Invoice Breakdown #1

Hello Weekend Club Members! We're about to get REAL transparent over here. Are you ready? 

I'm starting a new series where I'm going to share some of our invoices and break them down for you. If this is helpful to you guys, I think we'll share one of these maybe every other month or so. I think I'm going to mix it up and share some of our old invoices and talk about what we actually should have charged and some of our more recent invoices that were priced more appropriately. I was inspired to do this because of this site which I've found to be super helpful. 

A couple things before we get started:

This is solely for the purpose of educating, not for bragging or for making anyone feel bad about their rates. This is partly why I want to share some of our old invoices so that you can all see how much we've grown - and know that you can do this too!

These are meant to be examples and not specific financial advice. We don't know the ins and outs of your business, process, or the projects you take on. We can't give super specific advice because every job and client will be so different. We encourage you to take all of these posts with a grain of salt and then apply them to your own business and shoots however makes sense for you. 

I'm also not going to share any names since I want to protect our client's information but I'll do my best to describe the project as best I can in order to give you some context. 

It feels really vulnerable for me to share these and I'm a little nervous haha. As much as we talk about pricing your worth, I always still feel self-conscious about our own prices and it's scary to put them out there for other people to see. I'm doing it because I love you guys so BE NICE OK?

If you have any questions about the specifics of any of the invoices that I share, feel free to reach out to me and ask questions in the Slack channel or comment on the post so that everyone else can see and learn too!

Ok here we go...

The first shoot I want to share is one where we hit our minimum and had a lot of fun but I do feel that we should have been paid more because of the amount of work and the size of the company. We were a little flexible since they only needed to use the images for three months so we could cut the licensing fees down a little, and it was also a project that we really wanted. 

This company came to us last fall (2020) wanting images for a holiday campaign, but they wanted the images to be still somewhat generic and evergreen in case they ended up wanting to use them after the holidays were over. They wanted to feature their products that would make good holiday gifts, and part of the goal was to have posters in their cafe windows showing the products since customers couldn't go inside the stores to see them. The budget they gave us was $6-$10K.

They wanted two gifs, and eight stills, but some of those images would be shot with the same exact set/setup but just different products since their US products looked different than some of their products sold in Asia and they wanted to showcase both. Because they had a really tight turnaround time (made even shorter by going back and forth with their legal team on the contract) as well as a smaller budget, we agreed that we would only do post production for the two gifs and they would handle post for all the stills. 

We would be planning, building, and styling the sets, but they would bring in their own florist who regularly worked with their company so the cost of her labor as well as the florals is not included in the invoice. This was also challenging for me because I never was able to speak directly to her even though I asked to. I did send over illustrations of the sets based off the examples of her arrangements I was given and then we kind of winged it the day of the shoot and thankfully it worked out. 

Something else that wasn't included in the invoice was meals since the company just took care of those. That's definitely something to discuss during your initial calls and include in your estimate if needed.

Let's walk through the actual invoice - I'm just going to type everything out here so that I can comment on it.

TWO GIFS, EIGHT STILL IMAGES

Set Design and Building..................$1,400

This was supposed to be for five sets but I ended up creating 6. I did reuse aspects of each set so that helped a little but I also did quite a bit of production. I definitely did more than they asked of me, we probably could have delivered something more simple and they would have been just as happy but I got really inspired by the architecture of their stores and went all out. I spent at least 3-4 days planning and building the sets so I really should have charged closer to $3,500-$4,000 for this.

Prop Styling..................$800

This I do feel like was a fair price since I didn't end up doing too much styling. I planned and prepped the props which ended up being very simple - we mostly used blocks and our Moodelier columns so all I had to do was spray paint them. The day of I set up the blocks and columns and then helped to choose the floral arrangements but the florist did all of the floral styling. I didn't have any returns to do after the shoot (PRAISE). 

Photography and Lighting..................$3,500

This is what we tend to charge for one day of shooting and lighting but it can vary. If it's more simple we can drop it down a little, if its more complex we will raise it.

Equipment and Studio..................$450

We always charge a fee for our studio and equipment even though we typically don't have to rent anything. This helps to cover our rent and the wear and tear on our equipment. We probably could have charged a little more here, but even a little bit helps. 

Post Production..................$1,600

This price was based on the two gifs alone but we wanted to make sure we factored in how valuable animated / stop motion content can be for social.

Licensing..................$4,400

This is where we really should have charged more, especially for the size of the company and the fact that these would be used internationally. But the fact that they only needed them for three months definitely played into it. We also split up the areas so they only had to pay for usage in Asia for the images that would actually be used in Asia and vice versa. This meant that this fee covered usage for the following:

         *Owned website and organic social media for five stills and two gifs in the USA for

           three months

         * Owned website and organic social media for three stills in Asia for three months

         *One printed store window display (one image) internationally for three months

According to Fotoquote, the cost of all of this should have been closer to $13,030 for three months. They did end up purchasing the rights to run one social media ad (a still) for three months for $750 after the shoot, which definitely should have cost more but it was nice to make a little extra cash. 

Set and Props..................$325.23

This was for the actual cost of set materials and props. I had estimated $350. This was before we were charging a rental fee for our props, so this was just the cost of the plywood boards I bought, paint, spray paint, rollers, tape, and wooden dowels. 

INVOICE TOTAL..................$12,475.23

There you go! Our first invoice breakdown. If I were to price out this shoot now, I would have priced it closer to $25K or possibly even higher due to the amount of work and size of the company. I would love to hear your thoughts on this, if it's helpful or if you have any questions! Also feel free to let me know if you would have priced things differently - I always love hearing how other price things. 

Is it the weekend yet?

Elle