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Hi Melody, Susie, Pam, etc,
I was just wondering why it is that you guys don’t sell empty boxes (with the cardboard inserts)? I mean, it would be easy money since so many of us need extra boxes, and it would cut way down on broken Windstones due to mailing disasters. So, it protects the pretties, and makes money. Why not do it? I know I’d personally be thrilled to be able to buy some boxes.
I would love to be able to buy them, too. I’ve had an ad listed in the classifieds looking for a number of dragon boxes since early January (and I’m willing to pay for them), and I haven’t had anyone contact me. I’d especially like to be able to buy replacement boxes for the more fragile and larger pieces (laps, scratchers, old warriors, emperors, rising spectrals, etc.)!
I don’t know for sure, but here are some likely reasons:
1.) It helps prevent/identify knock offs. One way a lot of people can tell it’s a mint Winstone is that it has a Windstone box. There are a lot of knock-offs on the market – can you imagine how much more confusing it would be if they had legit boxes?
2.) It’s time consuming. Windstone has a pretty small staff and they are usually 100% busy doing things to ship new sculpts. Making boxes takes time (not a lot of time, but it adds up). They don’t always have boxes for the items they are selling (remember the last GBY batch?), let alone boxes just to sell.
3.) It would be REALLY expensive to the purchaser. With the rise in price for shipping, plus labor, plus materials – you could be paying as much or more for an empty box as you would for a small/medium sculpt.
4.) There’s no profit in it really. Sales don’t equal profit. If something is fairly expensive to make relative to it’s value, you can’t mark it up much and still sell it. So, lots of work and hassle, but no real benefit to the company.
As I said, I can’t swear these are the reasons – but I’ve probably hit at least a couple 🙂
I wish they would, I have several off ebay that don’t have boxes…fortunately they arrived to me safely but if I ever have to move, I’d love to move all my babies safely…
4 things I'm looking for:
1. Mother Meerkat
2. production color Sitting Young Oriental dragons to be made in more colors besides VF
3. Female Griffin – Siamese with White
4. September Raffle Prize 2022 AHD Male GriffinPain in the rear to store.. would take up a lot of room that could be used to stash dragons and unis in 😉
These would probably make a good replacement for cardboard inserts:
http://www.sealedairprotects.com/NA/EN/products/foam_packaging/instapak.aspxWe use basically the same stuff to pack SK’s.
I don’t know for sure, but here are some likely reasons:
1.) It helps prevent/identify knock offs. One way a lot of people can tell it’s a mint Winstone is that it has a Windstone box. There are a lot of knock-offs on the market – can you imagine how much more confusing it would be if they had legit boxes?
2.) It’s time consuming. Windstone has a pretty small staff and they are usually 100% busy doing things to ship new sculpts. Making boxes takes time (not a lot of time, but it adds up). They don’t always have boxes for the items they are selling (remember the last GBY batch?), let alone boxes just to sell.
3.) It would be REALLY expensive to the purchaser. With the rise in price for shipping, plus labor, plus materials – you could be paying as much or more for an empty box as you would for a small/medium sculpt.
4.) There’s no profit in it really. Sales don’t equal profit. If something is fairly expensive to make relative to it’s value, you can’t mark it up much and still sell it. So, lots of work and hassle, but no real benefit to the company.
As I said, I can’t swear these are the reasons – but I’ve probably hit at least a couple 🙂
I’m sure you’re probably right, Kiya, but just because I can, I’ll respond to your responses, lol. None of this is meant to be argumentative, I just enjoy the thrill of the debate 😉
1) I don’t know if there’s really enough knock offs (or knock offers that would be willing to pay for legit boxes) to make it an issue. I mean, are there people who mass produce knock off Windstones and need a lot of boxes to mail them? I feel like people will have just one or two they try to sell. And even if they did have a legit box, most of the knock offs look pretty obvious, and a box wouldn’t be enough to put the suspicions to rest. The felt pads I can understand, but boxes not so much.
2) (I wasn’t actually here for the last GBY batch, but it sounds like there was a lack of boxes happening). I guess for this one I’d say just sell boxes when they’re in surplus, or get someone part time to make boxes. That would make a nice summer job for a kid; get to sit in the factory and look at all the pretties while preparing boxes for mailing. I’d be all over that 😉
3) I think we as purchasers realize it would be expensive, but would probably be willing to do it anyway. The amount you’d have to pay for a box might seem high, but if it saves a piece that’s worth astronomically more I’d say it’s worth it. Emp boxes anyone? 😉
4) There could be profit in it I think. If I were to buy a box, I’m not really paying for the box, I’m paying for the ability to safely and confidently transport my Windstones, and that’s worth a lot more than the price of some cardboard, so the company could charge a lot more than the cost of the cardboard I feel like.
