Kelly Clarkson tried to buy a wooden bird from a Brooklyn shop called Art of Play this month. The bird is named Molly. It hung on the wall near a $15,000 price tag. The store told her Molly wasn’t for sale. She posted about it, and the internet did what it does. The store then raised Molly’s price to $15 million. A grocer offered to sell her one of his own singing machines for $15,000.
The man who made Molly is Bliss Kolb, a 70-year-old artist in Seattle. For about 15 years he has carved wooden animals and rigged them with pulleys and gears so they move. Most of that time, almost nobody knew his name. He’d made about 25 of these moving figures, called automata, in his life. Since her post, about 100 people have asked him to make them one. “I’ve wanted for people to know about my work for decades,” he told the Journal’s Misty White Sidell. “I appreciate that she liked it.”
Here’s the catch. Each piece takes him nearly a year. Most sell for $4,000 to $15,000, and the materials cost a couple hundred dollars. The price is the year, Kolb says. He’s trying to wind down his commitments, so he isn’t taking new orders right now. Maybe later. The best demand of his career showed up at 70, and he’s making it wait. He knows what a year of his time is worth, and he’s choosing how to spend it.
The grocer’s counteroffer
Stew Leonard Jr., 72, runs Stew Leonard’s, the family grocery chain known for its dancing avocados and milk crates. The chain has eight stores in Connecticut, New York and New Jersey, with about 200 of these machines spread among them. Two people work full time just to build them and keep them running. The most expensive one, a group of five milk cartons that sing, ran as much as $75,000. He calls them smile machines. Nobody has ever asked to buy one. He says he’d make an exception for Clarkson, and he’d even have it sing her songs. “We would do it for $15,000, not $15 million,” he said.
Our read
This one’s behavioral, and it’s the oldest lesson in money. An asking price is an opinion. Sometimes it’s a mood. Molly didn’t change between Clarkson’s visit and the new price tag. The store’s feelings did, and the tag went up a thousand times. Kolb, the man who actually made the bird, prices his work at a year of his labor plus a couple hundred dollars of wood. Stew Leonard put $15,000 on one of his own machines, which is what the job is worth to him. Three prices in one story, and only one of them is about the bird. We see this with houses, used cars, collectibles and stocks. The number on the tag tells you about the seller. The number that matters is what you’d pay, and why.
The one thing in your plan this touches is any value you’ve written down because it felt right. The number in your head for the house, the business or the collection you plan to sell one day. This week, pick one and check it against what a stranger paid for one like it lately. If the gap is wide, your plan is leaning on a feeling. Bring that number to your next review and we’ll look at it together. We’d rather find that out on a dry day than in the rain.