Vicente Wolf

Name: Patricia Monroi

Country: Brazil

Hi, so i´m a Brazilian architect and am currently in a negotiation to design a franchise store, the first project is a flagship that requires my creation and the others that will come will be repetition of the first with adaptations. The client wants to pay like repetition project with a suggestion that there will be an additional 20 stores a year in the future… I think it is too risky for me. What do you suggest to say to persuade the client? Thanks for your input, Patricia

Vicente Responds:

I think you should get a conceptual fee for coming up with the original concept, preparing the drawings and supervising construction. The conceptual part of it is the most important, but with each store that he opens, it will have to change – it can’t all be the same. You’ll have to work on it to ensure it has the same personality within a different space. There should be a fee for that and you should come up with it according to the quantity of work you need to do. Figure out how many hours you feel it’s going to take to conceptualize, plan, do the elevations and then put a price to it, which you multiply by the hours. Add a little more to play it safe.

Most important, you should have it in your contact that the only way he can keep reproducing that concept is by using you to design the stores. If he doesn’t want to do that, you could get a flat fee as a royalty payment for coming up with the concept and then he can do it himself. But each store, whether you draw it up at a higher fee or he does it and you get a flat fee for it, (call it a flat fee) and then if he wants you to review the plans you can charge him per hour for reviewing the plans.

And in your contract it should say that whenever the store is published in a magazine, you need to be credited for design.