Chevron question

[Not your average framer]

Hi Iorek,

None of this was ever planned to be like ths. It's just how things have happened around here! You may, or not noticed that I have been through a long history of various health issues, many of which could have killed me, but my life has been spared. As a result, I am not scambling after the last penny. Money is not a terribly big deal to me, but respect and kindness to others is what it's now all about! I am just so greatful to still be alive and this really changes you and your priorities!

There are so many things which I can no longer be wasting time on these days. Time is too precious to watse it on worrying about trivial things. I'm still here and I'm still surviving. There are days when walking can be a big problem, it's how my life is! I am not unhappy and I have no wish to complain about the life I have been given, it's O.K. I am a very simple man, who trusts that there is someone, who is watching over me and caring for me day by day. I like simple things and your rule of three is just that. It is both simple and adequate! What more do we need?

[swany]

but some really took the p**s.

I think it is important that you add 20 mins labor time for meet & greet & when they go over that 20mins you start adding to the price. so as a default they come in & lets say your hourly rate is £30, automatically £10 goes onto the price then another £10 for each 15mins after that. So let's they finally pic the frame & mount & it took them 30 minutes add the £20 when giving them the price. this might seem high but really all your doing is getting a paying customer to pay you for your time. How many tire kickers come in then don't buy.

If you get 6 frames a day at 30mins each that's 3 hours at £30 equal to £90 per day or £450 per week. You would be better making stock frames and selling them at a discount.

If your not covering your breakeven hourly rate then it's time to shut up shop. I know some people have set up by appointment only and that's a good idea as you can set a time frame that suits both of you but also stating a slot time of 15mins you are showing the customer that your time is valuable plus you are controlling the first part of the sales process.

[Not your average framer]

Not many framers are charging £30 an hour, the average is already more than that, most of us already have to pay our overheads and there are plenty of tasks which need doing which are not directly chargable to customers. If you are charging an average of £30 an hour for framing, you are going to have a hard time even managing to break even and just to cover you bills. Making a living on that is even harder. With recent price increases, being able to work efficiently and to produce top quality frames at a price, which customers are willing to pay, while also covering your overheads and having a worthwhile amount left to pay youself a reasonable wage is qite a challenge. It's very nice when high value work comes in, but you have to also do some of the less well paid "bread and butter" stuff as well.

Those of us who produce hand finished frames can be producing some hand finished frames fro start to finish, in only 30 minuites and we still need to get a proper profit margin out of that as well. Choosing the right mouldings, finishes and finishing techniques have a lot to do with making enough profit to live on. Also hand finished frames really need to look amazing to get people to want to buy them. Most people who don't do hand finished frames don't necessarily understand this. Even my ready made frames need to look really stunning, why is anyone going to buy my ready made frames, when they can buy cheap and cheerful ready made frames at the local supermarket for less. Everything which I produce has to look amazing, every time, all the time, in order for me to stay in business. I've already been here for almost 20 years, in a small rural town, where not all businesses are surviving.

It does not help me to produce, too much waste in sizes, which have no potential to be turned in to something saleable. Even my waste needs to contribute to my profits and selling anything too cheaply is also a recipe for disaster, everthing needs to be priced at a price which customers will happily pay, but I need to make a living as well. Ready made frames require considerable know how, if you just copy what popular elsewhere, you will be outpriced and they won't sell. Even my ready made frames need to be selling in to a niche market. At the end of the day, everything must have that "I want it" factor. That's the real secret and it's not something which you can learn over night. In the earlier days, I made plenty of mistakes, before I got things like this right.

You get good times and you also get really bad times. Five months of the year are really terrible and I need to survive those year after year. There are also seven months of the year, which are usually better, but you still need to understand what you are doing, Very often you can hear couple talking as they are looking at items in the shop windows and sometimes they decide not to buy something, so that they can buy their children some ice creams instead and you've lost a sale. Really hot days are extremely bad for business! My shop is not near the coast and on nice sunny days, everyone heads for the beach and the town is empty. Customers are often to really looking for things to buy from the shop windows. Items need to catch their eyes in a few seconds! There's a lot to understand in order to make that happen. I sell crazy amounts of really nice oak frames.

