Jessica Hische: preference

Transcript context

…Along these lines, you have a pretty unique way of pricing your work. For people that may want to explore this with you, share whatever you can about just how you think about pricing and ideally even an order magnitude of pricing so they're like, "Oh, okay. We should actually do this." To go back to the process how it's always about figuring out what people are trying to accomplish, so a lot of my process scales depending on how broad of an exploration that we're doing. The way that I treat it is I treat my branding work not dissimilarly to how I treat commercial lettering, which is atypical. Brand people, what they typically do is because the client has to own the assets outright at the end no matter what, they tend to do is bill everything that the client owns everything as you are moving along. It's all sort of work for hire, but the idea being that it's a buyout of everything that is being made. What that means is that when a branding agency is pricing stuff for you, they're taking the buyout rights and baking it into every round of work so that every round gets more expensive because you are owning all of the work. What I do is I treat it much more like a commercial lettering project where I say, "You have to own the rights to this eventually, but hey, let's break that out and let's keep the creative process lighter and less expensive so then we have more room to explore. So then if some stakeholder comes in last minute and blows everything else up and we need to start over, you haven't already paid to own everything that we've created, you just pay to own the thing that we create in the end that gets chosen." I really like the idea of keeping the creation process more flexible and to try to scale to what people need versus having a really rigid way of approaching everything. Sometimes people will bring me on really early in the process, where if they have an internal team or if they're working with an external agency or something, they want me there from the get out. Some people are like, "We have no money and we are going to try to do this as much as we can inside of our business, but then can we hire you at the end to make it look good? If we can get everybody bought in and get it 80% of the way there." Depending on what people's budgets are, I have different ways of working, or just depending on what their needs are. Because my whole thing too is I don't want to step on anybody's toes, because sometimes companies have these really amazing designers that are working in-house, and it sucks as a designer who started at a company and thinks that you might be able to get a chance to work on what is considered the most important asset in terms of the brand and they just farm it out to someone else instead of letting you touch it. To me, that's a recipe for anything that I create to be immediately killed, because someone inside is going to be like, "It's time to shine," and then they're just going to kill all my work. I'm always like, "How do we collaborate? How do I make it so that I'm an asset to you? Not that I'm trying to step on your toes, not that I'm trying to take over what's the cool juicy work from the people who inside that are really excited to do it." I just want them to feel as bought in as I can be. rying to step on your toes, not that I'm trying to take over what's the cool juicy work from the people who inside that are really excited to do it." I just want them to feel as bought in as I can be. But yeah, it becomes interesting. I feel like I get told by branding people that I'm too inexpensive because they're like, "Oh, for what you do, it should be 60 or $70,000 at a minimum to do all this kind of stuff." I'm like, I feel like the majority of the projects that I do end up being between 25 and 35, but depending on how you bring me in, it can be less if it's just as a consultant. It's not out of the realm of possibilities to hire a proper crazy expert at stuff. It's not like you're thinking about sinking half a million dollars into the brand. That's a very different experience.…

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