Quick answer: Build your price from your own numbers rather than the market's — total session time including preparation and follow-up, the cost of anything the client takes home, your kit amortized over its life, and the number of clients you can realistically serve in a month. Copying another consultant's price copies their cost structure, which is almost never yours.
This is the question that comes up most often once the training is done and the kit has arrived: what do I actually charge? And most new consultants answer it by looking up what someone nearby charges, which is understandable and is also how people end up working for less than they meant to.
Count the whole session, not the appointment
The appointment is the visible part. The billable reality is longer:
- Preparation — sorting drapes, setting the light, checking the space
- The analysis itself — typically two to three hours for a full personal color analysis
- Follow-up — notes, palette handover, the questions that arrive afterwards
- Travel, if you go to the client
A three-hour appointment is often a five-hour commitment. Pricing against three is how the math quietly stops working.
Separate what you keep from what she keeps
Two different things are being sold, and blurring them is what makes margin disappear.
Your time and expertise is the service. The palette fan she takes home is a physical good with a real unit cost. Price the service on your time, then add the takeaway at its own cost plus margin. Consultants who fold the fan into a single round number tend to absorb the cost themselves without noticing.
Your kit is a third category — a fixed cost spread across every client it will ever serve. Divide the kit cost by the number of analyses you expect from it and add that per session. It is a small number, and leaving it out is why the second kit feels like an unexpected expense rather than a planned one.
Capacity is the ceiling nobody mentions
There is a hard limit on this work: you can only be in one room at a time. If a full analysis takes five hours all in, a realistic week holds a handful of them, not twenty.
That ceiling is what makes underpricing so costly here. In a business with unlimited units, a low price can be made up on volume. In this one, it cannot — there is no volume to make it up with. Which is also why most established consultants eventually add something that is not time-for-money: group workshops, wardrobe packages, digital follow-ups, or teaching.
Raising a price you already set
New rate for new clients, existing rate honored for anyone already booked. That is the whole mechanism, and it is fair on both sides.
Two things usually signal it is time: you are booked further ahead than you want to be, or you have added something real to the service — more experience, a better kit, a longer follow-up. A price rise attached to something concrete is easy to explain, including to yourself.
What we are not going to give you
An honest limit: we are not going to publish a number. Rates vary enormously by country, city, cost of living and positioning, and a figure that helps a consultant in one market misleads one in another. The framework travels; the number does not.
Pricing is taught as part of the method rather than left to guesswork — the Personal Color Analysis Certification covers it in the practical module, and the Image Consulting Certification ends five of its service modules with duration and pricing. If you are still choosing a kit, start here.
FAQ
Should I offer a discount for my first clients?
A clearly labeled introductory rate with an end date works better than a quiet discount, because it does not become the price you are stuck with.
Do I charge more for a home visit than a studio session?
Travel is time, and time is the thing you are selling. Most consultants price it in rather than absorb it.
Should the palette fan be included or sold separately?
Either works. What matters is that its cost appears somewhere in your calculation rather than being quietly absorbed.
Price from your own numbers. The consultant down the road has a different kit, a different rent and a different week — her figure was never going to be yours.
