There are many ways you can improve your foundry’s chance of retail success! Here’s a few of our recommendations:
Introductory discounts
Some foundries see success by offering an introductory discount on their font when it is first released. This gets customers excited about your design and drives traffic to your page. Discounts between 50% - 60% are the most effective. Read more about discounting here.
Offer a free style
Recently, we’ve seen foundries see success by offering one or two free styles in their family for free. This especially works well for larger text families. Font customers like to test out fonts before making the decision to spend money on a complete family. If you are uncomfortable giving away a font, consider offering a free demo font with a limited character set. Families that contain a free style that is not a demo style are eligible to be included in our Free Font Friday emails, which is one of our most popular newsletters.
Competition research
Before releasing the font, do some research. Put yourself in the shoes of a potential customer looking to use/buy a font in the same category as yours. Pretend you are a graphic designer looking for a font. What is that experience like? Check out your competition - what features do those fonts have? What are they priced at? What are they missing? Emphasize what makes your fonts different in your marketing, and use the prices of popular competitors to inform your prices. What is trending in graphic design? Use those trends to craft your marketing images.
Font pricing
Pricing fonts is an essential part of a font release.
A common mistake when pricing fonts is to price based on the amount of work done to create the font or the amount of time it took to create the font. For example, fonts that took one year to make should not be priced twice the price of fonts that took six months to make.
Instead, price based on the market and the research you did in the "Competition research" section of this article. There are many pricing strategies. One strategy is to price your fonts lower with the goal of having high volume of sales. On the other hand, you can set high prices anticipating fewer sales. Consider your font category when pricing - higher prices with occasional discounts for text or large families seems to work well, while consistently low "good value" prices for smaller, more specific, or display families works best. It's worth testing out and seeing what works for your foundry! Prices cannot be changed for 45 days after introduction, last price change, or promotion. If your font is sold elsewhere, it should be priced the same as on MyFonts or higher.
Read all about font pricing in our in-depth guide here.
Compelling images
Imagery is a key component of successful fonts. We require at least five (5) images in PNG format at 2:1 ratio for each font family on our sites. Here are some tips for great images:
- Show the fonts in use on example logos or products.
- Utilize photography.
- Show the fonts in real-world situations or settings.
- Don’t be afraid of simplicity - sometimes less is more, so don’t fill each image with fonts.
- Use a consistent and simple color palette - we recommend 3-4 colors at most.
- Use your images to educate customers about the great features of your fonts.
- Don’t create only “traditional” specimen images. Have some fun!
- Don’t include pricing in your image.
- Refrain from using political or insensitive imagery.
- We recommend 2000 x 1000 px for retina screens. Minimum size is 1440 x 720 px.
Your images should be aspirational; you want potential customers to look at your font images and think “If I buy this font, I could make something that great.” Potential customers should be able to clearly envision how your font would work in their project. Want some examples of images that are resonating with customers? Check out our Hot New Fonts page!
Grow your following
In general, the best thing you can do is to continue to develop and build your foundry's reputation and following. Promote your font on social media, create your own email list, or advertise your fonts online. Grow the network of people who are interested in your fonts and know about your foundry. Our site, especially MyFonts, acts like a megaphone; the more traffic you drive to your family page on the site, the more people that find the page, the more visible the page becomes in search results, and thus the more potential customers see the font. Please note that you cannot use the email addresses of customers who purchase your fonts through MyFonts for marketing purposes.