Wholesale pricing when your margins are already tight
One of the shops near me asked if I'd consider selling some of my prints wholesale. Not consignment, actual wholesale. The problem is my cost per print isn't trivial once I factor in paper, ink, and the time I spend on each one. My retail margin is decent but not huge, and cutting the price in half for a retailer would basically erase any profit.
I know the standard advice is to double your wholesale price to get retail, but that math only works if your cost of goods leaves enough room. When you're already pricing fairly tight at shows or online, handing a retailer a 50% discount feels like you're paying them to sell your work.
Has anyone here found a wholesale formula that actually works for art or merch with higher production costs? Do you negotiate a smaller discount than the usual keystone markup, or do you just raise your retail price across the board to make the numbers work? Curious how others have navigated this without undercutting their own direct sales.
Honestly I wrestled with this same question a couple years back when a gallery in Front Royal asked about carrying my Shenandoah prints. I ended up realizing that the "double wholesale to get retail" formula is a solid starting framework, even if you can't always land exactly on it. Some of my prints just don't have the margin for a true keystone split, and that's okay. I use it as the baseline to think through the math, and then I figure out which pieces actually work at wholesale and which ones I only sell direct. Not every print has to be available in every channel. That realization took some pressure off for me.