Value vs. Effort: How to Price Your Furniture the Right Way

Val Frania

Hi my Flipping friends, welcome back to Flipping Furniture for Profit. I'm Val Frania, and today we're stepping into a topic that every furniture artist bumps into sooner or later. Pricing. It's not necessarily the emotional side of our work, you know, the self-doubt or the imposter syndrome. Today, it's more of a tip day, a teaching day, a practical nuts and bolts. Let's talk about strategy episode. And I want to start with the truth.

Many of us forget you're not just flipping furniture. You're creating functional art. And functional art deserves to be priced accordingly. Before we talk numbers, let's walk you through something that's so easy to forget when you're starting a piece and you're just staring at it, that you've worked on it for so many days and you're thinking, how do I price this?

What you create isn't just the paint job people see. It's everything they don't see. Searching, hunting. Waiting for the right project piece at the right price. Driving over there to pick it up and loading it. Unloading it. Figuring out where you're going to put it. Storing it until you can even get to it. Assessing it, walking around it, making sure it's solid, deciding whether you have to repair the joints, the hardware if you want to keep that, or buy new. Fix veneer that might be chipped. All of those repairing things, deep cleaning it, sanding, priming, painting, sometimes more than once, adding details, deciding on the redesign, sealing and protecting after you've decorated that beautiful piece up, and then staging and photographing, listing, answering messages, arranging pickup or delivery.

There's so much to what we do. This is hours of unseen effort. This is experience. This is skill. And that's why even though I never price based strictly on hours or products use, the value of what we create is absolutely real. We're not making bulk produced furniture.

We're not crafters selling trinkets. We're furniture artists and we should act like it. We price for value, not effort. This is where most beginners get stuck. "If it only took me two hours to paint this end table, how can I charge one hundred and forty five dollars?" Or, "People aren't buying? I bet my price is too high," so they drop to sixty five or seventy five, or a bigger piece, you drop it one hundred bucks and suddenly you've trained your buyers that you're a bargain seller instead of an artist.

I price for value the uniqueness, the artful presence, the final design, usefulness. Not the hours, not the paint, not the materials. When you price by effort, you cheat your work. When you price by value, you elevate it. So let's talk about some practical pricing rules that should work for you. Now let's get into the details. The part you can write down and use today.

One: this is a real simple one. Don't price with zeros. I don't know, it just seems that people are afraid of zeros. A dresser at two hundred feels generic, stiff like a big box price. A dresser at one ninety seven or one eighty nine feels like a thoughtful price. And believe it or not, if someone sees one ninety seven or one eighty nine, they feel like that's way cheaper than two hundred. There's something about those zeros that feels more expensive than one ninety seven. Numbers ending in seven or nine convert better because the brain feels like it's getting something special, not something made at the factory.

Okay. Number two: for sets, price two ways. Let's say you're selling a tall dresser. A long dresser and a couple nightstands. Well, maybe somebody doesn't need the nightstands. Maybe somebody only needs one dresser. So I suggest, and it works well, price them as a set and then also price them individually. Make the set price slightly less than buying the pair separately. So if you have let's say you have two night stands, you could price them one forty nine each or two seventy nine for the set. And this lets people feel like they're getting a deal by buying the set, and then increases your odds of moving the whole set at once. People love a deal.

And also, number three: free delivery is a sales booster, even if it's only within a certain radius, like we live in Wausau. So on some pieces that we don't mind moving on our own, we'll say free delivery in the Wausau area. People buy faster when they don't have to figure out trucks and someone to help them load it up.

Okay. Number four: never reduce the price inside the original listing on Marketplace. If you drop the price, Facebook crosses out your old one and puts the new one right next to it. So what does this train your buyers to do? It trains them to wait. Wait for the next drop. Wait for you to get desperate. Wait for that magic fifty percent slash. And instead, delete the listing entirely and repost with a new price. It's a fresh listing. It gets fresh eyes, fresh audience. It bumps it to the top. That's another way that you're going to get more views.

Number five: price ten to twenty percent higher than your target. Why? Because people feel like they're getting a deal. If your goal's one eighty, list it at two nineteen. When the offer one eighty, then you can accept it without losing profit. And if they don't make an offer, then you make the two nineteen. Either way, you win. People love getting a deal.

