$100/hr shop rate

[Donngal]

as a thought, for example.
I dont know anyone that likes to get tattooed that has a issue with 75-125 per hour for professional custom work, and that shop overhead and material costs way less.

D

[Marco-borromei]

Donngal, that's a good comparison. My tattoo, 20+ years ago was a little less than one hour beginning to end, and cost $150.

I'd showed up with an actual size original drawing of what I wanted, the artist spent less then 10 min actually redrawing it [thank God, i am a crappy artist with a pencil], named a price, and started working. I walked out of the shop less than an hour later, all done.

And swearing I'd never do it again.

That year a gallon of gas cost about $1.30 and a gallon of milk about 2.75.

[Donngal]

Donngal, that's a good comparison. My tattoo, 20+ years ago was a little less than one hour beginning to end, and cost $150.

I'd showed up with an actual size original drawing of what I wanted, the artist spent less then 10 min actually redrawing it [thank God, i am a crappy artist with a pencil], named a price, and started working. I walked out of the shop less than an hour later, all done.

And swearing I'd never do it again.

That year a gallon of gas cost about $1.30 and a gallon of milk about 2.75.

And then on top of that im sure you tipped him or something

[Hildebrandt]

I think that the comparison to a tattoo artist highlights the main difficulty in being paid adequately as an armourer - you can get something meaningful from a tattoo artist in a matter of hours, but it takes an armourer days to make just about anything. Most people can afford to pay someone for a few hours at a $100/hour shop rate, but few can afford (or at least justify) to pay for work at that rate for a sustained period. For that reason, it is generally easier for an armourer to get paid a decent wage working on shorter projects, and almost impossible to make the same wage on something really time-consuming, even if its far higher cost makes it appear profitable.

[Keegan Ingrassia]

Armor is no longer an essential part of life, nor needed for one's survival. It is difficult to justify the expense of armor, then, without moving the mental perception from "protective armor" to "wearable art". An artistic metal sculpture, people will happily shell out just about any price. But when you get to that level, your target market is no longer middle class individuals with a love of history...you're having to market to the upper class. The people who are willing and able to pay for a custom piece of sheet metal art...the people willing to go lavish just to make a statement. You're no longer a craftsman...you're an artist, and you refer to your shop as a "studio".

[Thomas Powers]

studio? Bah; it's an Atelier !

[James Arlen Gillaspie]

studio? Bah; it's an Atelier !

Dam' straight!

[James Arlen Gillaspie]

Nobody needs Lamborghinis, custom motorcycles, Alexander McQueen dresses, symphony orchestras, opera, van Gogh, or movies, either. Hell, we went for thousands of years without any of this stuff, and nobody noticed.

“Allow not nature more than nature needs,
Man's life's as cheap as beast's.” -King Lear

The problem is we targeted the wrong people. The SCA is, to steal a line from Chesterton, a "sieve that holds the sand and lets the gold go free”, chock full of low-rollers, and reenactment is really a rich man’s game that is being played by poor people. I have a wanna-be client who is a painter of note that gets $10,000 for one of his larger canvases. He is amazed there is no high end store front for high quality modern art armour in the L.A. area or NYC, and says, ‘They want it. They just don’t know they want it, because they’ve never seen it.”

[Hildebrandt]

Just what I was thinking, James.

[Otto von Teich]

James, A great observation I'd say! I've always considered it to be high end functional art. The difference between paintings and armour (steel sculpture) is the painting has to look nice in two dimensions. The armour has to look nice in three dimensions AND function properly. The physical effort is also much greater in swinging a hammer near a hot forge than swinging a paintbrush in a air conditioned studio. Also, a lot more hours go into building a fine armour than in painting picture of one!

[Keegan Ingrassia]

Said it better than I did, James.

[WinterTreeCrafts]

I'm still a newcomer compared to most posting in this thread, but hopefully someone will get some use out of the data I can chime in with.

For the last bunch of years I've charged $30/hr. (I charged 25 a decade ago when I first started) It was too little and I wish I had raised my rate far sooner. The only reason I was able to make that work was because I lived in a doublewide in a tiny back woods town with very low property taxes and my medical insurance from the People's Republic of Vermont was highly subsidized. I had a rusted out beat to hell Chevy pickup that had no loan on it. My mortgage payment for my house, shop and 5 acres of land was under $400. Taxes were another $100 a month. My kitchen is equipped from thrift stores and dumpster-diving at private colleges just before summer break where the rich kids throw all manner of useful things away.

