wardred
Member
- Joined
- Dec 18, 2008
- Messages
- 394
- Website
- thorslongboat.com
- WEBSITE
- https://artstation.com/wardred
- YOUTUBE
- wardred22
If they get their production kinks worked out, and there's enough profit margin that they can offer a "wholesale" price to retailers and the retailers can markup the product to the "retail" price the team is offering and everybody makes a profit, then this is probably the best place for the team to be in. I could see the team not getting to this point any time soon, and instead offering discounts directly to the customers rather than having a wholesale and retail price, at least until they've recouped their costs, and preferably made a couple bucks themselves.
The plus side to offering up to retailers is it gives them exposure to people they may not otherwise attract, and potentially significant injections of capital at semi-regular intervals. (Edit: Some retailers may have a diverse enough clientèle and be large enough that they can markup higher than Craig's and ED's store without worrying too much about it, but I think most retailers like having the option of offering the product for the same price, if not lower, than the manufacturing team is selling it for.)
The main problems would be stabilizing that production line so that the retailers don't end up waiting months for their orders, something I'm not certain they'd stand for, and getting a profit margin high enough that they can have a retail and wholesale price without making that retail price astronomical.
ED, or maybe Craig would be the better person to ask, what would you anticipate a minimum order for a retailer smaller than ThinkGeek to get a wholesale price, and do you anticipate being able to do this with either the Panodra or the iControlPad anytime in 2011? I know ED and a couple other stores are already reselling Pandoras, but mostly I've thought of them as team members/investors. They'd obviously have priority over some truly 3rd party retailer, which is what I'm talking about.
Along those same lines, how many orders from the US would you have to have to warrant getting FCC certified? (I believe this is required if you're a US based distributor.) For the curious minded.
Edit: Also, having a fair number of "non-enthusiasts" isn't necessarily a bad thing. Getting the software to the point where somebody not comfortable with anything more complicated than a console, or web-browser and solitaire, can use it should be the goal. No weird tweaking to the PNDs. No cautions about the browser cache running off of the nand, and here's what one has to do to get it to run off of one SD card or the other... in short, getting it to "just work". I know that's the goal, but having a few people who really don't know, and don't want to know, how to tweak things can help a project get to that point.
The plus side to offering up to retailers is it gives them exposure to people they may not otherwise attract, and potentially significant injections of capital at semi-regular intervals. (Edit: Some retailers may have a diverse enough clientèle and be large enough that they can markup higher than Craig's and ED's store without worrying too much about it, but I think most retailers like having the option of offering the product for the same price, if not lower, than the manufacturing team is selling it for.)
The main problems would be stabilizing that production line so that the retailers don't end up waiting months for their orders, something I'm not certain they'd stand for, and getting a profit margin high enough that they can have a retail and wholesale price without making that retail price astronomical.
ED, or maybe Craig would be the better person to ask, what would you anticipate a minimum order for a retailer smaller than ThinkGeek to get a wholesale price, and do you anticipate being able to do this with either the Panodra or the iControlPad anytime in 2011? I know ED and a couple other stores are already reselling Pandoras, but mostly I've thought of them as team members/investors. They'd obviously have priority over some truly 3rd party retailer, which is what I'm talking about.
Along those same lines, how many orders from the US would you have to have to warrant getting FCC certified? (I believe this is required if you're a US based distributor.) For the curious minded.
Edit: Also, having a fair number of "non-enthusiasts" isn't necessarily a bad thing. Getting the software to the point where somebody not comfortable with anything more complicated than a console, or web-browser and solitaire, can use it should be the goal. No weird tweaking to the PNDs. No cautions about the browser cache running off of the nand, and here's what one has to do to get it to run off of one SD card or the other... in short, getting it to "just work". I know that's the goal, but having a few people who really don't know, and don't want to know, how to tweak things can help a project get to that point.
Last edited by a moderator: