Our BrandingIrons became a huge hit thanks to BoingBoing, Wired, a lot of other blogs and many twitter peoples. I then decided that it would be interesting and a good idea to raise the price of the BrandingIrons by $20. Instead of $25 they would now cost $45. The idea was that these custom BrandingIrons could then do more to subsidize the Shapeways community. It was an experiment in reversing the 'loss leader' idea to create a 'profit leader' that would build the foundations for thousands of new creations in the future.

This was a mistake and we are going to go back to our original pricing of $25. So the marketing person's headline for this post should be, "Huge price cut on customizable branding Irons"

Sales of the BrandingIrons slowed from a torrent to a trickle. And I spent a lot of time listening and discovering my error. Nick Taylor, summed it up best in a blog comment, "I think you're breaking an unspoken social contract that there is a meaningful relationship between the value of something, and the price." Price and value always fascinate me. Why is one shirt for sale for $200 and the other for $10? What value & perceived value operate on your buying decisions? How we do we compare a price when we've never considered a comparable product? How much does "unique" cost? What ideas are worth paying for, which are not?

With all my supposed thinking, my little experiment completely missed the simple idea that there would be people out there told about the $25 price who would find the new $45 price disagreeable (and might even find us annoying for changing it).

We did sell less and I would attribute this to the 'sticker shock' and justified feelings of unfairness. We also received feedback from people explicitly stating that they found $25 to be a good price point and $45 to be excessive for the product. All in all it would seem that 3D printed customizable BrandingIrons are a rather elastic good. I really liked the discussion on the blog and all the emails that I received. But, I must apologize to the people that were annoyed or confused by the price change. The mistake was mine, my apologies.

We want to be as simple, as easy and clear as we can. This is why we are reversing the price raise and reimbursing the people that brought BrandingIrons at the higher price. We will also never again flippantly play with price but stick to the calculated prices as we have in the past. From now on: prices on Shapeways will only go down, as they should.

You can find our Customizable Logo BrandingIron here and our Customizable Text Branding Iron here.