Keeping up with inflation

Miles Newlyn
Miles Newlyn Posts: 252
in Type Business
In the new year I put my license prices up by 20%, and some usage quotas a lot more. The first quarter shows no decrease in orders. The font industry should not have to suffer as a result of the decreasing value of money.

Comments

  • Justin Penner
    Justin Penner Posts: 65
    That's great to hear, Miles.

    In case anyone missed it, there was a good discussion about how font pricing has not kept up with inflation on Twitter recently:

  • Yves Michel
    Yves Michel Posts: 183
    Very interesting threat and very important problem in this "World War" period!
  • Alex Visi
    Alex Visi Posts: 185
    Yves Michel said:
    very important problem in this "World War" period!
    Yes, it is. If you don’t raise the prices, the war and the restrictions are being paid for out of your pocket. If you raise the prices, that’s passed on to your clients.
  • JoyceKetterer
    JoyceKetterer Posts: 813
    Just thought I'd offer a counter point. 

    First, I think it's a good idea to periodically adjust pricing.  Second, I think it's really important to make a distinction between labor and licensing costs.  

    For Darden Studio, all our current retail fonts have long since broken even and our overhead hasn't gone up to maintain assets.  Plus, our prices were always in the high middle.  Therefore, I think it's totally reasonable to make the strategic decide to not change anything now.  We are, of course, raising the price of our labor.  
  • Miles Newlyn
    Miles Newlyn Posts: 252
    Thanks Joyce, that's a great counterpoint. It's a way of looking at the business that's quite different from mine.

    Would the raising of the price of labour now mean that fonts being designed now should be priced higher than ones done previously at lower labour costs? 
  • JoyceKetterer
    JoyceKetterer Posts: 813
    edited April 2022
    @Miles Newlyn For now it just affects  commissions and consulting.  We don't have any true custom work at the moment but we have several language expansions going and some consulting.

    You ask an interesting question but for complicated reasons it's not really relevant. 

    One, we are doing a rebrand and new website which should launch at the end of the year.  When we do we're changing the basic licensing pricing model to be more focussed on the style rather than the subfamily.  Along with that the one style price will go up, and so will the full family price but some of the middle configurations of styles prices will stay the same or go down.  This was planned anyway but I think it will probably satisfy my inflation related concerns.

    Two, I decided several years ago that my life is made much easier if I have core pricing across all families.  That is, super families do have different prices but all sub families (the smallest is 16 styles and the biggest is 24) are the same.  I'd not break that rule to treat newer families differently even if I thought I could ethically justify it.  I'd probably instead just split the difference.  

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