The Art of Adding Value

Adding Value to Your Art

Adding Value to Your Art

There is an art to adding value and it’s not always about reducing cost, it’s about leveraging the psyche of the human mind as much as anything else, and the value add is a tool that many in marketing have used since, well, the dawn of marketing I guess!

Here’s my value add to you…

My gift to you is $0 access to this website, as often as you want, at any time of the day or night and you don’t even have to sign up to anything.  Now I really can’t add any better value than that right?

Where’s the catch, there isn’t one! Suddenly, access to this site seems like an incredible value, yet nothing has changed, I have never charged anyone to access this site. What changed is how I framed it just now, I added a value to something you get for free, even if that value is $0. The perception is that it’s worth much more (and I’m hoping it is), but what I’m also doing here is giving you that extra value you suddenly perceive as a gift.

Adding value isn’t and should never be about stripping value from your bottom line, and if you have collectors, that’s the last thing they would want you to do too. As long as they have skin in the game by owning your work, the last thing they will want to see is any stripping of value anywhere. They want to protect their investments so it’s really not in their interests to see you fail. So, this week, we take a dive into a world that revolves around value add.

Snow Moon - Cannock Chase, a special commission available through my Fine Art America and Pixels stores, and available directly too!

You got me at the Haribo’s…

A random act after placing an online order bought a smile to my face twice in the past two weeks. In these dark days, anything that can bring a smile to a customer’s face has to be worth doing, and including a smile with every purchase isn’t a bad strategy to add into your marketing toolkit. There’s little doubt that leaving customers with a smile on their face is confirmation that you have added a value.

I placed two relatively low cost orders online over the past two weeks, a face cream because I’m getting old and probably a little vainer than I once was, and a real matte glass screen protector for my iPad Pro because I wanted something that would last a little longer than the expensive flimsy matte screen protectors I usually buy and because they really do make a difference when you are painting digitally with the Apple Pencil. I do love a grippy pencil.

I wasn’t expecting anything other than what I had ordered to turn up, so I was surprised to find a pack of Haribo candies with the face cream, something so random that it bought a smile to my face, and a free second screen protector when I had only ordered one.  I was so pleasantly surprised with the Haribo’s that I ordered another face cream to see me through the rest of the bleak winter we always seem to have here in Blighty.

Yes, I had become a repeat customer not from the fact that the face cream is the only one that seems to have any effect on the dry skin that a year spent mostly indoors has inflicted me with, but because opening the parcel and finding something so innocent and random made me immediately think that it was a nice touch that the seller really didn’t have to do, and more importantly, it made me smile.

The thing is, I don’t even like Haribo’s, which I also know sounds weird because who doesn’t like Haribo’s, and it gets weirder when you consider that there were only eight pieces of sugared sweetness in the mini packet, so it hardly broke the bank.

Thinking back, this isn’t the first time I have been tempted to repeat my business or spend a little more in some attempt to claim a gift. It’s not like I need a Bluetooth shower speaker if I spend twenty-bucks more, both I and Alexa can hear each other even when I’m taking a shower and she can even turn the lights on, or at least she can when she eventually realises that all lights is very different from hallway lights, so why would I even consider going back to something as basic as a waterproof speaker that’s a lot more miss than hit in picking up a signal and relies on six batteries and is going to cost me twenty-bucks more. Is it even safe to have batteries in the shower? Guess we’ll find out because I now own a Bluetooth shower speaker.

I can tell you exactly why we all do this, it’s because it’s an added value and a gift. A gift might be free, but it isn’t badged as free, it’s badged as a gift which implies it has a value. Free, implies it has little to no value, so ‘free’ is probably a word we need to scratch out from our marketing dictionary. What I’m attempting to say in less than a hundred and fifty words is that we place a higher value on a gift than something we just get for free.

I‘m no psychologist but I do know me, and I know that I would be less likely to spend a buck or two more for something free if it offers me no value or usefulness, but a gift, I love gifts, here’s the extra spend I need to claim it. Real psychologists have, however, studied this phenomenon for years. What they have found is that tactics like bundled promotions tend to increase the intention to repurchase, and they elicit a higher willingness to pay more.

Other studies have shown that items are less likely to be returned if they come with a free gift because that would also need to be returned too, and returning the gift would be perceived as a loss. But we also have to consider that the free item is valued less than the main item, so customers are less likely to make a future purchase of the free item. They want it because it’s free, whether they need it or not. Free is a powerful force.

