Originally Posted by
kingfan2323
Solution driven ideas would be great.
Okay, back home on the computer, which makes responding a lot easier! You guys know I wander off into "inside baseball" territory easily, so for those who don't care about the nuts and bolts of this stuff, this is a good time to read another thread.
As I mentioned above, I'm always looking for possible case vendors. They're harder to find than you'd expect because of the size of our orders. Small shops cannot make this many cases. Some of the larger companies that can handle this size order are accustomed to dealing with other industries like expensive wines and jewelry, and they charge accordingly. The materials don't cost them more than the materials cost our current vendor, but there's a huge mark up on the labor, so our retail prices would need to go WAY up.
Real world example: one company I've spoken with is accustomed jobs like making 100 special boxes for the NFL for a Super Bowl special VIP package, and charging $800 per unit, which is nothing to the NFL... But his quote was $85 per unit for the aftermarket SK slipcases, with the exact same specs as our current vendor... And I'm not sure we'd sell many of those!
Here are the most recent options I presented to Richard, re: slipcase production.
1A) There is a small press that gets most of their cases made in China. Production takes approximately 12 weeks. Transit time varies as they cannot afford a full cargo container all on their own, so their cases are shipped through a service that essentially puts other company's shipments together to fill a container. But they WOULD be done faster than many projects with our current case maker. Production costs are approximately the same as we pay now, so the retail price would stay the same... but this press recommended we increase our order by 20% because that's the percentage of units they have to toss for quality control reasons.
1B) We aren't opposed to using vendors outside the USA, but we've mostly kept our spending inside the country whenever possible because we like supporting US jobs. That said, we DID try a Chinese company for traycases maybe 10 years ago. (Actually, a local business person who had contacts in China's manufacturing plants came to us with the idea.) The time frame was longer than expected, the cases didn't quite fit right, and they SMELLED AWFUL due to the chemicals in the glue. This experience soured us on the idea of trying China again, but we know that one experience with one company is hardly representative of all of the manufacturing plants in a country!
2A) There is another case maker we do use, but the retail cost for these SK aftermarket slipcases -- if our order was for the same number of units -- would need to go up to $34 because of his increased production costs. If our order goes down due to fewer sales, the price would have to go up to compensate. We pegged the ideal retail price at $40 based on surveys we did the other year -- to make up for the lost sales and increased costs.
2B) Our current aftermarket SK slipcase order is larger than the print runs for MOST of our books. If most of those customers said they'd happily pay $34 or $35 to get the cases faster, this is DEFINITELY an option. But we'd hate to lose 500 (or whatever) orders and then have to double the retail price. AND anger so many customers by raising the price, losing their business, etc.
2C) There's definitely a line of thought that if we could pump these out in 6 weeks, maybe we'd sell a lot more. That sounds good on paper, but we've sold A LOT of Stephen King related books, cases, etc, over the years, and we have a REALLY good feel for the marketplace, so we're pretty sure we've reached MOST of the people who will pay money for an add-on slipcase for their book. Any changes cannot be based on the idea that there's some huge untapped customer base that would jump on board if these came out faster. There probably isn't.
3) We could send the work to our one man shop. He would take approximately 5 months to do the entire job, but as you noted above, that would be faster than some of the cases have taken. It would also mean he would have to stop work on our traycases. He has produced traycases for more than 75 overdue projects over the last 30 months, which is why we're finally within 10 or so projects of being caught up on the Lettered Editions. (Which are WAY overdue, totally our fault, and we'll apologize again here for good measure. Those cases are WAY too late, and everyone who has stuck it out is absolutely awesome for doing so.)
4) We could stop producing the aftermarket slipcases, which would help solve some other case related delays for other projects. It would mean NOT selling a product to 2000 customers who have come to really support that line of products, though, and we'd have to figure out if some of the other projects getting done a little faster would justify angering those customers -- and losing the revenue, which would need made up somewhere else (higher prices?).
I probably have more thoughts, but I'm late getting the kids to bed, so I'll sign off with this for now. Thanks!
Brian
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