< FOUNDRY QUOTATIONS – WHAT’S INCLUDED
TENDERING & PRICE NEGOTIATION
An artist may be quite happy to approach and engage a single preferred founder to cast their work, but it sometimes pays to get a wider pricing comparison. This can easily be done by sending the details of the proposed sculpture project to more than one foundry for a quotation. It is not necessary to contact every foundry available, three is usually enough to give some clear idea of comparative costings. Bear in mind earlier comments though, that the cheapest is not always being the best option and a good many artists will happily pay premium rates to a foundry that provides them with a top class service in the full knowledge that lower prices are available elsewhere. Building an effective working relationship with a founder should be a priority for any artist with a regular casting schedule.
Asking around for a foundry quotation for most projects should be a fairly simple task, however large scale commissions may require a more formal approach by the artist. Large commissions are often funded by big corporations, galleries or major contractors, who in turn tend to conduct business under quite specific and sometimes inflexible guidelines. Large commissions can also involve supporting contracts being carried out by a number of other individuals and organisations beyond the artist and founder alone (ie lighting, groundworks, access etc). The work of all these participants may have to be detailed, costed and supervised.
The method used to obtain quotations under these circumstances is known as TENDERING. The formal process of tendering requires the drafting of a job specification which includes all the known information about the proposed project. Also listed in this document are the requirements expected of the founder and any other involved contractor. Issues raised in a tendering document can include payment details, stage deadlines, delivery dates, installation details and maintenance obligations, as well as health and safety and other procedural instructions documents such as the submission of a METHOD STATEMENT.
As far as the artwork itself is concerned, the basic information and specification supplied for a tender is essentially the same as that required for a straightforward estimate or foundry quotation (see FOUNDRY QUOTATIONS & ESTIMATES above), except in this case the details of the project are widely circulated with a covering letter to suitable foundries, asking those with an interest to submit a bid. In some cases it may be a requirement to publish an EXPRESSION OF INTEREST (EOI) notice in a national or regional newspaper. As tendering is a fairly formal approach, this type of bidding process is usually reserved for large or very high value projects (specification sheets for some projects can run to many dozens of pages containing detailed information).
Those artists who are awarded a commission and are expected to tender for a foundry costing will normally work in close co-operation with their commissioner or agent to prepare a suitable document for distribution to foundires. Despite the implied formality of tendering, there is no reason why artists should not modify the basic principals of this process for more personal enquiries about smaller projects.
Tendering for quotes is an extremely useful tool and the responses gained should provide the artist or commissioning agency with a comparative overview on founders’ cost structures and service levels – this kind of information can be especially helpful if the scale of the proposed project is outside of the artist’s immediate experience.
Tendering for comparative foundry costings may be a contractual obligation within an awarded commission. In this case submitting a range of foundry quotations to a commissioning body will be a binding matter, even if the artist already has a specific founder in mind. In practice though, most commissioning bodies will give some weight to the artist’s own preferences – provided their preferred founder’s costing is not excessively high.
For those artists or organisations whose main priority is to obtain the lowest possible price on a foundry cast, extensive tendering or some form of derivative process is essential. Pressing founders for further discounts on their quotations can bring additional savings, but artists should bear in mind that professional founders are established to make a profit, not to provide subsidised support for sculptors. As noted previously, the quality of any product or service is inevitably linked to the fee or price charged, so if a foundry is pressurised to take on a project at an excessively low price then the job may be given minimal priority, ultimately being put to one side and left unworked for extended periods whilst better paid work is attended to. To encourage good service, an artist will normally have to make some kind of concession to get a lower than first quoted casting price. Arrangements here can typically involve ordering and making a down payment on an entire EDITION (instead of one cast at a time), or offering the founder a ‘job lot’ of several individual sculptures. Either of these concessions offered to a founder will usually result in some level of overall fee discount.
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