When it comes to bundles, the opposite is true and the main item is valued less, the bundled item is what’s likely to be purchased again and again. If you need to sell more of any particular item in the future, what they essentially found in these studies was that it was better to bundle the item that you want to continue to sell as an aside to the primary item. Keep up, I know, I couldn’t quite get my head around this either until I thought about every single bundled offer I have ever purchased.

Pye Green Tower - another special commission available directly or from my online stores!

There’s a difference in intent and action from a customer when it comes to bundles and gifts, depending on what you are selling, and what you are hoping to sell in the future, determines which offer you use as the hook to bring the customer in. Yes, it is kind of complicated, but remember what I said right at the beginning of this article, how this website is a free gift to you, well, I can also bundle it with a piece of my art for a really great price giving you something nice to look at and years of pre-written experience accessible whenever you want. Now I’m adding some serious value, not that I don’t always try to. Seriously though, if you need a bundle of art, get in touch.

When it comes to running special offers on artworks, regular readers will know that I’m not a fan. Been there, done that, have the bills to prove it. Discounting art really does a disservice to previous buyers in that it also devalues whatever they have already purchased from you. Imagine if you had purchased one of my original special edition one-off artworks for the princely sum of five thousand dollars and next week I discounted it to a hundred bucks. Your first thought would probably be around how little you will trust me in the future, rapidly followed by a phone conversation to ask for a refund, and I would be right in front of you thinking and asking the very same thing.

Discounting also takes money away from your bottom line, if you can sell a piece of work for five thousand dollars you would need to sell fifty times as many at a hundred dollars. Each item needing you to up-front the costs of production, and of course, you would need fifty times the time, and maybe, many more times the effort. If discounting is too frequent, it quickly becomes your new norm at which point you haven’t just devalued the works your collectors have already purchased, you have essentially devalued your business moving forward.

That’s not to say that you should never discount, there are times when it absolutely makes sense to offer a discount. If you have long-term collectors, then offering a small discount on repeat purchases is justifiable, but only if and when you have to do it or when whole life value of the client makes it worth doing.

The other issue with discounting is that its success is predicated on your existing value. If you are making two bucks on a print, a 50% discount to the buyer, sees a return of a dollar for you. That’s probably nowhere near enough to convince a buyer one way or the other. If a buyer connects with the artwork, chances are that if they can afford it, they will buy it without the dollar discount.  Small discounts tend to need volume to make up any shortfall, and small discounts just tend to look mean. A buyer doesn’t see the value of the base costs, or that a dollar off is actually halving your income, they only see the discount.

In short, at two bucks, it’s fair to say that you probably don’t have enough value to give away without seriously impeding your own bottom line, and the buyer isn’t getting what they consider a generous discount which leaves you both equally disappointed, and besides, this can cause you to resent the buyer and that’s never a great place to be. Also, if you are only making two dollars on a piece of art and a buyer asks for a discount, you really need to consider if you are undervaluing yourself and your work.

Here’s where we get to the crux of this weeks article, adding value isn’t always about discounting or significantly harming your bottom line. I can’t begin to count the times I have repeated this as a mentor to a new artist or through this website, but you would be surprised at just how eager new artists can be to make a sale, even if it means recovering less than the work cost to produce. There is something called a loss leader, but those kinds of business models require you to have a much bigger ticket item that you are directing the buyer towards that will allow you to recover the loss. If you want to attract people to that five-thousand-dollar artwork, it might be prudent to get them in the door with the offer of less expensive piece, maybe even the first piece in a series so that they might then go on to buy the collection.

Visit Beautiful Cannock Chase - By Mark Taylor

Surprisingly, I have seen this with some experienced artists too and dare I say it, I recognise selling more art at a loss throughout my first decade in the business, I honestly thought it was the model that every artist used. I just didn’t realise it wasn’t until a buyer of all people pointed it out to me and said that if they were going to continue to collect my work, they’d like to see my prices increase, and this took me a little while longer to understand what was really being said.

If you are stripping value from your work, never expect that buyers won’t do that exact same thing either. You are creative, so think creatively. Adding value isn’t at all about stripping value away, it’s the opposite, and the word “adding” should have already given this away.  