I also didn't do anything that cost money. I didn't travel, eat out, purchase music/movies, don't have TV. I didn't have a cell phone and I don't drink or smoke. So pretty much every dime normal people spend on "having fun" I was investing in tools and materials.

It wasn't too terribly many years ago that I had a mini-celebration because I had bought my first pair of jeans at retail. Prior to that a merchant who knows me in the real world referred to my style of attire as "POW". (He nailed it).

Every penny went into equipping the shop and feeding me while I practiced at making something worth charging money for. One time I went back and added it all up. I spent over $100k on my shop in order to make $20-$25k per year at best. Thats a private college education right there (granted, probably more useful though... I say as I am still paying off student loans).

If I had a family, kids, or anything less than stellar and cheap medical care thanks to Vermont (I had a run-in with skin cancer that would have financially crippled me otherwise, 6 surgeries and I've lost count of how many biopsies and labs) theres just no freakin way...

Where this is all going is I guess to tell the newcomers, during my 20's I was just happy to be making a living my own way rather than pouring coffee or running a cash register or breaking my back in the fields or pushing a shovel. By being obsessively frugal I could afford a nice sword for my classes or a welder or something every few months. When I started coming up on 30 I looked around and realized that this wasn't going to fly forever and I started making enough money that the taxes and premiums went up twice as much as the increase in my income, meaning by making more money I was making less, the truck had fully rusted out and needed to be replaced, the so called "Starter-house" that was supposed to be a 5-year stepping stone to a regular stick-built house was approaching its 10 year anniversary... I didn't have a penny for retirement, just planned on working until I died, Etc. Etc...

Now that I'm married, have a nice new truck and only hesitate a moderate amount about buying a nice wool sweater and am building a beautiful house and new shop, I gave myself a raise to $40/hr. I gotta tell you, after becoming familiar with the building trades, its still a pittance. People with half my skills and half my care and attention to detail and half my customer service are making twice as much. The bills I received for shoddy, rushed and piss-poor work were astounding, and these were the folks who were reputed to be the best of the local fare. After firing them all and doing it myself I've discovered/acquired a variety of skills that can make me far more money than making armour.

$40/hr for the skill and capital it takes to be an armourer isn't shit. It really isn't. A real wake up call is getting a bill for $150 from a lawyer because she spent 20 minutes reading an e-mail from me and making a correction to a letter she needed to send, when the errors in the letter were her mistake (naturally rounded up to the half hour). I wondered what it would be like if I screwed up a gorget while assembling it and billed the customer double since I had to make another one. As far as take-home pay, I lost the better part of a day's work because a lawyer spent 20 minutes fixing her own screwup, and I'm not exactly flipping burgers...

When I finally finish building this place and re-open for custom work I am going to charge $50/hr for it and I'm going to start diversifying into other things. If it cuts the volume down to the point where I'm not getting much work for armour I'm probably going to go do something else because I can't justify doing this work that breaks my body (the joint pains havn't hit me yet, but the hints are starting to show up) when a spray foam contractor with no skills and no education charges triple what I charge for him to stand there and move his arm up and down and take a step to the side every few seconds. If I just end up making gorgets 2 days a week and spend 3-4 days a week playing with wood or sustainable design and only 1 day a week making cool custom armour because I enjoy it rather than it being profitable, that'll be fine.

If you are intelligent and skilled enough to make decent armour (and bonus points if you can run a reliable business in the process) you are likely intelligent and skilled enough to make at least a middle class living doing something similarly fulfilling and engaging.The craftsmanship required to do what we do is of a pretty high level compared to most trades, and the knowledge and intellect behind the research and context of what we do could make one a pretty engaging history professor. (And then you get to wear sweaters with elbow patches...)

I have run into more incompetence in the past 2 years than I ever imagined existed. Don't even get me started on company reps and what they make... In any case my point is, if you can stand out from the incompetence and mediocrity which seems rather endemic, theres a good, deserved living to be made.

This industry could use a good dose of dwindling supply to drive up prices to a more sustainable level.

[Scott Martin]

Hi Eric

Well put: this type of thread is why I'm happy that I decided many years ago to not make armour for a living. I have kids and a mortgage, and still enjoy making armour, none of which I think would be true if I'd followed the "armourer" career path. There are a fair number of folks who used to make armour who now make other metal "Art" (Christian Fletcher and Patrick Thadden spring to mind) or into other industries (Wade among others) instead, and this seems to serve to "distill" the elite armourers into other aspects or industries, which is a pity for anyone who wants to learn from the "past masters".

