Good Day. The financial crash this year began in the States, and we have watched it from here with a certain distance, but the distance is not as safe as it looks. I have a client in Las Vegas who lost a great deal, and watching that up close taught my clients, and me, that nothing is certain, and that we had better be pragmatic in how we work.
This has been a downturn in more than money. People have stopped spending on design, and stopped valuing it the way they did a year ago. I have struggled to keep clients, watched budgets simply evaporate, and learned, out of necessity, how to stretch a dollar further than I thought possible.
It also pressed a bad habit into me that I am still trying to break. In desperation I began to discount, to bend on price when a client pushed, and once you start that, it is hard to stop. I want to say this plainly, as much to myself as to anyone. The price is the price.
You would not haggle over a Mona Lisa. You do not walk into a grocery store and negotiate the price of a pound of ground beef, or argue the cost of a gallon of milk. You decide it is worth it, and you pay, and you carry it home. Yet this downturn has quietly taught a whole market that they may negotiate a designer down, and too often, in a hard month, I have let them.
I am naming it because naming it is the first step out. The work has a value that does not move with someone else's anxiety, and treating it as though it does is a slow way to teach the world that craft is cheap.
So this is the year I learned both halves of the lesson at once. How to be lean and resourceful when money is tight, and how dangerous it is to confuse being generous with being undervalued. I have not mastered the second half yet. But 2008 made very sure I will never again forget the question.
Jonathan Ellis · Edmonton · May 2008