Number six: how to handle low ballers with Grace. I know, I know how frustrating those twenty five and fifty dollar offers can be. Here's a few options. All perfectly acceptable. Number one, just ignore it. It's totally fine. Just scroll on by or just simply say, "No thanks." And sometimes I say, "No thanks. I just listed it." I'm not willing to deal. And sometimes they'll just come back and say, "Okay, I'll take it at that price." That happens more often than you realize. Or then you can say, "No thanks, but I have other pieces closer to your price range." I think that was brilliant. I read that online one day. I thought, that's a really good idea.

Or if you're feeling really spicy in the the the lowball offer is ridiculous. Just say, "It's for sale, not for rent." I like that one. But do keep it classy. We need to have a good reputation online, so being polite and courteous goes a long way. And sometimes they'll either come back and make you full price offer, or maybe keep an eye on what you list in the future because you were a kind soul. You're running a business. But a little humor doesn't hurt either.

Okay. Why you should not price according to match the economy. This is important. There will always be people who are bargain hunters. I'm a bargain hunter. I'm sure you probably are too. There will always be people who shop yard sales and thrift stores. There will always be people who think everything should be forty dollars or less. Those aren't your customers. Your clients are the ones who value your craftsmanship, uniqueness, quality, and especially art.

What we do is art. I'm going to keep saying that until you get it. We are furniture artists. We're not just furniture flippers, we're furniture artists. Even during hard times, fine art doesn't go on clearance. Why? Because the value doesn't change when you reduce your prices just to make a sale, you're accidentally labeling your work as cheap or disposable, and once you put yourself in that category, it's really hard to get out.

And plus, you know, if you lower your prices ridiculously low, then why bother doing it at all? And you're just tagging the people that want to buy cheap? There is money out there. Keep your prices where they should be so the right buyer comes along. So instead of lowering prices, focus on visibility and presentation. Maybe better staging is in order. Or better photos, better listing descriptions, listing on multiple platforms, using keywords, posting reels, or behind the scenes videos that might be helpful. Offering delivery whether free or you just tack on a little bit. Put your best pieces at the top of your Facebook Marketplace shop, and if you delete and repost every seven to ten days, your listings will refresh. More people will see it and that's huge. It really is a numbers game. You got to get your piece in front of as many people as possible so you can find your buyer.

Your job isn't to reach everyone. Your job is just to reach the people who see your work, who appreciate it. There's always money out there. Always. Your job is to draw out the people who value specialty items, which is the definition of your furniture art.

Okay, so what if you need space and you need to sell quickly? I get it, not everyone has a workshop or basement or garage space. Pieces pile up. Life happens. But here's the truth. Undervaluing your work should not be your strategy. Instead, rotate your listings. Maybe focus on some easier flips temporarily, or spend some time learning more about redesign, new methods, new new ways of presenting your piece. Create a staging routine that'll speed up your process. Improve your listing copy and you know, offering delivery all of those things. Think about posting your work in some local neighborhood groups. I know there's several apps online that you can do that. Maybe build a coming soon list of interested customers if you maybe even do some emailing. Maybe create some urgency with limited time bundles. You know, buy two pieces, get free delivery or ten percent off your next purchase, or buy three items, get twenty percent off.

Be creative. The more strategic you become, the less you'll ever feel the need to slash prices. So I want to leave you with this. You're an artist. I know I say that over and over, but I want to keep reminding you that you create beauty, value, functionality in a world that desperately needs all three. There's, you know, those big box stores, they sell the same stuff over and over, and everybody's got the same stuff in their house. How about we decorate our home to delight us? Or how about we offer beauty to the people around us? Something different than what the big box stores offer? You don't shrink your worth because someone messages you with a low offer. You don't price like you're competing with Walmart or Ikea. You're not. You're creating a one of kind, one of a kind pieces meant to live in someone's home for years. So price with confidence, price with intention, price with strategy. And remember that the right buyer's out there and they will pay for the value you bring. You just have to get your piece in front of their eyes.

You create amazing pieces. Then there's someone out there that is going to want that. If this episode encouraged you, would you consider sharing it with another flipper? Somebody may it struggling with pricing somebody that's discouraged because their pieces aren't selling.

And in the future, if you want more practical guidance like this, you can always check out my Furniture Flipping Blueprint. That's where I teach beginners and those that have have been at a while how to flip furniture with confidence, clarity, profit. And thanks for joining me today. Now go list that piece with confidence and charge what it's worth. You've got this. See you next week.