I don't follow Mac's advice (charge a realistic amount or give it to your friends for free) because when I gave armour away it wasn't valued, when I charge *something* for it (generally waaaay over the SCA asking price) then it gets taken care of. This also lets me figure out technique on pieces scaled for "human" proportions and see how close the shapes get to the pieces I am reproducing. This may seem trivial, but I'm the opposite of Doug Strong - 6'9" and ~240 lbs, so things like greaves look weirdly elongated. I'd apologize for driving the market down, but generally the only folks who get armour from me aren't actively looking for armour, but are willing to "upgrade" their kit for my "training cost".

Nice to hear that you're moving into new digs, and we'll look forward to seeing more of your work! I'm hoping to get out of the "baby hole" in the next year or two and start visiting folks again - the Hammer-in in Texas was just before the advent of our previous monster, so we had time and a bit of disposable income

Scott

[James Arlen Gillaspie]

Erik's post should be a 'sticky' that is addressed to every bonehead that thinks he will make a living making armour for the SCA. I know of only a handful that have done it, and it all depends on making stuff so fast that it would make their head spin right off their shoulders. It is only the stuff that can be made at blinding speed that is profitable.

Many years ago I learned a very valuable lesson when I made a few pairs of hot rolled 16 gauge legs with rolled up and riveted knee cops that I was asking $75 a pair for. This was complained about (I was in Arizona, after all), but one of the complainers thought nothing of buying a pair of roller blades with attached lower leg protection for $175. Bottom line; many SCAdians have what I call 'Rain Man Syndrom'. 'Hey, Ray, how much does a candy bar cost?' '$100.' 'How much does a full suit of gothic plate cost?' '$100.' They just don't value armour. They don't need it the way they need roller blades or the latest video game.

[Baron Eirik]

They just don't value armour.

It ain't just armor. I know merchants that sell primarily to other reenactment eras and several have said the equivalent of "I go to rendezvous to make money from the public, I sell at SCA events because you folk are nicer."

And, to be honest, it ain't everyone either. But, by and large, we *can* be cheap bastards.

[John S.]

A consumer's perspective....

There is a valid point being made--a small business has to charge enough to cover expenses + paying yourself or it isn't a viable business. You also need to pay yourself more than you would first think. However, some of you guys are being really insulting about the way you're making your point.... "rain man syndrome," the sentiment that "if you're hobbyist or charging less than I want to charge, get out the market" or the fair trade-esque attitude of "the consumer is taking advantage of the worker by not paying more."

I will probably never be able to afford to pay someone artist rates for more than a few hours. This is independent of how much I want the item. There are hobbies that I will never be able to afford. This is not a result of valuing armour less than any other hobby item. Most of us are probably in the same boat.

The sentiment of "find a different market" has merit, but most entry and intermediate level employees (even doctors and attorneys who are incorrectly stereotyped as making lots of money) aren't paid well. The art market (for any type of art that takes more than a few hours to make) is restricted to the privileged few.

As a consumer, one response to this dilemma is to not purchase anyone's products and just stop participating in this hobby. Another response to this dilemma is to buy strategic pieces (like a helmet) that I can't make, make some of the other items myself, and just do without on some of the other items. I expect an upper end item to cost more than a munitions item. When I can afford it, I am willing to pay more for it. When I can't afford it, I find a cheaper option or don't purchase it.

We are part of a capitalist not socialist economy. Demand by the consumer not effort from the worker drives prices. I have no desire to enter this market as a business because I know I can make a better living in a different profession. However, I'm glad that there are businesses in this market space and am genuinely happy that a few folks manage to make a living from it.

[Donngal]

I here a lot " I cant charge that much because my reputation isnt there, or, Im to new." I dont feel that charging a low ball amount on a piece in order to build a reputation is the wisest choice.
becuse 1 thing it does is build you reputation as a low priced manufacturer. Nothing wrong with be the low priced munitions grade armourer. But ill see posts were its , so n so sells cheap armour. that I think in the long run hurts. I talk to armorers trying to make it in the buis professionally everyday. they are always struggling to make ends meet. they get into finacial distress when theres a 50.00 refund. I think alot of time people forget a 75.00 per hour shop rate doesnt mean the builder is taking home $75.00 per hour. if they are running there business honestly and by the books they are lucky to get 1/3rd of that depending where they live. so my best advice is if you want to be a shade tree hobbiest then do that, and if you sell things just keep in mind that underselling yourself can put you in a spot if your not careful. if you plan on being a professional. write a business plan, write it twice. look at it from every possible angle. make sure you get proper insurance especially with more steel fighting armours being popular. make sure you can pay yourself, your shop overhead, your shop has some profit saved from every sale. you dedicate xx hours perweek to being in the office preparing invoices, taxes, shipping , receiving, research. theres just so much more than making a pair of elbows and selling it if you want to stay in business. just more of my 2 cents