So how do I add value?

As an independent artist, you have so many options to add value that it’s more about choosing the right value add for the right client, and making sure that some value add is always given to all clients. That’s not always something you can control if you are represented. Fortunately, as an independent, it is within your gift to gift some value add.

You don’t have to go down the route of providing a small micro-packet of Haribo’s to put a smile on a clients face, you are uniquely positioned as an independent artist to offer an outstanding customer experience and a personal level of care that any huge box store would find it difficult if not impossible to come close to matching. Value can be as much about providing the right information and signposting the client to what’s right for them and their budget, as it is about anything that costs you cold hard cash and this works pretty much across any business.

It’s difficult to take big business as a blueprint to run a small business, the challenges are very different as are the audiences involved, but there has been a shift of focus over the past couple of years and what you can openly see these days is that big business is beginning to look to small businesses for cues around engaging with local and niche audiences. I’ve yet to see any big business do that quite as well as a small business can, but it does confirm that the buying public is more receptive to that localised approach. If that wasn’t the case, big business wouldn’t be using the power of entire marketing departments to focus on giving the illusion of being your new local best friend. That’s surely a good indication that localism is something that needs some more of your focus.

There are a few tricks that large businesses use that might be useful, although quite how you pull off the extra fries in the bottom of the bag trick with art is something that might need to be thought about. For those unfamiliar with that particular element of business psychology, there are always extra fries in the bottom of the bag to make it look like they gave you too many. It is broadly known that this visual prompt is something that reinforces a value add and it is part of a costed model, they’re not really giving you anything for free, the millions of extra fries in the bottom of the bags are already included in their bottom line.

Of course, with art, adding in a couple of extra works will rapidly eat into your bottom line and you will inevitably run the risk of becoming an ‘actual’ starving artist, but there are plenty of other value adds that you could and should consider.

Colliery Wheel Number 5 - another from the Chase Collection on my store!

You can become a resource for your buyers…

The best person to talk about your art will always be you, so if buyers are interested, let them know that they can ask you questions about your work, and go further, keep the conversation going for as long as you can. This is such an important element in building up the all-important trusting relationship.

You could also consider providing other resources, maybe produce a booklet or handout, which these days, could even be an e-book or email, that provides information about how to care for their new artwork, how to hang it, how to frame it, and think about the other value adds that you can offer through doing this. There’s an opportunity here for the upsell too, so let them know that you can also supply the frame and get the work matted and ready to hang, and if you do send any kind of document out, make sure your contact details are on it and consider making any documentation fall in line with the overall theme of your branding, you, by the way, are the brand.

I have been doing this for a while even with the open edition prints that I sell directly. Whenever I handle any part of the print process, the buyer  can expect to receive a folder containing care instructions, contact details, and with originals and special or limited editions, a certificate to say that it is a genuine print or original work which is then signed and dated.  There’s also a serial number on the certificate which matches a holographic serial number that is placed on the back of the work and I have used the holograms on USB sticks and hard drives where the buyer has purchased an original digital work. If the stickers are tampered with, they expose the word, void. You can even get these with your signature or business name laser etched into them, and they look really good, they’re a visual cue that sings quality more than having any deeper meaning.

Hologram Stickers that change in the light!

The art world and certificates of authenticity has forever been a world of smoke and mirrors, but this does add an element that makes something a little more difficult for others to pass off as their own or someone else’s work and also, if you get this right, people will know that the bargain on that certain e-commerce website didn’t actually come from you.

To me, it seems like a logical way to provide a certificate of authenticity with some meaning, because without the hologram or a reference point that leads back to you, whether it’s a hologram or a signature or whatever, a certificate really isn’t worth much more than the paper, it’s written on, but it also adds a touch of quality to the process and my collectors seem to like the idea!

The other thing I always include in the folder is a set of three business cards so that they can be handed out, and a catalogue of art featuring works from the same series, or works that would work well together with the chosen piece. It’s not quite a laborious as it sounds, everything is templated and I keep pages to insert into the catalogue stocked up so that I can just slide them in, and it allows me to curate the work that I want the buyer to see based on what they have purchased or what I have a good idea they will like from the conversations we will have had.   They also get a print out of the colour pallet used together with complementary and harmonious colours.