Debates are fun. 🙂 I don’t think it’s argumentative, it’s just – if you haven’t managed a business or worked in certain positions in a business – you don’t realize just how costly certain things are (it’s really crazy to be honest!)
I have absolutely NO idea how much money Windstone pays for supplies so these numbers are purely speculation!
So, say the box (collapsed) costs about $2.30 to purchase (this is based on a quick google search on bulk cardboard boxes).
Then, say, the unstamped inserts cost $5. (It’s more material and of a very specialized type).
You’ll need to tape the box. So, we’ll say $0.10 for tape.
Now, the cost to stamp the box (in maintenance and wear and tear on a machine – yes, if a business does pricing right, this is all calculated to the penny for production – business accounting is crazy!) I have no idea how much the machine costs. We’ll randomly pick – $0.50
Now, your part time kiddo for the summer has to get paid at least minimum wage. Minimum wage in Oregon is $8.95/hour. Figure by the time the kid gets the box out, assembles it, runs the insert through the stamper, puts the insert in the box, and tapes the whole thing up – he can do max of 10 boxes an hour – this is a kid, not an assembly line worker after all! So, labor costs of about $0.90
Then, storage space. Each box takes up a about a square foot of factory space. And you have to stack them not so high they are still hard to get down (otherwise, you have to use other equipment and time to get them).
Most factories work out a per square foot value of their space and then can calculate out how much it costs them per foot/per day to store unsold product. For the sake of argument, we’ll say storing a box for a month costs $0.25 (it’s probably more).
But wait, there’s more! Boxes have to be sold and the orders fulfilled. Susie and her son, Little John, do the majority of this right now. This involves printing the invoice, printing the shipping label, applying the printing label, and moving the boxes to where they will be picked up.
We’ll assume Susie and Little John make minimum wage (I hope not, but, we’re just doing a cost exercise here). Figure with all the steps, they can do about 10 boxes an hour too. So, another $0.90 of labor.
Now shipping. Even empty boxes weigh a couple pounds for the bigger pieces. So, we’ve got about $3.00 shipping if they ship media mail. Now, if you want your box faster, you’re looking at closer to $8.00
BUT – we’re all also familiar with the postal service and UPS. If you ship that box all alone, it might get smashed and damaged! So you probably want to double box it. So add in another $3 for a larger outer box, and about $2 in packing peanuts. And another $0.90 in labor while you’re at it.
Now – you also have to think about your intern. He’s going to want to work more than one hour all summer. If he just works one week, part time, that’s 160 empty boxes! Put them in stacks 5 high by 2 wide and you’ve lost about 16 square feet of factory space! This is starting to get big! (The factory, btw, has NO open floor space! :))
Oh, and let’s add in some more money. Because some boxes will get lost so they will have to be reshipped. Some will get damaged. And all of these take resources and Susie’s time to deal with the service issue. So, assume an average of another $0.50 per box for that poo.
Also – someone has to do payroll for the box kid. And pay for the boxes from their manufacturer. So, another $0.10 for the labor to do the invoices.
SO – your cost per box is roughly $20. Then there needs to be some profit there. So, say $22 per box so you have a 10% margin.
That doesn’t sound too bad, right?
Well, then you get into something called “opportunity loss” costs. That storage space and the time spent could have been used to create a product with better margins that took up less space. So now you have to calculate how much money you lost by making boxes instead and add that to the box cost to break even.
Again, this is all just in the spirit of debate – but these are the kinds of things business have to think about when adding a product line (even empty boxes). 🙂
Oh, and I forgot to add – You also have to be sure you have enough people who want a new lap dragon box (or emp or whatever) that you can sell that 160 boxes. Otherwise, you lose all the money you just spent to make them. 🙂
You COULD, in theory, make this an “on demand” service – but then what happens when the demand is high, but you’re also doing something else (like shipping grab bag babies?) Then people have to wait and get unhappy about waiting and you have more customer service issues.
