
The class on 3/03/10 was aimed at making us understand costings and money skills when setting up a business. Especially in Creative Business, whether your a Textile Designer, Illustrator or Graphic Artist, independant designers find it hard to make profit, having to balance fixed costs, costs of materials and labour and also giving a price that is 'suitable'.
The class introduced me to the term 'fixed costs', which include all the standard consistent bills and outgoings, which are taken out whether you have sold 1 or 5000 items of your work. These include studio rent, heating and lighting bills, travel costs, tax etc...
To earn enough profit to keep a business going, these fixed costs need to be taken into account when pricing your work. The cost of materials is inportant and also the number of hours of labour you and other staff have worked.
A simple excersise using Lego bricks helped the class to find ways of cutting down material costs to create a larger profit margin. We were given a pricing sheet which contained images of the different Lego bricks, for example; Three brick, Four brick, Long four, Slanted Two... each size and shape had a price attached. We were then given an image of a model to create. Our group made a baby Giraffe and Elephant. These worked well, yet after looking at the overall prices to make the models, we looked at ways to get the costs as low as possible whilst still achieving the same appearance. For example, we found it was cheaper to use four small 'one' bricks at 50p each rather than using a single 'four' block brick at £3.00.
This excersise worked well at helping me to understand how costs can be cut when minor changes are made.
Final Models:
Baby Giraffe: £18.00
Elephant: £63.00
Expensive Lego figures!