D

[Mac]

"if you're hobbyist or charging less than I want to charge, get out the market"

I don't remember saying that exactly, but it sort of sounds like it's aimed in my direction.

Let me restate and clarify my position....

--A professional should charge at a rate that will give him a living wage
--If the going rate does not yield a living wage, he should charge more
--If a hobiest charges anything, he should charge like a professional. Charging less devalues everyone's work.

Mac

[John S.]

More a general sense of what several posters are saying than directed specifically at you, Mac.

Your first two points are 100% true. If those conditions can not be satisfied by the market for a product, then making that product is not a viable business.

Your third point just seems off. A hobbyist should set their prices as they choose and feel no inherent responsibility to maintain the health of the market.

I understand why getting undercut by hobbyists is frustrating for you and other professionals. Why not focus on the extra value you offer vs a cheaply-priced hobbyist?--a better product, and guaranteed delivery of the product.

For what it's worth, we may disagree on this point but you're still on the short list of folks I consider to be consistently making artistic pieces.

[Mac]

We can disagree on that third point, and that's OK. I don't really expect folks to comply with those points, but it's good if they at least consider the ideas.

That last one is really a sort of a bargaining chip. It's the thing you start with so that you can settle for something more moderate. It's sort of like when folks say "any pornography degrades all women". While it's probably true, the logical conclusions are not really workable. So, you start the argument there and have room to give ground.

Mac

[Signo]

On that "third" point there is a thing to be considered : artists can price their work how please them, because there is no real competition, because people like the art they produce, an prefer one or the other on taste. But professional armourer and hobbist make different products because the skill level and competence are different, the problem is that most of the customers can't understand the differences between apparently "identical" products. The real problem is this. Uneducated customers buy crap thinking it's gold, they think that a 200$ breastplate is not much different than a 400 one. This is the problem, not the hobbist that price himself low, because if he do, probably is because his work is not like those of the professionals. So, who is to blame? The customer that want cheap masterpieces or who actually build the stuff? If the problem is underpricing, then indian stuff and east european stuff already undervalued everyone.

[valdred]

Alternatively, a day job combined with working on the side until you retire, (then start armouring in earnest) seems like a good strategy. /shrug

[Sean M]

Darrell Markewitz has two posts about the economics of knifemaking, and how it has changed since the 1970s, on his blog: Layered Steel / Global Markets. He figures that when he was making custom knives, he had trouble earning half minimum wage, and that as fast as he mastered the art and acquired new tools, the competition increased.

[Ckanite]

It's funny that this post rose to the top when it has. As to this, even though I rarely make any armour, I am now looking to slightly re-do my shop and that includes my shop rates. And here's a few things that I need to contend with as I'm making the changes. I need to get out of the mass produced market now. Beard Beads and "disposable travel pipes" were a good start, but there's no real future selling super cheap things and shipping them all across the globe, also, where I'm moving vastly increases the price it takes to ship things. Not from the post office, but the drive to the post office: 25 mins vs. the 5 mins. it now takes me. Also, getting materials is now going to be a lot more difficult: 1.5 hours vs. 20 mins now. Now, I'm getting my YouTube money cut as well, so there goes that.

As it stands now, I was operating at $30/shop hr + YouTube + Patreon + drafting = ~ $24k/year. While, for my skill level and the market I was targeting, I was in a pretty good place. I'm going to have to now account for increased travel time, the increase in my skill, loss of YouTube money, storage costs and now, a car loan. With everything, before running the numbers, I'm way more inclined to start charging $70/hour shop rate. While this isn't where quite where the $100/hr starts, it is a pretty significant jump due to cost increases, hastle increases, and loss of other revenue streams. I also believe that making semi-bespoke items will be a much better use of my time opposed to what I am doing and I'm using that to partially justify the higher wage.

