Snail Slime Pricing – Why do the unscalable thing?

For about $350 customers can hire snails to run (run?) all over their face. That is those customers who visit Tokyo’s Ci:z.Labo spa and have $350 to throw around.

(customers) enjoy freshly made snail slime as the creatures slink across your face for a long, long five minutes

Or if $350 is too steep for you (or that is your reason to not tolerate snails on your face) you can pay $242 for the next best option,

their face will be slathered with snail-slime extract cream and massaged for an hour

That is one full hour of a more tolerable massage by a human at a 30% discount to what slimy snails do for just 5 minutes.

And if you insist on snails over humans you better book in advance as they are booked for weeks. The spa does not want to tire out its celebrity snails. The celebrities work only five minutes a day. That is they can do only one customer a day. Rest of the time they spend munching all-organic diet–carrots, Japanese mustard spinach, and Swiss chard while sliming away in a room set to 20 degrees Celsius.

Let us defer the question of why and what job customers are hiring the snails or the snail slime cream for another day. Let us ask another question

Why does the spa offer such a limited capacity service?

It appears the most unscalable thing to do. Just one customer generating $350 a day. If only they can crack the whip on those slackers and make them work overtime. Or hire other rockstar slime producers to work in parallel.

That is because the live snail crawl is not a product at all. It is just part of the brand. Selling snail slime in a bottle is a good story but not a memorable one like live snails on face. The limit of one customer per day is not about capacity limit but another ingredient of the marketing story, so are the organic carrot add swiss chard meals.

What appears to be another product, exists just to sell the other option and is priced such that at least a few will try it to add credence to the marketing story. The rest will happily settle for another insanely premium priced product. The $350 for five minutes price helps as anchor to make the
$242 per hour price look lot more reasonable. After all how else can you convince customers to pay $242 for letting someone slather snail slime?

So before you copy the spa’s method and do something that doesn’t scale, understand what is the real product and what is just there to sell the real product.