There is an element of additional cost in doing this, and especially if you go down the route of having bespoke serial numbers printed, but when serial numbers are tied to a collection of limited edition prints or an original series, it looks more like the premium product it should look like.

The stickers shown above are slightly more generic than the ones I use on my commissions, but these also have a hidden underlay that when peeled, reveals the word void. These are great if you need to provide sealed items too and they’re not all that expensive.

To finish off the folder, I always add a thank you note on a postcard which features another piece of my work and then it’s all placed in a good quality envelope and that gets sealed with another label, this time saying thank you for supporting my small business.

It really doesn’t cost too much to do this, buyers appreciate it, I have the option of adding in a voucher for the times I do want to run a promotion, or for when the buyer has already made previous purchases, and there’s usually a discount voucher for a framer if one hasn’t already been ordered. That’s especially something I like to do because it supports another small business too.

Consider giving your customer a test drive!

Art is a considered purchase for most people and especially in these times of economic uncertainty. Something I have been doing for a while for my collectors who are thinking about some of my slightly more expensive works and originals and allowing them to try out the art on their own wall for a couple of days.  Obviously, this works much better if it’s a local buyer, it becomes challenging when you need to start looking into getting worked shipped, but whenever I have done this, the success rate has been really good and the buyer has gone on to make the purchase.

Cannock Chase Stag - Another work from my commissioned Chase Collection!

There is a word of warning with this, you might want to ask for a deposit or ask the potential client to sign something that says that any damage will be covered, but if you have already established trust with a client, asking them to pay to test out your work might not always sit well. The important thing in doing this is in making sure that your art goes through that potential customer's front door. Some will return it and say that it doesn’t fit as well as they thought it might, but more often than not, people genuinely do become attached to art, and it can happen quickly. There’s also an element of that psychology where people are less inclined to lose something once they have it.

Adding value is also about continuing to add value to your existing customers…

All too often the focus is on adding value to new customers which is absolutely super-important, but what about those you already have? Sure, it’s important to keep new customers coming through your door but it’s also important to keep the customers you already have. For me, around 70% of my business comes from customers I already have.

There’s another reason or three why you should be adding value to existing customers and maybe the biggest reason to do this is that new customers cost you both time and money. Spending time onboarding new customers will always come with a price attached in some form or other and there are generally multiple costs that need to be factored in over and above the time you need to spend onboarding them.  

Customer retention and brand loyalty is something that big business understands well, but once again, as small businesses, we are in a much more unique position where we can respond much faster.

Most big businesses understand that their customers, however loyal now, will have a lifetime value. I think it’s slightly different with art. Big business tends to focus on those customers who are more likely to bring reward sooner, and they realise that the time that the customer spends with them might be limited. With art and I think to an extent, with very few other products, our customers no matter how much they have or haven’t already spent, have the potential to stay with us for as long as we can keep satisfying their needs as long as their artistic tastes remain aligned with what we deliver, and a buyer of a postcard today might have aspirations to become a serious collector when their circumstances change.

If you are an artist, you don’t need buyers, you really need collectors. Buyers are fine, but they’re unpredictable. A good collector base that is engaged has the potential to carry you through the slower times and an engaged collector base makes it about as easy as it gets in the art world to begin predicting when your next sale might happen and even to who, but you do have to keep your ‘A’ game in play.

Looking after your existing customers and hopefully getting them excited enough to eventually blossom into collectors, doesn’t have to be hard work. Keeping in touch with them but never spamming them with emails, and making sure that you only send emails when you have something to say, perhaps about a work in progress, or a work you are about to release, are relatively easy things to do. There is something else you also need to consider adding and it’s something that once again, big business really struggles with, I’m talking about the personal touch, the human element that all too often gets lost via the chatbots of big business and their desire to run their empires via an algorithm and minimum human contact. I have a feeling that the human element of business is going to be back in vogue when people begin to tire of the robots, now’s the time to get ahead.

That human connection is the biggest value you can ever add as an artist and there is zero cost to you in doing it. It’s asking how someone is, and taking an interest in the answer they give. It’s the occasional, I haven’t forgotten you. Eventually, when you begin to build relationships and trust, it’s the friendships that you will form within your collector base that will become the bedrock of your business, a lot like the old-fashioned local community store, and chances are, if you get this right, a community will form around you.