[Tableau]

Right now I'm working on developing products that I can make and sell at a reasonable shop rate so that I can afford to make custom armour. I consider doing custom armour projects as me paying for an education, for the moment. Even so, it's expensive for my customers, and it is expensive for me, since the number of hours I end up sinking into it is huge. Luckily I've had a steady flow of small blacksmithing projects that actually pay a bit of money (although it's still hard to get more than $30/h). I can make hooks at around $80/h, but the market for that is fairly limited. I do recognize than the only reason any of this is working for me is basically because I'm young and have low costs and no family to support and I'm not saving any money or planning for retirement and hoping my car doesn't die and I don't need to get any dental work done, but I do suspect it's possible to improve on all this in the years to come. I have been on a slow but steady up-slope for the past few years. Of course that would be faster if I just forgot about armour lol

In any case, I think I've got to finish up a few armour commissions I'm still tinkering with and then put the whole thing back on the back burner until I can develop the other parts of the business to the point where I can really afford the armouring hobby. I do have some schemes to make some armour components faster, but this will take a lot of development, and I suspect it might land me in a place where armour might bring in a bit of money, rather than costing money. $100/h does seem literally impossible, but I suspect with enough development $60/h will become possible. But that will come with increased overhead.

I have heard some professionals can get $50-$60/h so that's encouraging anyway.

[Ckanite]

I think one thing we need to talk about is how we bill out our time to the customer as well.

For instance, you can't say they you're looking at a 3 hours project at $100/hour and not expect them to balk at it. One way I've been billing people and talking them through my estimate process is to tell them it'll be a 16 hour project at $30/hr but this is a fun project/you get the friends and family discount/whatever to drop your rate in half = 16hrs x $30/hr = $480 -> $240. In reality, the project only takes you 7 hours, you then have an extra hour built in for fluff or over run and at the end, you can always give the customer a small refund, saying that it only took me 15 hours = 15hrs x $15 = $225 so you can give them a $15 refund. In reality the numbers work out to 7hrs x $30 = $210 (your actual wage) and you have $15 you can play with and still give a $15 refund.

This will do a few things for you. 1 - you get the wage you're after. 2 - you make the customer think they're getting an inside deal and it makes them much more likely to accept your quote. 3 - you have twice as long as you need to complete the task than the customer thinks, so you can take your time or finish early. 4 - you can give a partial refund which makes the customer even more happy and makes you look obsessively fair. All of this makes you look good, so long as the customer never finds out how you actually do your quotes and it will make then much more likely to come back with more projects and tell people about you.

[Hrolfr]

Not armor wise, but in the 90's, I lost a lot of business because I was inexpensive. If I would have charged 2.5 times as much I would have been swamped.

[Ckanite]

Not armor wise, but in the 90's, I lost a lot of business because I was inexpensive. If I would have charged 2.5 times as much I would have been swamped.

This is something else we need to talk about! Only half of what people are buying. They are also buying your personality and the feeling of the product. Which means the fancy words you use to sell it, the price you sell it at and the packaging.

[Tom B.]

Back in 2016 I was asked by a large US museum to quote a pair of all out reproduction mail sleeves for a project they were doing.
I sharpened my pencil and set down to do the math. All of the items I currently make are made from rings sourced in India. For this project I would need to start with wire and make my own rings. I had some very good data and photos from the sleeves that Wade owns.

The number of hours required to make the appropriate sized and shaped wedge riveted rings was staggering.
There were going to be a total of about 50k rings of three different weights, all with a flattened/oval cross section and each closed with a wedge rivet.
I made a spreadsheet to estimate the time needed for each step in the manufacturing process.

You could buy a pair of real 500 year old sleeves at auction for less than I would have needed to charge (well below a $100/hr shop rate).

The custom mail that I do make is not inexpensive.
My queue is full, to the point I am having to turn away business.
My target customers want functional mail based on historical patterns.
I have had several price hikes over the last 4-5 years and may have another one soon.
I feel that my prices are near the breaking point, much higher and potential customers will think I am too expensive.

I hope to be able to gather the funds to work on a project that should drastically improve both the appearance and quality of the mail I make.
However there are considerable development and capital expenses that must be funded.

[Chris Gilman]

"What the market will bare"
"Supply and Demand"
"It's worth what it's worth"

These sayings are used for a reason. In a "hobby" especially.

