Why should I bother offering lower-priced merchandise if the profit margins are small?

Lower-priced items like prints, cards, stickers, and merchandise aren’t primarily about profit margins—they’re about customer acquisition and marketing. Think of them as an inexpensive way to acquire customers and email addresses that you wouldn’t get otherwise. At events, people might not buy a $300 original, but selling 50 cards at lower prices gets your work into 50 homes and potentially 50 email addresses. The revenue potential of your business over the next ten years will be directly proportional to the number of new customers you acquire per year. This is a fact: the easiest customer to get is one you already have. So these smaller items are your entry point for building a customer base that you can market to repeatedly over time. Don’t dismiss the ‘chintzy stuff’—it’s strategic customer acquisition.

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Asked by an artist dismissive of lower-priced products · Answered by Patrick Shanahan · art-marketing-podcast · 2025-08-29