So the lady that owns the chocolate shop is apparently a well-trained chocolatier (and their stuff is fantastic), but also a self-taught graphics artists and she's been doing their own labels for years. I sent her some SVGs of boxes to decorate and told her that we'll figure out the pricing to run the machine after she settings on a design and I can figure out how to optimize the process and waste as little material as possible.
The ammo box that I did is for my cop friend that runs shooting competitions all over the place and wants some cool, custom prizes as awards for his competition. I told him "There's a lot of room for improvement, but it will take me a little bit to learn how to use Adobe Illustrator.", and he replied with "Come over this weekend. My wife used to teach graphic design (especially Illustrator) at the college and she's really excited about what you sent over this morning".
My lady's best friend & her husband also went to school for graphic design (but don't use their degrees) and have a bunch of ideas, and her co-worker has a fairly successful Etsy account that she makes about a grand from per month, and she wants to make some Jewelry with it.
I'm going to learn Illustrator so I can make all the stuff I want to anyways, but I'm going to have to figure out how to price the use of this thing so that people can just send their files and I send them back a box of unassembled parts. The damn machine only costs about $1,500, so I assume
everyone will eventually get their own if any of us start making decent money from it...assuming i'm actually charging them more than pennies and nickels to use it in the first place. Haven't been able to come up with a universal pricing structure yet, but was thinking something like:
Stocked material cost + 20% markup, $15/hr labor, $0.10/minute while the machine is actually running.
I think that would encourage people to arrange their files to maximize material usage (material cost built in, labor per part increases with frequent sheet changes) and use the machine functions that are fast (cutting & scoring) instead of the slow one (engraving). Engraving stinks worse, too.
That would make A SINGLE box like the one below:
$7 + $1.40
$15
$0.45 (cutting) + $3.50 (engraving)
=$27.35
Or my best guess for doing them in batches of 50, replace the engraves with scores, and arrange the cuts to fit the most on one sheet:
$116 + $23.20
$22 $90
$35
=$196.2, or $3.92/box
=$264.20, or $5.28
If that all works out, seems reasonable.
edit: Muh Maths
Bandwagon
Can your machine make something like this?
www.lumilor.com
