Wednesday night, and the Business worksheet on added value is open next to a finished badge design I still not pack. The textbook example is a wooden chair. Mine is a round piece of card with a character face on it. It look less serious until you remember someone pay for that face on purpose.
Added value, in the book, is the difference between what you sell something for and what the bought-in materials cost. Paper is cheap. Ink is cheap. The plastic sleeve that keep the badge from bending in a bag is still cheap. The number on the transfer is not. That gap is the point, and for a long time I treat it like lucky accident instead of a process I can name.
Before, I think the “value” is only whether the drawing look cute. Cute is part of it. The rest is decisions buyers never see as separate lines: which expression fit a two-centimetre circle, how many times I redraw the hairline, and whether the colours still read when the print shop make everything a bit duller. Those choices are work. Call them work do not make me a company. It just stop me from pretending the price is a tip for being available.
Business want the formula written clean for the exam, and I can do that: selling price minus cost of materials. What the worksheet do not show is how easy to undercount the cost side when the main input is your own evening. Maths homework waiting under the sketchbook is not on the materials list, but it is still a cost I pay. If I ignore that, the “added value” look bigger than it is, and I congratulate myself for a number that is partly unpaid time with a nicer name.
Tonight I write the badge example under the chair example in my notes. Same structure, different object. The buyer is not paying for cardstock. They pay for a version of a character that do not exist until I make the choices that get it there. That is closer to what I mean when I say I want understand finance later: not glass buildings, just why some changes get a price and others are treated like they happen by themselves.
I am putting the badge in an envelope now. The worksheet can wait five minutes. The definition is already in my handwriting, and for once it match something I can hold.