How to price a spell for sale to clients

In talking about the possability of selling my spells online, the discussion of how to price my spells came up. I determined that it was not possible to sell my spells for less that $300 per spell, and even that was pushing the limits, with prices of $500 or $700 range being a better option. Once I had said this though, I was posed the following question:

Why would your spells so expensive? I see other Witches selling spells online for only $30 or $50 per spell, heck, I can get a mass produced Voodoo Doll for ten bucks on Amazon! I bet you’d sell more spells to more people if you brought the price down by a few hundreds dollars. Isn’t it to your finacial advantage to sell more spells at a lower price?

It is an interesting matter, the topic of how to price a spell for sale, and I have decided to devote a post to explaining how I came up with my figures.

Fiirst off, I would like to point out, that in September of 2009 (just a few months away) I will be celebrating my 30th year of practicing Witchcraft. I have been a practicing Sea Witch since September of 1979. In my 30 years of spell casting, I have never once recieved payment for my services. Not one single penny. I have always simply helped those in need, as the need was found. Likewise, my use of Poppets (Voodoo Dolls) has been on a very traditional basis, in that the client, never has actual contact with the doll itself. I keep and later destroy the doll. I complete the spell from start to finish. The client takes no part in the spell being cast, never has the doll in their possession, and never even sees the doll at all.

The move to selling the spells online, results in a need for a slight change in my methods: namely, the client will recieve the doll, use the doll, take an active paart in the spell casting ritual, and if need be, they will destroy the doll after the spell is complete.

The difference in price results from Federal, State, and Local laws, which require a change in the materials I will be useing to make the dolls. When the doll itself never comes into physical contact with the client, it is possible for me to make the doll out of any material I happen to have laying around. However, should the client need to come into contact with the doll, Federal, State, and Local laws require that the doll can only be made out of certain types of mmaterials and that said materials were bought new and unused and are certified as safe for use in items for sale to the public. In other words, when the doll was not made available to the client, I could make it out of old .99c peices of fabric I found at Goodwill, whereas when the doll comes in contact with the client, I must go out and buy the cloth for $7.95 – $54.95 per yard from Jo-Anne’s Fabric Store. What this means is, by selling my spells online, I have increased my overhead by as much as 500%! This in turn means that there is no way for me to offer the spells without pay, due to the fact tha I must buy the materials to make the doll. This means I can not sell each doll for anything less than the cost of the fabric used to make it.

Quality of the cloth is another factor to consider. The cloth I use for my dolls is a high quality 100% cotton. Those $10 Voodoo Dolls on Amazon, are made out of polyester. Polyester is a man made material, and does not conduct a high output of energy. Poly-Cotton has some cotton in it, and thus a higher output of energy as the percentage of cotton in it increases. Of course the more cotton in the fabric, the higher the cost of the fabric, and 100% cotton is a high range fabric as a result. Now, if I was worried about cutting costs and making a finacial success of things here, I would do like those mass produced dolls and use poly or poly-cotton, however, the weaker energy output would result in a much weaker and far less effective spell. 100% cotton is going to put out the highest out put of energy possible for a fabric to put out, thus resulting in a far more powerful and effective spell. So, by cutting corners on cost, I would have to also cut corners on the effectivness of the spell as well, and I’m not willing to do that. But I do have to buy the fabric to make the doll, and so again, I can’t sell the doll for anything less than the cost of the fabric.

Of course it’s not all about the fabric. I use crystals and gemstones in my spell casting, and gemstones being a commdety means that during a ressesion, their value goes higher and higher while the value of  paper money goes less and less. The end result is, an Amythest crystal which in 2005 I could have bought for $3 now sells in 2009 for $30. And here’s where selling the spells  directly to the client, as opposed to me preforming the spells alone, comes in: I can reuse the same crystal for each cllient. Thus my $3 crystal can be used over and over again for years, so long as I purify it and reenergize it between clients. However, when I sell the spell to the client, the crystal has to be sent to them, along with the doll. This means that now, instead of useing one crystal for every one, I now must buy one crystal per client. This means that I can not sell the spell for anything less than the cost of the crystal or gemstone. (Keeping in mind here that some crystals and gemstones sell for $500 or more per stone!)

There is an advantage to this change, of sending the crystal directly to the client. Though it will cost the client more money to buy the spell, it will however be a stronger, more powerful, and longer lasting spell. Here’s why: When I cast a spell, reusing a crystal, I had used on an older spell, there is a chance that some of the old energies are still effecting the crystal and thus causing the spell to not be as effective as it should be. Also, once I have finished the spell for one client, and reenergized the crystal for the next client, the crystal has not had it’s connection with the first spell broken, which means the first spell will begin to weaken from that point onward, until it is rejuvinated. 

