Pricing your airbrush designs properly will of course make a big difference in your overall sales. Customers should always be made to feel that they are getting their money's worth. One good strategy is to separate the price of your airbrush design from the price of the actual shirt. On your design display panels, display the price of each design individually. When shopping for a design, the customer will then know what each design in your selection costs. Number each design on your display for easy reference.

At your sales counter, have a separate menu of your shirt , choices and prices displayed at eye level. At the bottom of your shirt menu, clearly indicate that the shirt and the design are separate items and that to arrive at the total cost, the two prices must be added together (plus applicable sales tax).

After realizing what an airbrush T-shirt costs, about 15% to 20% of your customers will simply walk away, believe it or not. That is the very reason why you should price your de- signs separately. If your pricing is a package deal that covers the design and the shirt, as many as 30% to 40% of interested shoppers are likely to walk away. The package price may seem like a more straightforward way to price your product, but the figure will scare off too many customers who consider it "too expensive for a T-shirt."

Remember that a good number of your customers are impulse buyers. In most cases, there are four basic steps that you need to follow to close a sale with impulse buyers. First, you must get their attention. You do this by having a nice looking, flashy, well-organized display. Second, you must spark their interest. You do this by determining the age, sex, and type of person who most frequents your place of business and targeting that group through the types of designs you sell. Third, make it easy for your customers to make the decision to buy. Do this by offering your designs at a fair price. Make sure that customers feel they are getting their money's worth. And fourth, initiate the sale of the product with your sales pitch. You need to get the customer to move forward with the purchase.

Customers buying on impulse need to have a little time invested working through the first two steps before they concern themselves with price. In the final analysis of making a sale, it is the timing that you must consider when dealing with a customer's response,on price. At a certain point, the customer will have spent enough time choosing a shirt and picking out the design to be painted. It is at this point that you begin revealing the total cost. Most of your customers will pause for a minute and then turn to you with a smile and say, "go ahead and impress me." Now it is time to give them their money's worth and end up with a new bunch of satisfied customers.

Giving the customers their money's worth is subjective, of course. It depends on how much you are charging for your product in the first place. The question you must ask yourself when pricing your designs and shirts is this: If I were in my customer's shoes, would I pay that price? If the answer is yes, you have a winner, If the answer is no and you don't want to lower the price for a particular design, you might try to rework the art. Make the design a little brighter or a little bigger. Airbrush customers always equate size with value.

How you arrange your display may affect profits, too. Consider aesthetics as well as pricing. Don't group your designs by cost—in other words, don't put all of the cheap name designs in one comer and all of the expensive scenery designs in another comer of the display. If you watch your customers, you will notice that most will not stop and study your entire display. As customers pass by your booth, they usually just glance. Maybe a design will catch their eye and they will stop. If the design they noticed costs $12 and all of the other displays around it are also $12, potential cus- tomers might wrongly assume that everything on the display is that price—and away they go. The same is true with the opposite scenario: If the cheaper dis- plays are grouped together, customers may believe that everything is $3. So the idea is to mix your design prices.

Work your display into sections of 20 display panels. In each section, try to have an equal number of designs at each price category (inexpensive, standard, and expensive). It is a good idea to try to get an overall average price for your standard designs in any one display sec- tion. For example, you could have six $3 designs, two $4 name designs, five $6 designs, four styles at $8 to $9, and three from $10 to $12. In this example, your average price would be around $7 or $8 for that 20-display panel section. If you organize your display like this, then when a customer asks, "How much is airbrushing?" you can answer, "Prices for our standard designs start at $3 and go up to $12. Overall, they average around $7." No customer should have a problem with this way of presenting your prices.

The location of your business will dictate your product's overall average price. Ski resorts, for example, will bear much higher prices than flea markets. No matter where your business is located, the time of year will definitely affect sales. During the peak season in resorts, your prices can increase dramatically. In malls, you can charge more for designs catering to a particular holiday such as Mother's Day or Valentine's Day. And, of course, during the Christmas season, no matter where you are located, people will pay top dollar for gifts.

So far we have been looking at different ways to price your standard designs. These designs are the bread and butter of your business, but custom work has its place, too. Customers like to see what you could do for them if they wanted to spend a bit more on a design. Custom designs at West Coast Airbrush shops start at $15 and average about $35, although we never display prices on any custom work, again for the simple reason that customers might assume that everything is $35.

When customers do ask the price for a particular custom design, tell them the price, but indicate that if that's too high, you could do one for a little less. Explain that the cheaper design will not be quite as elaborately detailed as the standard- priced custom design, but assure the customer that it will still be nice. Making a successful sale of a custom design may require that you be a little flexible with your prices, even if you have to give in to your customers a little. Remember, it is better to offer a customer a $2 discount on a design and make the sale than to be inflexible about your price and lose out entirely.

If you are just starting out, visions of having your own airbrush business may be all you can think about. Don't get sidetracked into thinking that all of the pros do nothing but high-line, expensive T-shirt portraits and $100 car designs all day. I can tell you that that's simply not the case. They do name designs, small design group orders, simple lettering layouts, lovey-dovey heart designs, cutesy little cartoons, and, yes, even rainbows over and over again all day every day. But occasionally, just occasionally, that awe-inspired perfect airbrush customer walks into the store and plops down $75 or so and says, "Do me something that will knock my socks off." It's this one-in- a-hundred customer that helps T-shirt airbrush artists keep their artistic integrity.

All in all, the foundation of a suc- cessful airbrush T-shirt shop is built on the standard quick, inexpensive designs, the $3 to $12 ones that you do every day over and over. Certain designs seem consistently to sell best. The dual-heart design with two people's names, designs with cute cartoons, rainbows, and unicorns are an airbrush shop's staples. Why is this? The typical buying customer at most West Coast Airbrush stores located in shopping malls is female, 25 to 45 years old, with a high school art education. Target this group of customers, and they will support your efforts as a T-shirt airbrush artist. It does not take much to impress the typical customer as far as the quality of the artwork goes, but we as artists should have quality standards for our inexpensive designs. The typical shopper is more impressed with the sub- ject matter and the colors of the design and concerned with the price. These factors, along with the overall appearance and shopping atmosphere in the store, are what make the sale.