Sticker Shock? Why Investing in your Business is Worth it.
STICKER SHOCK? WHY INVESTING IN YOUR BUSINESS IS WORTH IT.
If you’ve been to our services page and gotten sticker shock while you’re there, hopefully I can explain myself a little bit in this post!
TLDR; We aren’t like other designers, instead we provide our clients with a holistic experience that creates value and meaning around their brands.
Admittedly, I was shocked too when I sat down with my accountant to calculate exactly how much I should be charging for the amount of work I do for clients. After going through each task in my deliverables that I’d previously tracked my time on, I was more shocked by how much I was doing for free. I always knew I was undercharging for my work but I guess I never realized how much. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s super important to over-deliver for your clients but I’m also running a business and I quite literally am the one who puts the food on the table so I needed to start charging for the work I’m doing. Secondly, I just don’t have time to do all that free work anymore. As the primary caretaker of my daughter and my household, I can’t afford to take on months of work I’m not getting paid to do. Which is a perfect segue to my next point:
I like to compare what we do to building you a custom dream home. Building your brands’ custom dream home does not happen overnight. Let me repeat: building your brands’ custom dream home DOES NOT happen overnight. It requires months and months of work. I’ve seen designers market launching you a website in a week or even in 24 hours. These designers are using templates they pre-built which is what allows them to do it for cheaper. They put in the up-front work and then cash in on that work. If you see a designer promise a website in 24 hours, it’s not going to be custom and it’s assuming you’ve already done the work of being able to provide them with content i.e. building your brand’s story, copywriting and photography. If you have done all that work and don’t necessarily care about customization, then a semi-custom template is a great option for you! However, if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that most businesses have no idea what that content consists of or why they need it. More on that in a minute.
Hiring an experienced designer is going to cost you in the multiple thousands. That’s just something you won’t get around. When I worked in the design department at IKEA, we used to do something called comp-shopping. Comp-shopping where you go around to your competitors and see what they are charging for similar items. Rest assured, I’ve done my comp-shopping. I’m not out here trying to get away with charging 7k for a website just because.
With all of that said, our prices are built around something you usually don’t get anywhere else and that’s strategy. After designing dozens of brands and dozens of websites, I learned that I cannot effectively do my job to the level I would like to without strategy which is why it’s built it in. If your brand doesn’t want strategy, then I don’t want to be the designer on it. Because without it, everyone’s confused. Including me — the one who’s supposed to provide your customers with clarity.
So now, instead of a website that would normally cost $5,000, it now costs $7,000 but you don’t have to do anything except answer a few questions. That’s simply ideal for the right kind of person.
Below is a graphic we’ve put around our website to give you a visual of how all the components we offer work together to create one beautiful product.
COMPONENT 1 - STRATEGY
What is strategy? I’ve done my best to over communicate around my website the importance of strategy but I’ll give you a more in-depth look right here. With brand strategy, we define who your brand is talking to. This is so important because at the end of the day, you are trying to sell something to someone. Who is that person? After we define that, the next thing thing we have to figure out is what problem your business solves for that specific person. We use a specific psychological framework to help us define all of that.
COMPONENT 2 - MESSAGING
Now that we’ve figured out who you are talking to and the problem you are ultimately solving, we can start crafting the language around your brand. We’ll find your brand tone, come up with a mission statement and other phrases and lastly determine your fonts and colors. The fonts and colors come after this. The fonts and colors depend on all of this information. For an extreme example, you don’t want to have masculine fonts and colors if your solving a problem for a women in her thirties. That’s pretty obvious but something you may not realize is that type and color have many subconscious effects on individuals.
COMPONENTS 3 + 4 - DESIGN AND PHOTO
You cannot skip the first two steps and just start here. A brand that doesn’t first lay the foundation and build out a framework does not solve a problem, creates confusion, and lacks trust and value around their brand. From the outside it feels chaotic which is just a picture of how it feels internally.
During this final step, we paint the walls and add the light fixtures, wall paper and tile. aka we make it pretty. We design a custom, unique icons and logos and create a fluid and strategic website that converts. This creates a perception of your brand that builds trust.
When you have all of these details in place, that chaotic feeling you had turns into peace. That’s an investment that’s worth it if you ask me.
