The Charity Sale

I volunteered to help out at a charity sale which was held yesterday (Sunday).  Boy, oh boy.  I’ve never had to wake up as early as 5:45am for years!  It was tough (and I had actually fallen asleep only at 2:00am) but knowing that it was all for charity, I was up and running in no time.

TG and I arrived at the sale on time, and proceeded to our duties at the General Store.  One of the things I had to do was to sort out new clothings (probably donated by a garment factory) and put them on the hangers for display.  The only thing that slowed me down was having to check for dirt and well, ripped garments that we obviously would not able to sell.  There were at least 4 or 5 boxes in total, and boy were they dusty!  I had to hold myself from sneezing countless of times.

The whole place was packed with volunteers and the visitors trickled in soon enough.  TG and I were disappointed though, that our painted items, were priced way below market value.    I believe I had mentioned before that we would donate some of our painted items to be sold at the charity.  Little did we know that our artwork would be grossly underappreciated and underpriced.  We had given to them, the cost of the raw wooden pieces, without even costing in our time and our paints.

As a comparison, a handpainted tole piece would easily be priced 6 times the actual cost of the raw product itself.  What did they price us?  RM2-4 above the actual cost (excluding time and paints).  My beautiful heart-shaped piece which costed me RM11 to purchase, was priced at RM15 at the store. 

Work done:  5-6 layers of basecoating each front AND back, countless times of sanding down, endless minutes/hours of opaque-ing the flowers, floating work to highlight and to shade, 4 layers of varnish, almost 9 hours of work in all.  For ONE piece.  Yup.

I didn’t really mind it because it was for charity.  But I was heartbroken when I realized that we were underpriced, mostly because we did put in a lot of hard work for it, and told them to price it a minimum 3 times the price of the raw product.  It would have been easy to sell even if I were to price it up 4 times.  And this was for charity!  We were confident that if people were willing to pay 6 times in a regular store, our asking amount of 3 times was not overkill.

When TG questioned why did they underprice us by so much, one of the association’s (organizers) members noted that “People here don’t know how to appreciate art, and if we priced it more expensive, people wouldn’t buy.”  Well, go stroll along the other side of the sale and you would find a tole painting booth.  The lady there sold a simple piece for RM12!  A small, 2.5″ wooden paper weight holder with ONE painted flower.  And as a perfectionist who criticizes my own work like hell, I can’t help but notice that TG’s and my work were, in comparison, much more detail-oriented and finer.  If people were willing to pay RM85 for a simple tray, I don’t see why they wouldn’t pay RM40 for my pretty heart-shaped plaque.

Thankfully, someone DID appreciate our art pieces… TG’s old friend who had seen all her other pieces at home, and knew how much each piece would be worth in the market.  She questioned too (she too was part of the association) why were our items priced so cheap!  She grabbed every piece that we had — basically all except for one small piece that TG had painted, and which they priced RM1.50 above cost (groan) and which was sold earlier in the day before we arrived.  She said she knew how to appreciate them, and that they would make good gifts.  There you go.

When we left at about 1-ish pm, my snowflakes were still unsold.  How much were they priced, you ask?  50 cents above the cost of raw product.  I did not even cost in the Canadian-bought artificial snow paste and the rhinestones.  Sigh.  I was very tempted to just buy them all back (would cost me RM27) but I was already too demotivated from seeing my painted items sold for cheap (worse than pasar malam [night market] – lah).

As we were making our way home, TG too expressed her disappointment.  I told her, that although it was charity, painting those items was really not worth my (our) time.   I mean, I might just as well donate the cost of the items in cash!  Since it is going to be priced only a coupla bucks above cost, I don’t think I want to spend that countless hours of work on them!

Oh well… here are the items I donated… before and after my paintwork:

I tried to place them in the same position as I did in the “before” photo, but I didn’t have the pic with me to compare. 

Nieway, over and done with.  Let’s see what happens next year…