I sell more oak frames, that almost anything else and I know how to produce them in a worthwhile amount of time, they really are top quality and also stunning! These frames need to look stunning and there is no future in producing them to sell them cheap. I try to have something in my widows for everyone. A little known fact, you can lose sales by being too cheap. Iems can be really nice quality, but if you are not charging enough for people's expectations, it will be assumed that they are not worth buying. If you are located in a small town, where footfall is often limited, niche market items are the only logical way to go. If the numerical volue of sales is limited, then individal prices must be adequate to sustai your business. It's about being different and pursuing the better ends of the market, where the worthwhile money is.

Those who have the money to buy nice things are also really knowledgible and very discerning. They are immune to sales chat and they know exactly what the want and what it normally will sell for. You can't pull the wool over such people's eyes! Most of such customers, will avoid anything which is remotely close to mass market fashionable items. These people like to be very much individual in their tastes and they fill their home with various electic items. Items produced to not look too new, go down very well. Many of them live in older period houses, so to have a variety of suitable older looking and even rustic items is good. There are also those, who are quite careful about their budgets as well, who lve in older home, when old looking rustic frames are also popular, the colouring and age needs to look right. Normal antique pine stain is not what anyone is looking for at all!

Forget any thought that I am turning out cheap and quick stuff, that's what I am doing at all. That's not a very viable part of the market!

[cleaver]

Hi Matt

Firstly, I think your (stunning) one-offs are your calling card - and the sign of your superb taste, craftsmanship and eye for detail. These will automatically ad 'kudos' and perceived value to any simpler mouldings you choose to offer.

If I were you (and maybe you already do this), I'd display high quality prints of your beautiful work we've seen you post here. Again, I think this will bolster your credentials as a Rolls Royce framer......and will make the simpler moulding options seem like a bargain.

As to the mouldings, better folk than I have given great advice, plus your own eye is pretty incredible - and you should trust it all the way. However, I think you might look at finding simple ways to 'pimp' plainer frames (if you see fit to do so). E.g. you can add fillets to frames easily and transform them, and/or stack mouldings to create new looks.

I'm sure you will find plenty of more affordable options for customers that'll carry your hallmark of fabulous quality and craftsmanship. I still can't believe you've only been at this for two years !

Paul

[Not your average framer]

Yes Cleaver is right,

Adding that extra distinction to your frames, with slip and other note worth featurs, can be a helpful way of increasig profit and adding extra visual appeal. Why not have a moulding chevron of a moulding without a slip and another of the same moulding with the slip fitted as part of the chevron at a higher price. I love both frame slips and mount slips, but slips need to be those which are making a statement and add something special. For me, narrow basic slips are not really what it's all about.

There was a time when custom finished slips were more common and this could be a good time to bring such things back. I make my own slips, using waste pieces of moulding from my waste bin and I am really in to deeper frame slips, largely modelled of the Victorian and Edwardian Periods. Style is very important. I am particularly in to the style of gothic, Arts and crafts and the Art deco movements, but with a moderm twist as well. Oak is a very big thing for me. I like Oak frames and contrasting coloured Oak frames slips. If you do this the secret is the shape and proportions of the slip.

I like deep, narrow and steeply sloped frame slips. I have a jig with an electric hand planer on the base board, with an adjustable fence, plus the provision to incorporate an angled guide to enable me to cut exact angled faces on to the slip. I do have an electric surface planner, but I am not very keen to use Oak of this as it will blunt the blades quicker. I'm not so bother about blunting the blades on a hand planner, as the blades a much cheaper and not really worth sharpening when new blades are so cheap! Black Oak slips look the business, when fitted inside a plain Oak frame!

[Not your average framer]

I almost forgot. It is quite easy to cut angled stacked frame slips on a table saw. I got two different saw blades for my table saw, the blade that came with the saw and a 60 tooth teflon coated blade for fine finishes. I like the stacked slips to be angled and fitted one slip on the top of the other with a continuous slop across the face of both siips. The bepth of the top slip is noticeablly smaller that the botton slip. I can get a very smooth cut with the 60 tooth blade when cutting Obeche and a very light sanding alongthe cut with really fine abrasive paper.

The two slips are painted in contrasting colours. I like red for the top slip and black for the bottom slip. I often stain obeche frames using raw umber, Ive got a particular raw umber which very nicely mimics medium oak. Using an Obeche main moulding with adequate depth and two contrasting stacked slips, it is a very stunning and really modern look. With a matching slope machined onto the very edge of the sight edge on the main moulding it can really look amazing.