In my business (Film costumes and props) in a film requiring a "super hero suit" , the studio would not think twice about spending $150,000 or more, per suit, for their "special costumes", and this is when they need 5 to 10 suits. However, on a recent project about Neil Armstrong and the moon landings, we made some exact replicas of the Apollo 11 suits and the production company was beating us up over $40,000 each. (Fabric for these is $180 a yard, gold plating a visor is $750 ea.) As a result, we lost money. (Our "profit" comes from the fact we retain the suits at the end of filming and can rent them in the future. This is a little bit unique way I have set up my business model)
So in any budget there is also a preconceived value to an item based on what the client thinks it should cost and the peer pressure or market pressure, to make it at a specific level of quality. The superhero suits of today's movies have a track record of costing a lot to make, therefor each new project, budgets more and more for these suits, so they will be better than the ones before. Eventually this reaches a breaking point. Other costumes, like the Apollo spacesuits, are expected to cost less, because, well they already built those a long time ago, and you just have to copy what was already built, right? But, it is still what the market will bare. (A plywood box, painted to look like a soap product from the 60's, signed by the artist, just sold for over $3,000,000 dollars! It was originally bought for $1,000.)

If all armour cost $100,000 and up, the hobby would only have a few participants, every 20 years or so, when some wealthy people threw a medieval party. (But this wouldn't happen because the expectations of what armour should look like is so incorrect, that these people would wear plastic armor.)

I have been making and buying armour for nearly 40 years and I have seen the cost of armour consistently going up from one year to the next. Aside from the economy, this rise in price is due to more people participating in the hobby, demand going up, and better quality work being recognized by these participants. So I have also seen the quality going up as a result of information being available, and peer pressure to have better looking gear.
I could likely come up with a list of over 100 people who make armour, but at this point in my interest and at the level of education I have on the subject, I would only be interested in work made by a handful of those 100, and generally, they are going to be more expensive, because I'm not alone in this market.

So saying your rate should be "$100/hr." I feel is wrong and too high, for these reasons:
1st: The current market will not bare that price.
2nd: Even among many other professions with high overhead, cost of work space, tools, insurance..., $100/hr. is on the high side.
3rd: This rate is too high, Unless, you are in very high demand, because you offer a product that is so desired or of exceptional quality. Because, there are only a few clients that have this much disposable income for a hobby, or a professional need (Movie costumes as one example) that they can afford this rate.
If I don't have a film project to pay for it, I can not afford t spend these sums for a hobby.

Edit: I would also add, your rate is also dependent on how fast you are and the quality of your work (as mentioned above). Years ago, when the average rate in my business was $15 to $20 and hour, I had a foam fabricator asking $40/hr (He made the Staypuft Marsh mellow man from Ghostbusters) I was hesitant to hire him, but I needed a skilled person and needed them now. He had the job done an half the time I expected and it was really great work. So in his case $40/hr was a bargain. I have had other employees/ contractors, I felt I was ripped off, because of how slow they were or because of their lack of skill.

[Lurker 2]

I think the thing everyone had missed is you need to work toward being capable of and producing your hourly shop rate, in one hour I should produce $100 with if product like 2 to 3 (at a minimum) basket hilts or shield bosses, or cut and bedurr and rough form a simple helm. It not only about how much you want to make it is all about what you are capable of making its a two way street.

[Lurker 2]

I think the thing everyone had missed is you need to work toward being capable of and producing your hourly shop rate, in one hour I should produce $100 with if product like 2 to 3 (at a minimum) basket hilts or shield bosses, or cut and bedurr and rough form a simple helm. It not only about how much you want to make it is all about what you are capable of making its a two way street.

[Gerhard von Liebau]

Which is pretty much what Chris was pointing out in the post right above yours:

"3rd: This rate is too high, Unless, you are in very high demand, because you offer a product that is so desired or of exceptional quality."

[Chris Gilman]

Gerhard,
I think what Lurker is pointing out is more inline with my edited add. Which I think I was typing at the same time.

"Edit: I would also add, your rate is also dependent on how fast you are and the quality of your work (as mentioned above). Years ago, when the average rate in my business was $15 to $20 and hour, I had a foam fabricator asking $40/hr (He made the Staypuft Marsh mellow man from Ghostbusters) I was hesitant to hire him, but I needed a skilled person and needed them now. He had the job done an half the time I expected and it was really great work. So in his case $40/hr was a bargain. I have had other employees/ contractors, I felt I was ripped off, because of how slow they were or because of their lack of skill."

[Gerhard von Liebau]

I was thinking more along the lines of quality than quantity in this case. It certainly goes both ways!