Add value with the things you are already supposed to be doing…

How can anyone add value from providing only what’s expected to be provided? The simple answer is, there are too many businesses big and small, who have forgotten what they are supposed to be providing. 

It’s so important to have a laser-like focus on exactly what your target market wants and needs, and deliver that, even if you deliver nothing else. There are so many businesses, and I have to say that it is usually large ones, who forget what they need to be focussed on and they start delivering anything and everything other than what it says on the tin!

How that then translates for artists are that there are a heap of things that buyers expect that sometimes get forgotten about. Sometimes in the pursuit of the hustle, sometimes because the stock standard things that artists should be doing are either quite boring to deliver or do, or just uncomfortable, as in, I know I would rather be creating what I want to create instead of working out what it is that my market wants me to create.

The boring things that often get missed are the things that will add real value, not just to what you are doing right now, but in terms of building up a legacy that you can happily leave behind when the time comes. Things like documenting your work, taking time out to develop your skills without the pressure of always having to create something that will go on sale, taking time out more generally, after all, the art world isn’t always filled with glitter and shimmer.

These though, are not what one would call the obvious value adds. Yet, these are the very things that will make buyers and ultimately collectors, notice what you are doing. If you sit quietly in the comfort zone of painting the same thing over and over, there’s nothing left for a collector to collect, your skills stagnate, your art begins to suffer, and something as mundane as making sure that you document your work, shows and demonstrates progression.

If you’re rested you will be more willing to engage, and if you are enjoying the ride that the art world has the potential to provide, your customers will notice it too. No one wants to buy a piece of work from someone who takes zero interest in them or appears not to care about what they create or do. Your passion for what you do is a phenomenal value add that customers will pick up on.

Cannock Chase - Available now and another one from my Chase Collection

Remember, adding value doesn’t have to come with a monetary cost…

If you begin to add value in other ways over and above chipping away at the bottom line, it can even have the effect of eventually creating a premium offering. That doesn’t mean to say that you suddenly need to start charging premium prices, you don’t necessarily want to squeeze your current buyers out of the market immediately, but ultimately you and your art will need to develop and part of this development is around your art increasing in value over time.

If there is one thing that the pandemic has done, it is to drive the divide of wealth even wider and the markets you had pre-pandemic, might not be there right now, or they might have changed, and, if they have disappeared, who knows if they will eventually come back. The value add proposition has the potential to reposition you in a new market, and one which may turn out to be the market that dreams are made of.

Ultimately, the value add that focuses on looking after the consumer is the first step to the art career that you have most likely been yearning for, for some time.  If you can build up direct relationships with buyers, suddenly there’s little need for the middle man. It puts you and your art right there in front of the customer, your job at that point is to get that customer to like you a little more than they like someone else.

I know for some artists the transition into a market of affluence is a daunting thought, how do you even begin to communicate with people who earn more in an hour than you do in a week and the answer is very simple, you talk to them just like you talk to anyone else, with curtsey and respect.   

We’re all human, we all have the same basic needs, and we all kind of do the same human stuff. Their wealth shouldn’t put you off, yet I have met so many artists who purposely never go anywhere near a more affluent market because they’re not affluent themselves. Forget the wealth thing, you can’t judge an art buyer based on the size of their wallet compared to yours, and if you are competing with other artists on price, that’s just not a great strategy at all. Their market is probably not your market, you are the master of your market and the value add that you decide to bring to it.

Glow Over a Dry Stone Wall - One of my favourite works ever!

Other value adds…

Aside from the value add that improving your customer service can bring, there are a couple of other value adds that you might want to consider that don’t have to break the bank but might just put a smile on a clients face.

Include a hanging kit…

Even if it’s not an entire kit containing hanging wires to hooks, preparing an artwork so that it’s ready to hang and providing the fitting to hang it on, just adds that little extra for not a lot extra.  

Offer a guarantee…

Sometimes we get a work home and it doesn’t quite match the expectations we had hope it would meet, or we find it’s too big or too small for the space. You could consider having an exchange policy, and this will add value to your work too.

Include an artist’s proof…

Every work I create gets printed off at least three times during the creative process. I do this to make sure that colours work when they’re printed and it provides you with a way to check for imperfections that aren’t always obvious on screen. If you are a traditional or even a digital painter, your proof images might be in the form of sketches, and in time, you might have a heap of sketches and printed images hanging around. So consider bundling an artists proof with the final work. You could also ask Print on Demand buyers to register their art with you so that you can offer them access to new work!

