Your Product Isn't Too Expensive. Your Customer Doesn't Want It Enough.

A woman picks up a hand crafted ceramic bowl at a craft market.

She turns it over. Looks at the base. Holds it with both hands. Puts it down.

Walks three stalls away.

Comes back. Picks it up again.

She doesn’t need a bowl. She has bowls. Every kitchen in the country has bowls. You can buy one for £1 at Ikea and it will hold soup exactly as well as this one.

This one costs £38.

She buys it.

Not because it’s better at being a bowl. Because something about it — the weight of it, the glaze pooling slightly off-centre, the slightly uneven feel of the clay against her hands — created a response that the £1 bowl doesn’t.

That response is desire.

And it’s the most important thing in a product business that most product businesses never talk about directly.

Where desire actually lives

Nobody needs a £30 Expresso Ceramic candle. A £2 supermarket candle makes the room smell fine. Nobody needs a £55 Crossback Linen apron when a £6 cotton one does the same job. Nobody needs a £125 Eyes teapot when a plain white highstreet version is less than £10 and works perfectly fine.

And yet people buy all of these things. Happily. Repeatedly. At full price.

The £28 difference between the supermarket candle and the one from the influencer brand isn’t markup. It’s not greed. It’s not even “quality” in the way most people mean it.

It’s desire.

Desire lives in details. The weight of a hand-crafted bowl that makes it feel like it belongs in your hands. The way a candle’s scent changes as it burns, filling a room just right. The texture of linen against your skin. The packaging that opens like a gift, even if it’s just for yourself. The tiny indulgence that makes a £12 croissant feel like a treat you earned. The nostalgia that washes over you before you even know why.

It’s physical and emotional and narrative all at once — the product, the experience, and the story it lets you tell yourself. None of it shows up on a cost sheet as its own line item. But together, it’s the reason someone pays your price instead of the cheaper alternative.

Here’s what makes this tricky: desire is invisible until someone experiences the product. A cost sheet will tell you exactly what a hand-dipped glaze costs per unit. It won’t tell you that the slight variation it creates is the reason a customer picks one mug out of twenty and says this one.

Compliments are not sales

There’s a distance between “I like it” and “I need to have it.” It’s not a big distance. But it’s hard to measure and it’s where most product businesses live and die.

“That’s lovely” is not desire. It’s politeness.

“Where can I buy this?” is desire.

“How much is it?” — asked while already holding the product — is desire.

Sending a link to a friend unprompted is desire.

Coming back to a product listing for the third time in a week is desire.

Picking something up, putting it down, walking away, and coming back — that’s desire.

The difference matters because you can have a beautiful product that gets a hundred compliments and sells ten units. Compliments feel like validation. They’re not. They’re just words. Desire is what happens in someone’s hands, in their gut, in the moment they reach for their wallet.

And if the desire isn’t strong enough, no amount of adjusting the price or the cost will fix it. A £30 candle that doesn’t create enough desire won’t sell better at £22. It’ll just be a cheaper product that still doesn’t move.

The question to ask before anything else

Before you change a single detail — before you open the cost sheet, call the supplier, or start modelling a cheaper version — ask this:

If twice as many of the right people saw this product tomorrow, would it sell?

That question tells you what problem you actually have.

If the answer is yes — your problem isn’t price.
It’s distribution.

The product is doing its job. But not enough of the right people are seeing it.

Fix where and how it shows up:
Better stockists. Better photography. Different channels.
More of the right people finding it.

If the answer is “I’m not sure” — you don’t have a pricing problem.
You have a visibility problem.

You haven’t seen enough real behaviour yet.

Put it in front of people who don’t know you.
Not friends. Not family. People who owe you nothing.

And watch what they do.

Do they pick it up? Turn it over? Ask the price?

Or do they glance, nod politely, and move on?

“Nice” doesn’t mean anything.
Behaviour is the signal.

If the answer is no — if the right people see it and don’t want it enough —
then yes, something needs to change.

But it’s not the price.

It’s the product.

Make it more desirable. More distinct. More considered. More heartfelt.

Sometimes the uncomfortable truth is: it’s not good enough yet.

There is a third scenario:

People want it — but won’t pay the price. This is the only time cost really matters.

But even here, ask first:

Is it actually price?
Or is it perceived value?

Because often the fix is not lowering the price, but making the product feel worth it.

The takeaway

Your product is rarely too expensive.

Your customer just doesn’t want it enough yet.

And those are completely different problems, with completely different solutions.

For most product businesses, when something isn’t selling, you reach for the cost sheet first. It’s instinct. The numbers are right there — materials, labour, packaging — and they can be changed by Friday.

But desire can’t be engineered on a spreadsheet. It lives in the details that make someone pick your product up and not want to put it down. And if you start cutting those details to improve a margin, you’re not solving the problem. You’re removing the reason anyone would pay your price in the first place.

So before you make anything cheaper — make sure enough of the right people have seen it. Make sure the desire is actually there. And if it isn’t, the answer is almost always to make it more, not less.