However, if the crystal is instead given to the client, the cystal will continue to work on the spell every day, and each time the client picks up the crystal, the crystal becomes slightly more energized making the spell slightly more powerful each day, instead of growing weaker each day. What this means is, that a spell which would  have lasted only a few days, without the crystal’s connection, will now last for weeks, months, or possibly even years, because the crystal is focused only on  this one spell and never used for any other spells. The end result is an extremly powerful and very long lasting spell.

Okay, now we come to another factor: Visualization. Certain colors and symbols each have certain universial meanings, which, even if you do not know their meaning, you are envocking their power simple by looking at them and visualizing them in your head. Now, I know most of these color and symbol meaning by heart, and can just close my eyes and visualize them in my head without the use of the actual symbol in front of me. This cuts a huge ammount of cost, because I do not have to buy physical repesentations of the colors and symbols and when doing spells fulling on my own, I have no need for them. However, when a client buys a spell, nine times out of ten, said client has no idea which color to use when or what they symbols even look like let alone what they mean. This posses a problem and results in the need for the client to have in their possesstion some way for them to visualize and know what to visualize when and why. I have found a way to solve this problem, but it is not cheap.

Back to fabric used for the doll itself again. Being a Witch is not the only thing I do. I am also and auther, a writer, a painter, a pet artist,  a fashion designer, and costume maker. Well, all that rolled into one means, that I have access to fabric companies who will take your artwork and for a fee will print up bolts of fabric using your art work. What this in turn means is that in addition to designing my own patterns and sewing my own clothes, I also design the fabric used to make those clothes. And here’s where we get back on topic: To solve the visualization of symbols and colors problem, I painted a series of art works featureing those symbols and colors, and had fabric made up from them. Fabric of 100% cotton, to be used to make the caftans worn by the dolls, but fabric which due to it being custom made costs a whooping $54 per yard. Ouch! Well, once again, it’s a case of, I have to buy the materials to make the spell, and I can’t sell the spell for anything less than the cost of the materials used to create it.

Of course there are other materials included with the spell. The JuJu (or Voodoo Doll) is the main focus of the spell, and the crystal is the main battery which powers the JuJu, but than there is the soap used in the ritual baths (by the client) before the client can complete the spell, and there’s the candles, and any of the additional smaller items unique to each individual spell. Likewise there is the incese and oils I used when blessing the JuJu.  Each of those items adds up.

And finally to adress the issue of: “Wouldn’t it be to my finacial advantage to sell my spells at lower prices?”

Yes. Finacially speaking it would in fact be to my advantage to sell my spells at lower prices. And yes, if I did like other online Witches did and sold my spells for $30 or $50 per spell, I’d probably sell dozens of spell every day and make an easy quarter of a million dollars each year. But, there is a magor problem with that concept, and I’ll explain it to you. For starters, those so-called online Witches selling dozens of spells a day for $30 to $50 per spell are frauds, and I can prove it. They are selling their spells so cheaply because they are not selling you high quality spells, if they are even selling you a spell at all. How do I know this? Simple. A spell takes a lot of physical and mental energy to pull off. An effective spell can’t be ppulled off  in less time than a week. 

If the Witch is asting several smaller, weaker, or otherwise less powerful spells, she’ll at her best be able to create only 2 or 3 spells per day, but than not every day. She’ll have to take a day off every 3 or 4 days to recharge her physical and mental energies. For bigger, stronger, and more powerful spells, she isn’t going to cast more than one spell each week, not even if the client was Bill Gates offering her ten million dollars to do so.And after casting a big spell (such as a JuJu Spell) she may very well need a week or more off to reenergize her physchic strength.

I was out to become the next millionaire psychic, I’d be creating tons of tiny mini-spells and selling dozens per week at low prices. The thing is, I’ve spent much of my life homeless and living off the land; I’ve rarely had an income of more than $2,000 per year, far less than the average person earns in one month. Money, has never been a high priority in my life. My goals have always been on a spiritual level, so, I have no reason to be out there trying to pass off a bunch of non-effective cheap spells that don’t work. When I make a spell, I want to make sure it’s going to be as powerful as I can make it. What this means is, I rarely make more than 4 or 5 spells a month, usually less, because I want to conserve my energy into higher concentrations, less frequestly, rather than low consetrations very frequently. As such, I’ve never cast more than 50 spells a year, never more than one per week. So if I sell them for $300 per spell, that’s only $15,000 of whih $12,000 would have gone to materials, which means at the end of the year I would only have $3,000. Not very much, when you look at it that way is it?

What’s your take on this? I’d love to hear what you have to say about this post. Leave a comment and share your views!

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