How well do higher end morphs sell?

[nikkubus]

I also don't know much about the market in Europe vs in the US, but I can't imagine is drastically different. The more expensive the animal, the less people can afford said animal, and you might be holding on to it a little bit longer, but 1-2k isn't at the extreme end it should eventually sell. A 5-10k animal you could sit on for years waiting for just the right customer that can afford it and wants it. The opposite end of the spectrum, you are going to produce a lot of normal looking hets trying to produce a triple recessive, and those are near impossible to sell here.

Even if all those animals are super easy to sell, you need to think about if this is really a project you want to deal with as a new breeder, because it isn't always cost effective when you have to feed a bunch of hets long enough they are stable to be sold or even longer to breed them as holdbacks. It could take a decade of breeding to hit just one triple recessive depending on what your starting animals are. You could start with a pretty expensive pair and produce a lot more of the high end animals, but the second you try to add other morphs in to make the project exciting again, you have to deal with these crazy odds all over again! A project like this needs to be really well thought out and planned for. Once you accomplish triple recessives being reliably bred from one of your pairs, say you want to add YB or Enchi in there to make the yellows and oranges better, back to dealing with really difficult odds. It's better to get a variety of incomplete dominants in there from the beginning so that you have some kind of variety and the hatchlings that don't hit the goal still have something appealing to buy.

I'd say take a look at some of Kinova's projects and how when Justin is doing them, he's got a lot of alternate goals in these projects so that it stays interesting. He experiments with different combos to see which end up really carrying a project by making combos that are shining examples of the morphs he deals with. That is how he stays so relevant.

I've been breeding off and on for decades and still haven't braved even a double recessive project in BPs. It's a huge time and money investment. I've worked with double, triple, quadruple, quintuple recessive projects in corn snakes, but only because I was able to start with animals that helped me produce great visual combos right off the bat (it's a lot cheaper to say get a triple recessive het 4th recessive corn snake than it is to get even a single recessive visual BP most of the time, though BP recessive costs are dropping rapidly). Price drop is another thing you need to take into account. If it takes you a decade to hit visual triple, they probably won't cost nearly that much by the time you pull it off because they will slowly become more and more saturated in the market. When I started breeding, Pieds (nothing else in a combo) cost about $1500 here. You can pick one up for under $100 now.