The math isn't the part anyone argues with. Our own reel pricing is public: $750 for a single edited vertical reel, $250 for every reel after that in the same booking. Run that ladder out to ten reels and it lands at exactly $3,000. And that's the conservative end of the market, not the top: current rate guides put professional short-form at $200 to $1,000 and up per reel, and agency pricing for a single short runs from $1,000. Ask a gallery director to check the arithmetic and they'll do it correctly, on the spot, without a calculator.
What they mostly won't do is book it.
For a long stretch I read that as a pricing problem. It wasn't. The problem was one layer beneath the price, in an assumption I hadn't noticed I was making: that pricing a service means deciding what to charge for the thing I already do.
I wasn't deciding what price to put on the service. I was deciding what service to put under the price.
That sentence took a global art market report, a fair budget, and a hard look at what galleries actually spend money on to arrive at. Here's how I got there, what it changed about the day itself, and what the studio day costs now.
The math everyone already agrees on
Our reel pricing has never been complicated. The first reel is $750. Every additional reel booked at the same time is $250. Nine more reels at $250 each comes to $2,250. Add the first reel and ten reels comes to $3,000 even. That's the ladder as it's posted, and nothing about it is controversial. It's also a ladder nobody has ever climbed to the top of.
Fair and booked are two different things. A gallery that agrees $3,000 is a reasonable price for ten reels of content is not the same gallery that has $3,000 sitting somewhere waiting to be spent on ten reels of content. I kept treating those as the same fact.
Why galleries are price conscious in a specific way right now
The Art Basel and UBS Global Art Market Report put 2025 global art sales at $59.6 billion, up 4 percent after two years of decline, with the dealer sector up 2 percent. That reads like recovery, and in aggregate it is. But the same report broken down by dealer size tells a much more specific story. Among dealers with under $250,000 in annual sales, the smallest tier, 48 percent expect better sales ahead, up from 31 percent the year before. Confidence is genuinely returning at the bottom of the market.
The tier just above them is having the opposite year. Dealers with $250,000 to $500,000 in sales report the worst margin picture of any segment measured: 45 percent say margins are declining. That's the tier where most of the New York gallery directors I've priced this service for actually sit. They're not struggling in the way a market downturn implies. They're squeezed in a much more specific way, doing better business on paper while keeping less of it.
That's not a market that says no to $3,000. It's a market that says yes to the number and then quietly puts it off, because the money that used to move easily now has more places it needs to go before content gets a turn.
The obstacle isn't cash, it's habit
What made this click was looking at what galleries already spend money on without hesitating. A booth at a NADA fair runs about $11,000. A main-section booth at the Armory Show runs somewhere between $42,000 and $115,500, and buildout, the walls, lighting, and furniture that turn an empty booth into a presentable one, adds another $15,000 to $40,000 on top of that. Directors interviewed for the piece said almost the same thing in almost the same words: they almost always go in minus. The fair rarely pays for itself in sales made on site.
And yet 69 percent of galleries keep exhibiting anyway, year after year, at a cost that dwarfs anything I've ever quoted for a studio day. That's not a market being careless with money. That's a gallery treating a fair booth as a fixed, dated, non-negotiable line item, the way rent or insurance is a fixed line item, while treating content as a discretionary extra that gets picked up only when there's room left over.
The obstacle isn't cash, it's habit. A fair has a date on the calendar and a booth number attached to it, so it happens whether or not anyone feels ready. Content doesn't have a date. It's a habit nobody in the gallery has built room for, and a habit with no fixed slot competes with everything else that also doesn't have a fixed slot, which is to say it usually loses. Discounting the service further wasn't going to fix that. The service itself had to stop asking for a habit that didn't exist yet.
Designing the day backwards
Once I saw it as a habit problem instead of a cash problem, the brief for the new day wrote itself. It had to fit inside a single visit, cost under $1,500, and ask nothing of the gallery beyond showing up and opening the door.
The studio day that came out of that brief is two hours long. Ten concepts are written in advance, against the specific gallery and the specific work on the walls, so no time on site goes to deciding what to film. One camera moves through the space covering all ten in sequence, rather than resetting lighting and framing for each one separately. And the edit is outsourced rather than handled in-house.
That last piece is what actually makes the math work. Short-form video editing runs $20 to $100 per video on the open outsourcing market, and offshore editors bill $5 to $15 an hour for that same work. Editing, not shooting, is where the hours in a ten-reel project actually go. Moving that piece off our own clock is what lets two hours of filming turn into ten finished reels without ten finished reels' worth of studio time behind them.
Why the content is worth the trouble at all
Online channels now account for 33 percent of dealer sales, 37 percent once fair online viewing rooms are included, and most of that comes through a dealer's own site, email list, and social accounts rather than through a marketplace. The same reporting found that 52 percent of high-net-worth collectors say they'd rather buy directly from a dealer online than through any other channel.
That's the channel a gallery skips when content stays a "someday" project. It isn't a nice-to-have running alongside the real business. For a third of dealer sales, and for the majority of the collectors with the most money to spend, it already is the real business. Skipping it doesn't save a gallery from a discretionary expense. It quietly caps the channel that's growing the fastest.
What it is now
The studio day is $1,500 for ten edited reels: two hours on site, ten pre-written concepts, one camera, one visit, an outsourced edit. The first three galleries who book it get it at a founding rate of $1,100. If you'd rather we handle posting the reels ourselves instead of just handing them over, that's an additional $400.
None of that changes what ten reels are worth. It changes what has to happen for a gallery to actually get them, which turned out to be the entire problem the whole time.
Frequently asked questions
How is the $1,500 studio day different from booking ten reels at the regular rate?
The regular ladder is built for one-off bookings, $750 for a first reel and $250 for each one after it, which runs to $3,000 for ten. The studio day is a fixed format built around one visit instead of a series of separate ones: two hours, ten pre-written concepts, one camera, and an outsourced edit. Fixing the format is what makes $1,500 possible, not a discount on the same open-ended booking.
What actually happens during the two hours?
We arrive with ten concepts already written against the space and the work in it, so there's no time lost deciding what to film on site. One camera moves through the studio covering all ten in sequence. Nothing gets restaged or reshot; the day is planned tightly enough that it doesn't need to be.
Who edits the ten reels?
The edit is outsourced rather than done in-house, which is what keeps the day's cost proportional to two hours of shooting instead of the many more hours ten separate edits would otherwise take.
What's the founding rate, and who qualifies?
The first three galleries who book the studio day get it at $1,100 instead of $1,500. It exists to get the format proven with a few real galleries before it becomes the standing price.
Does the $1,500 include posting the reels to our channels?
No. The day covers filming and editing; you get ten finished reels ready to post. If you'd rather hand that part off too, we'll post them for you for an additional $400.
Ten reels, one visit, $1,500.
The studio day is built to ask as little of your calendar as possible. Two hours, ten concepts already written, one camera, one visit, ten reels back.
Explore social reels →