Create a video of your process…

People are genuinely interested in seeing what goes into creating a piece of art, and if they have never seen the process before, they’re usually fascinated by how easy you make even to complicated tasks look. In these socially distanced times, everyone is into video, so you could even consider giving a live demonstration over one of the many video conferencing apps that we’re all mostly using today. You could even set this up as a special event on social media to bring in some extra attention and give you something else to post about.

Go beyond the process…

I know with digital art, there’s still very much a perception that you just click a couple of buttons and the magic happens and sadly, even today’s technology isn’t that good. So consider demonstrating the software that you use so that people gain a deeper insight into what’s involved.

Talk about the materials you use…

Most buyers have no idea how much value is on the canvas even before they decide to purchase the work. Art supplies are expensive, so feel free to draw (no pun intended) attention to the quality materials that you are using. They might not know the difference between paper and canvas types either, so explain the difference and show them comparisons. With some papers now costing as much as canvases, they might even begin to see why there’s often little difference in the final price.

Stop selling through a vanity gallery…

There are fewer vanity galleries today than there was this time last year, but let’s be completely honest here, vanity galleries are very different to traditional galleries and they focus on a different market. Think carefully about where you place your work, the wrong choice could put many customers off. Where you sell really matters.

Improve your presentation…

From the document folders to your social media posts, presentation is everything. How you display your artwork is critical in attracting the right audience, your art isn’t a widget, so when you post it online make it look like it really is much more than an everyday widget.

Sell multiples…

For the past few years, I have really been focussing on thematic collections of my landscapes, and I have a few that I have never posted online because they’re available only to my existing collector base. This is where offering a discount can work, if a buyer is taking an entire collection or at least a good part of it, there’s much more room to manoeuvre your pricing to meet the buyer's purse.

It doesn’t have to be a series of artworks though, you could consider bundling accessories, homewares, even a photobook of the collection.

Mountain - One of my best selling early works, still as popular today!

The Upsell…

Pointing out the benefits of archival paper over poster paper, or adding a matte to protect the art, there are multiple ways to make the upsell that don’t always have to add significant cost to the buyer. Last year, I bundled specially created limited edition wallpapers for tablets and phones, a collection of ten works created for that exact purpose and they could only be purchased when they purchased a print directly.

Add loyalty benefits…

We have all seen and probably own a collection of loyalty cards, and you can do this with your buyers too, even if they’re not currently collectors. You don’t always have to offer a discount although you could do this from time to time,  you could also provide special access to a restricted part of your website, or a restricted collection only available to those who have joined your loyalty program. You could even consider creating a private social media group for collectors and place any special offers only in there. The real benefit of this is that this allows you to continue growing those all-important relationships and building trust.

Until next time…

Hopefully, this weeks article will have inspired you to begin thinking outside of the proverbial box when it comes to adding value to your customers and collectors. As you have seen this week, adding value is a two-way street, the ideal is when adding value to the customer adds value to your business too. It’s especially difficult to move some art in some markets right now, but there are still buyers wanting to buy, and there are some markets that have been doing really well throughout the course of the past eight or nine months.

So with this in mind, all that’s left to say is that my next article is going to focus on the uncomfortable business of art. We’ll get down in the dirt of the art world and work out ways to push through the noise that we mostly put of pushing through.

In the meantime, stay safe, stay well, and happy creating!

Mark x

About Mark

I am an artist and blogger and live in Staffordshire, England. You can purchase my art through my Fine Art America store or my Pixels site here: https://10-mark-taylor.pixels.com   and you can purchase my new works, special and limited editions directly. You can also view my portfolio website at https://beechhousemedia.com

If you are on Facebook, you can give me a follow right here,  https://facebook.com/beechhousemedia  You can also follow me on Twitter @beechhouseart and on Pinterest at https://pinterest.com/beechhousemedia

If you would like to support the upkeep of this site or maybe just buy me a coffee, you can do so at my Go Fund Me link right here. 

Any donations received are used to ensure I can continue writing independently for independent artists. I self-fund this website through my art sales on Pixels and Fine Art America, so any donations through Go Fund Me take the pressure off and allow me to carry on writing independent articles to support independent visual artists, the price of a coffee really does make a huge difference!