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I’ve seen this play out in other (mostly creative) fields as well. But it is not without its challenges. Namely, the people who will pay the very high prices te

I’ve seen this play out in other (mostly creative) fields as well. But it is not without its challenges. Namely, the people who will pay the very high prices tend to come in via reputation and referrals. You can’t generally just throw up a website and some AdWords as a brand new baker and start pulling in five-figure clients. They either want to hear from other people who trust that you’re the person to go to, or at least you need a portfolio of similar work. And of course therein lies a bit of a catch-22. You can’t get high end clients without having other high end clients. No number of $30 birthday cake clients are going to give you credibility with $6k wedding cake clients. Cake baking is one example where you might be able to work around this somewhat by just baking high end cakes for no client, posting them on social media, and hope to pull in a few brave first customers. But for trades like tattoos where there’s really no way to do it without a client, it’s tough. I have no experience with tattoos, but I’m guessing that in that world the high end customers want to see that you have tattooed beautiful things on other beautiful people. If your current client base is average looking people who mostly get boring or trashy tattoos, you can’t just quadruple your prices and expect it to work.

EveYoung 5y ago
Having worked in the luxury industry before, my experience is that it really comes down to personal connections and branding. The problem is that positioning yourself as a true luxury player takes years (even in local markets) and until then you're still have to pay rent for high-end locations, PR, and equipment. There is a reason why most successful founders have strong industry connections and/or excellent references.
brudgers 5y ago
There’s no Catch-22 if you know the potential clients socially…or your parents and grandparents do. It’s not that that advantage means a person doesn’t have to work hard. It means that hard work is more likely to produce success. Even more important the social connections make hard work more likely to produce success. Prior familiarity with $6000 cakes creates intuition regarding where to prioritize efforts and where efforts don’t produce returns. For example, what is the optimum resource commitment to the cake box. About how good does it need to be? Not enough is bad. Too much is money left on the table.

EveYoung 5y ago

Having worked in the luxury industry before, my experience is that it really comes down to personal connections and branding. The problem is that positioning yourself as a true luxury player takes years (even in local markets) and until then you're still have to pay rent for high-end locations, PR, and equipment. There is a reason why most successful founders have strong industry connections and/or excellent references.

brudgers 5y ago

There’s no Catch-22 if you know the potential clients socially…or your parents and grandparents do. It’s not that that advantage means a person doesn’t have to work hard. It means that hard work is more likely to produce success. Even more important the social connections make hard work more likely to produce success. Prior familiarity with $6000 cakes creates intuition regarding where to prioritize efforts and where efforts don’t produce returns. For example, what is the optimum resource commitment to the cake box. About how good does it need to be? Not enough is bad. Too much is money left on the table.