You COULD, in theory, make this an “on demand” service – but then what happens when the demand is high, but you’re also doing something else (like shipping grab bag babies?) Then people have to wait and get unhappy about waiting and you have more customer service issues.
but we have to wait when we order something around the same time as a GB anyway…I’ve ordered little things all the time around GB time, takes about the time a GB does to ship in my experience….
4 things I'm looking for:
1. Mother Meerkat
2. production color Sitting Young Oriental dragons to be made in more colors besides VF
3. Female Griffin – Siamese with White
4. September Raffle Prize 2022 AHD Male GriffinYou COULD, in theory, make this an “on demand” service – but then what happens when the demand is high, but you’re also doing something else (like shipping grab bag babies?) Then people have to wait and get unhappy about waiting and you have more customer service issues.
but we have to wait when we order something around the same time as a GB anyway…I’ve ordered little things all the time around GB time, takes about the time a GB does to ship in my experience….
And no one EVER complains about the delays in shipping as a result of grab bags. 😉
Honestly, there’s more to it than that even (though I figured everyone would be tired of the text wall)- if Windstone knows they are making 30 emps, they make sure they have stuff for 30 emp boxes. But if you do it “on demand”, you don’t know how many orders for boxes you’d get.
What if you get a box order, but you don’t have the stuff to make the box? What if it takes months to get in those things? Selling things you don’t have in stock is risky. (Also, no offense, but I’d rather they use their supply of boxes at any given time to ship product, not so I can have a spare – it would be really annoying to know you couldn’t BUY a piece because all the boxes were committed to box only orders!)
That isn’t to say that they might never do it, but it’s just not a super simple decision to make and from a basic business standpoint it doesn’t seem like the payout would be worth it.
The original post was it would be something fans would like and a simple way to make more money.
My counter point was that it’s not particularly simple and probably wouldn’t make much money (and might cost money).
You COULD, in theory, make this an “on demand” service – but then what happens when the demand is high, but you’re also doing something else (like shipping grab bag babies?) Then people have to wait and get unhappy about waiting and you have more customer service issues.
but we have to wait when we order something around the same time as a GB anyway…I’ve ordered little things all the time around GB time, takes about the time a GB does to ship in my experience….
And no one EVER complains about the delays in shipping as a result of grab bags. 😉
Honestly, there’s more to it than that even (though I figured everyone would be tired of the text wall)- if Windstone knows they are making 30 emps, they make sure they have stuff for 30 emp boxes. But if you do it “on demand”, you don’t know how many orders for boxes you’d get.
What if you get a box order, but you don’t have the stuff to make the box? What if it takes months to get in those things? Selling things you don’t have in stock is risky. (Also, no offense, but I’d rather they use their supply of boxes at any given time to ship product, not so I can have a spare – it would be really annoying to know you couldn’t BUY a piece because all the boxes were committed to box only orders!)
That isn’t to say that they might never do it, but it’s just not a super simple decision to make and from a basic business standpoint it doesn’t seem like the payout would be worth it.
The original post was it would be something fans would like and a simple way to make more money.
My counter point was that it’s not particularly simple and probably wouldn’t make much money (and might cost money).
I actually enjoyed your text wall, Kiya. Loved the, “But wait, there’s more.” Got a good chuckle from that. I’d stay on a box waiting list for 6 months if it meant getting a box T_T (Is that pathetic?)
This has come up before. It’s a space issue. Windstone does not have enough space to store empty boxes. They make the number of boxes they need for an order, pack it, and then ship the order out. Remember their new space is smaller than the old factory.
Looking for Blue Fawn Baby Kirin
Sanguine Oriental Test Paints, kinglet
Sun Dragon Koi #3These would probably make a good replacement for cardboard inserts:
http://www.sealedairprotects.com/NA/EN/products/foam_packaging/instapak.aspxWe use basically the same stuff to pack SK’s.
These! I was going to suggest them. Thank you Pam! These would work great for those worried about not having original inserts for their windstones be all snug in a box with for shipping or storing. You can make your own and these work really well.
This has come up before. It’s a space issue. Windstone does not have enough space to store empty boxes. They make the number of boxes they need for an order, pack it, and then ship the order out. Remember their new space is smaller than the old factory.
Yes. This has come up before, at least 2 or 3 times before actually. Space was the biggest issue, as well as it’s not profitable and the time it would take away from other things that would be more profitable to keep Windstone going.
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