One price struck through, a softer one added
A price tag printed with £30, struck through in one thick line, and £18 written in underneath by hand — two figures that only make sense read together.
One tag, hung by its string, the knot showing at the top corner. Printed on it in a firm, stamped
weight: £30, struck straight through with one thick line. Underneath, in a different, lighter
hand: £18.
Neither number means much on its own. Together they're the whole transaction, kept.
Why keep the original price on the tag instead of just writing the new one?
Because a single number is just a price. Two numbers, one crossed out, is proof that a price got argued down — which is a more specific thing to own than a discount ever is.
A tag that only shows £18 could mean anything: a sale, a mistake, the price it always was. Leaving £30 visible and struck through fixes the story in place — this cost more, a moment happened, and it cost less after. The strike-through is doing the work a receipt usually does, except it's stuck to the object itself rather than filed away somewhere.
Why does the second price look handwritten instead of another printed figure?
Because the two numbers come from two different moments, and the design says so by using two different marks.
£30 in stamped type is the shop's opening position, set before anyone walked in. £18 in a
softer, looser hand is what got agreed at the counter, added after the fact by whoever was standing
there when the deal closed. A second printed price would flatten that difference into one tidy
transaction; the change in hand keeps the negotiation visible as two separate acts.
What's the actual choice in designing one of these?
How far apart the two figures sit, and whose hand the second one is in.
A small gap between £30 and £18 reads as a token knock-off; a wide one reads as a real argument won. Whether the correction looks like a shopkeeper's tired scrawl or a buyer's own careful hand changes who the tag is telling the story from — the same mechanism at work on a password corrected in a second ink, just applied to a price instead of a code.
Does printing a price tag design raise any rights question?
Only if it's copying a specific shop or chain's actual tag — their logo, their layout, their house typeface — which, like any branded material, is something a business can license out.
A plain tag with no shop name on it isn't standing in for any particular retailer. Most secondhand tags never carried a brand mark in the first place — a strip of card, a string, a price — so the invented version here is closer to how these actually looked than a reconstructed shop tag would be.
Does this only work for something bought secondhand?
No — anywhere a price got negotiated in person rather than accepted as printed works the same way: an instrument at a market stall, a bike at a garage sale, furniture off a driveway.
What has to change is the object the tag is tied to, not the tag itself. The mechanism — a stamped figure, a strike, a softer figure beneath it — reads the same whether it's hanging off a guitar case or a chest of drawers.
Doesn't showing a lower price make it look like you're bragging about paying less?
Not really — the tag isn't arguing the item was cheap, it's recording that a specific exchange happened between two people at a counter.
A tag with only the final price on it looks the same whether it cost £18 from the start or got argued down from £30. Keeping both numbers is what shows the negotiation took place, not unlike the kind of unwritten agreement that lets a coin balanced on a ledge stand in for a whole queueing system — nobody's checking, and it still holds.
Does it print well?
Yes — a tag shape with two contrasting marks reads clearly at chest size and holds up well as a flat print.
The strike-through wants to stay a single confident stroke rather than several overlapping lines, or it starts to look scribbled rather than deliberate. Keep the two prices in genuinely different weights — one stamped and even, one looser — so the eye can tell them apart at a glance rather than reading them as one continuous correction.
Rust orange with black and cream keeps the contrast high without needing more than three flat inks: one for the tag, one for the printed price and strike, one for the added figure.
How do I get one made?
Describe the tag at JustOG — the two prices, how far apart they sit, whose hand wrote the second one. Pick a direction, drag the crop frame, see it composited on the real garment, and it's made to order and shipped.
Designs other people have published are in the shop.
£30, crossed out. £18, written under it. Both still legible, on purpose.