FingerNailFixer

One Way to Price Your Nail Art Services

by Holly Schippers | August 14, 2019 | Bookmark +
Nails by Lila Nguyen @lilanguyen_cnd_ea 
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Nails by Lila Nguyen @lilanguyen_cnd_ea

One of the first questions to come up in any art or business class is: How do you price nail art services? This question can have a lot of different answers depending on a lot of variables. Let’s look at one way of doing it, just for simplicity’s sake, to give you a starting point if you haven’t been charging for your art services. 

A simple way of charging for art work is to go by time. Your time has value and you need to learn this right from the get-go. In any other job you would expect an hourly wage and no one would think you should make less per hour doing different aspects of your job. It should be the same when it comes to doing nails. Take a look at your average service charge per hour.

Most nail professionals these days are doing gel-polish. For easy figuring, let’s say you do a basic gel-polish application in 30 minutes for $30. This would mean you could book two basic gel-polish applications in 60 minutes and make $60; therefore you should be making $1 per minute for your nail art. Industry standard is a minimum of $1 a minute, so please do not charge less than that. Feel free to charge more if your other service charges indicate you should do so.

The next step is to learn to block out time for nail designs. This is ideally done in 15-minute increments. Discuss this with clients ahead of time so that they can learn to pre-book time for nail art into their appointments. Once your client has an expectation of time and price, it is less stressful for both of you! You will find some clients are happy to go all out Pinterest style and pay $60 for an hour’s worth of art work once they have the option to do so.

Some nail art items that are more costly — like authentic Swarovski crystals and other types of embellishment — and you may need to charge extra for them. Just make sure you are very upfront and transparent about any additional charges before you begin.

Let me know how this pricing structure works for you in the comments or on social media and, as always, feel free to reach out with questions!

 

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