didn’t, but that probably would have helped too. The most helpful thing was making a list of all the things I love about my new job. Then, I made a list of all the big picture to-do items, like researching advertising options, meeting with a friend of a friend who has lots of wedding world connections, finding someone to help me with Mint, and talking to some local shops about my work—all things that will help me reach my big picture goals, and got me excited again about what I’m doing. I also took a good hard look at how much things have grown and changed over the past year, and gave myself a much needed pat on the back. It’s hard to remember to do that, sometimes!

images by pope saint victor, a nice and generous guy with a good sense of humor.

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We touched on this last week but in case you missed it—Ellie and I have set up a Howdy Do It formspring account so that you can ask us questions (anonymously or not) and we’ll answer them as best we can. Originally we thought we’d answer questions in our posts, but a week can be a long time to wait, and it kind of defeats the conversation atmosphere formspring allows. So, hop on over and ask away!”

This week:
• My write-up on the POST 27 site re-launch on Mint.

• Ellie & I set up a formspring and we answered a bunch of Howdy Do It related questions this week.

•These awesome specs that Ms. Kate Miss posted on for me, for you. Cute vintage-inspired frames, with lenses for $95. For each frame sold, one is donated to someone in need in developing country too.

• Had a chance to checkout the Thinking for a Living redesign? In a word: wow. You can key-command your way through the content. I definitely see that functionality being implemented into more blogs soon.

Howdy Do It came from “how do you do It,” the question Ellie & Margot found themselves asking about their freelance lifestyles, and so Howdy Do It was born, a weekly column about the things we do to keep ourselves organized, inspired and on track. Ellie will be here each Monday, and Margot will be over on Mint at the same time.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Over the years I’ve accumulated a lot of art and craft supplies, and over the past six months I’ve accumulated a ton of paper, envelopes, samples, envelope liners, ribbons, and shipping supplies for Hello Tenfold. It’s cheaper to buy things in bulk, so I do, but storage is a never-ending problem. Since many of your expressed an interest in organization during last week’s reader survey, I thought I’d share the way I organize my home office.

Last summer we bought a Linnarp bookcase from Ikea, along with matching red glass doors. The glass doors (which I could cover from the inside with pretty wallpaper), force me to keep the cabinet organized so it doesn’t look like a total wreck. Fortunately my envelopes arrive in nice little boxes, but for everything else I bought a bunch of inexpensive storage baskets from World Market. They fit on the cabinet shelves and are perfect for organizing all the loose ends, like glue, tape, scissors, exacto knives, etc. I also lined up 4 storage boxes on top of the cabinet for things I don’t need to access as often. [pictured storage boxes available here].

Letter trays work well for invitation samples and other loose papers.

For organizing my to-do list, I’ve started using the online application TeuxDeux instead of paper lists. I like TeuxDeux because I can access it from anywhere and it allows me to cross things off rather than deleting completed to-do list items, so I can get an idea for what I’ve already accomplished. In addition to daily to-do lists, at the bottom of the page there is a “someday” list for bigger picture to-dos. If you don’t finish a to-do list item on the day you intended, TeuxDeux just moves it over to the next day’s list, and you can drag and drop items so that your list is prioritized. Easy!

I also have a big whiteboard hanging in the office, which I split up into a grid. Each client gets their own box, so I can easily have a glance at what’s on my plate. I keep what’s on the board fairly simple, only including the client’s name, basic payment notes (like “deposit paid” or “bill for 2 xtra hrs”), the projected completion date, and a list of deliverables. In a separate color, I write things like “waiting on content” or “send to print.” Jobs that require some action from me get a red star next to them. The red star is enormously helpful! Since I’m a visual person, sometimes seeing a big red star is more helpful than one written item on a long to-do list.

So how about you? I’d love to hear your organization secrets!

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We touched on this last week but in case you missed it—Ellie and I have set up a Howdy Do It formspring account so that you can ask us questions (anonymously or not) and we’ll answer them as best we can. Originally we thought we’d answer questions in our posts, but a week can be a long time to wait, and it kind of defeats the conversation atmosphere formspring allows. So, hop on over and ask away!”

Howdy Do It came from “how do you do It,” the question Ellie & Margot found themselves asking about their freelance lifestyles, and so Howdy Do It was born, a weekly column about the things we do to keep ourselves organized, inspired and on track. Ellie will be here each Monday, and Margot will be over on Mint at the same time.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

So, it’s already been about 5 months since Margot &
here and here) and we want to know how you guys think we’re doing. You see, we spend quite a bit of time putting these posts putting together each week and while the response has been positive we thought we would ask for some of your thoughts, ideas for more directions to explore so the column doesn’t get stale. We’ve set up a short survey (it’s like 7 questions) hoping y’all will oblige us. Of course general opinions or Q&A are always welcome too. Speaking of Q&A, we’ve also set up a formspring account so that you can ask us questions about design, freelancing, or whatever other burning questions you might have. We’ll answer them in our Monday posts.

Also, if you’re in need of a little inspiration or a slug on the shoulder to keep your nose to the grindstone this week, here’s an oldie but a goodie in the form of Mr. Ira Glass and his thoughts on creative work:

Part 1 of Ira Glass on Storytelling.
Part 2 of Ira Glass on Storytelling.
Part 4 of Ira Glass on Storytelling.