There is a particular Obeche main moulding, which I like to use for this, it has the right proportions for what I like and the price is O.K too! It's a really stunning look and should not be priced to cheap! I'm not joking, it's really big on the WOW factor!

[Jon_Brooke]

My situation is similar to Iorek - I too was a photographer and have only been framing a couple of years, but I took over an existing business so was busy from the off.

Shortly after I started I actually threw out a load of samples and chose to consolidate to probably about 60 to 70 samples in total. About 1/3 of those are plain wood and about half of those are obeche / tulip wood / koto etc that I generally hand finish with paint or stain. Another third are fairly simple modern mouldings - quite a few blacks + flat or bevelled coloured mouldings. The last third are more traditional and quite a few are gold or have a gold or have a gold edge.

I probably do about 75% of my jobs from just those mouldings but quite often I have a conversation where I say to the customer something like "so you like the finish but would prefer something a bit wider?" and then I get out the catalogue.

Usually that leads to a sale without bothering to get in a sample. I buy most of my mouldings from Wessex and usually get a weekly van drop so I don't have massive amounts of stock and I can get stuff in pretty quick.

Over time I've adjusted my range in light of customer preferences, but very often the customer will go with my suggestions.

[Not your average framer]

I has occurred to me that it might be interesting to ask what are the preferred moulding width, which different people are thinks about, in this thread. To some degree, moulding widths may dictate prices, but different moulding widths are also about creating a different look as well. I tend to focus a lot up on the WOW factor, as I tink that it's very largely the WOW factor which creates the customer interest and therefore produces the potential for a sale. Regardless of the relevent moulding width, or price range, I'm still looking for the WOW factor. Even if it a customer on a limited budget, I still think that they are looking for something which looks a bit special in some way and I'm thinking about how to achieve this at a cost that fits the requirement. I think that people decide, if they like something in the first few seconds that they get to see it.

Percieved quality and percieved value for momey, alway seem to me to be really important. I have as much as anything else, identified this mostly as a result of my own thinking and expectations. I strongly suspect that there is quite a bit of needing to understand peoples thinking processes as part of why you should choose particular moulding chevrons. One thing I don't much like is mouldings, which look too skinny in side profile. To me this often just looks cheap, even if you are selling to a customer with a limited budget, it does not mean that they want something which looks cheap. Quite often, I am moe likely to go for a narrower moulding with a deeper side profile, because deeper side profiles look much more solid to me. I'm not a real big fan of anything with shallow rebates anyway.

If the moulding already has a shallow rebate, I cannot add much extra interest by suggesting the addition of a frame slip. Since I already make frame slips from moulding scraps, frame slips are my go to added extra feature, when trying to create that extra something. Frame slips are for me an easy way to often upgrade a basic stock moulding, without having to order something which is not already available from what I already have in stock. Adding a frame slip is a bit like creating a stacked moulding frame, but it usually cheaper than needing to go all the way using two full sized stacked mouldings. It's offering a bit of the stacked look, without it costing too much and enables me to keep an eye on costs to the customer, while making sure that I am still looking after my all important profit margin.

Making a basic moulding look more up market, while also increasing it's visual proportions at an advantageous cost is a very helpful idea for me!

[Not your average framer]

Rose and Hollis have very useful and reasonably priced Oak moulding which is about 20mm wide and this is very quick and easy to finish with thinned down acrylic paint. Thinned down acrylic paint is often much quicker to use that comercially available wood stain and also in some cases much cheaper than using wood stains. Quickly and easily staining oak makes a lot of sense, as it looks great. There are some relatively narrow Oak mouldings, which can be a very good deal in terms of cost, but they sell reasonably well and make great looking small ready made frames.

There's often a really decent potential the profit in producing real oak ready made frames from some of these narrower Oak mouldings. There's a lot less work involved in finishing these moulding, if you do your womework first and because they are produced from genuine Oak they have plenty of sales appeal. Customers will happily buy smaller frames to give as presents if nicely priced. I need to buy some more of my 12mm wide Oak moulding, since I have already used and sold most of my last batch which I bought not long ago.

Quality small Oak frames sell like crazy! I am thinking about creating some small self standing Oak frames, with a pedestal base to make them easy to stand of flat surfaces. These can look really great standing on shelves in bookcases and things like that. Displaying them of shelves inside your shop windows at an appropriate height might help create some customer interest. Nicely finished, they can command quite a good price while still being great value for money to potential customers.