BlytheLife.com opened in July 2010 and is a blog and resource hub for all things Blythe!
QOTW: How much for a custom doll?
Written on April 14, 2014 at 12:00 pm by MichelleFiled under: Question of the Week
Occasionally I see posts online about how people feel that $X is too much for a Blythe doll when just a few years ago, the norm was $Y. Are customized Blythes really that expensive nowadays? I decided to do some investigating! I went onto the popular Facebook group, Dolly Adoption, and decided to add up the prices (without shipping) for the first 30 dolls that I saw being listed and calculate the average. To make it fair, I only looked at customized Blythes – no Middies, no Icy dolls, no dolls that were being listed as “factory” or “TBL”. If the price was marked down, I use the lower price as it clearly wasn’t selling at the higher price. I converted all prices to USD, when needed.
Some numbers for you all:
- The lowest price was $125, the highest was $1275
- The average was $599.50
- The mode (value that showed up most frequently) was $300 (at 3 times in 30 listings)
- Only two listings were at or above $1000
- Half of the listings were below $500
Obviously there are varying factors for what makes a customized doll worth it’s value. Was the base doll used expensive to begin with (customized anniversary dolls, I’m looking at you!)? Was the hair rerooted? What was it rerooted with? How extensive is the carving and make-up? Is there art on the eyelids? Is there a non-stock body? What is the doll’s theme? Is this reflected in the charms? What kind of eyechips does she have? Are they handpainted? And, the most important question of all, who customized her? Because the name means a lot – much like how a luxury sedan costs more than the run-of-the-mill minivan, the artist behind the doll adds value to the doll while an unknown customizer won’t fetch as high of a price. As customizers become more skilled, they should charge more for their work, much like how if you have more relevant education under your belt, your employer should, in theory, be upping your salary. But what a customizer charges and what the market will pay are two very different things – hence the reason why some dolls stick around for quite a while, waiting for someone to snatch them up.
What is the most, or the least, you’ve ever paid for a customized Blythe doll?
Shoestring budget gal, here. I’ve seen many customized dollies that I would dearly love to be able to afford. I understand the skill and complexity it takes to sculpt, repaint and reroot these little beauties, so I really don’t think that it is out of line to charge as much as the market will allow. I, don’t, however, think it is wise to charge so much that a doll is on the market for over a year (and, yes, I’ve seen that happen). There comes a time to give in and lower the price.
That being said, I have only one customized doll. She was on ebay and her customizer was unknown. As adorable as she is, nobody had bid on her, so she was mine at the remarkable price of $160! She’s a simple, natural-looking custom, but she is very well-made and adorable.
I think it’s really cool that you did math to figure out what the average cost of dolls are online. What was really interesting is that for your sample size, half were under $500. That doesn’t always seem to be the case and I would be interested to see a followup with a bigger sampling of listings to see if these numbers still hold.
I only have customs. My cheapest one was around $250 and the most expensive was $800. I don’t regret it at all, I regret not getting some customs when they were cheaper before those customizers got really expensive!
Sitting here in 2022 looking at this post midway through a recession where custom fakes lowball for around 400…..