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At 01:12 PM 10/13/2001, Doug Miller wrote: >Any $ put into design ALWAYS pays off big time on the bottom line. > >>If Gibson cares about selling EDPs, they'd get an industrial designer to >>redesign the face plate. Graphic designer to redo the logo. Do any of >>these things make the EDP a better product? No, but extra sales would >>sure influence someone into throwing cash at an EDP 2 project. >__________________________ >Doug Miller >Graphic Designer I guess it makes sense that a graphic designer would think so. I tend to agree. but again, let's look at numbers to do such a project. How much would it cost to for this design work, and how many more sales would it generate? Would the additional sales even be enough to cover the additional cost? I'll make some wild guess estimates. Since you want to redesign the faceplate, in addition to industrial designers and graphic designers that requires new engineering work to do the mechanical redesign of the metal, and then the electrical engineering and PCB layout of the front panel PCB that holds the parts. Then of course, the NRE charges for retooling the metal and PCB fabrication, and silkscreens for the paint, etc. Probably you need to redesign and reprint any marketing literature also. I guess you have to redesign the footpedal too, but I won't count that. So I'll estimate: Industrial design: $20,000 (that's much cheaper than ID estimates I've gotten for other things, but we'll find some cheap guy to do it..) Graphic design of new logo: $5000 (? not sure what that costs.) mechanical engineer for 1 week: $5000 electrical engineer for 1 week: $5000 PCB layout designer for 1 week: $5000 NRE charges on PCB and metal tooling: $5,000 prototype build and testing: $7500 redesign, reprint marketing lit: $2500 = $55,000 How many extra units do we need to sell to break even on that? if list price is $1150, wholesale is probably half, $575. Probably 50% of wholesale price is COGS, so that leaves $287.50/unit after manufacturing costs. we have a corporate requirement to maintain 30% margin, which is not even that much for a low volume product, but .3 x 575 = 172.50, so that leaves us with $115. presumably the division has overhead costs to pay for office rent, salaries, etc., let's say that's 10% of income which is probably too low, or $57.50/unit, leaving us with $57.50. But let's say we tighten our belts somewhere and manage to devote $75/unit to pay for this redesign. $55,000 / $75 = 733 units needed to be sold just to pay off the cost of this redesign and break even. I guess these should be counted as additional sales beyond current figures to make it worthwhile. There have been very few years in the echoplex's history where that kind of volume was done, so we are talking about something on the order of doubling sales or more. Even if that is the wrong way to look at it, maybe we are optimistically talking about only a 50% increase in sales needed to cover the cost and take the rest out of existing sales. We will say that is 1/2 our number above, or 367 additional units sold. Now, is a new faceplate design for this product going to generate 367 - 733 more sales? is this project realistic? How many people base their decisions on buying rack mounted musical instrument gear on how it looks? My guess is, somewhere near 0. Even if just attracting more attention is all we hope to do, will we attract that much more attention just by changing the faceplate, and convert it into 367 more sales? I doubt it. You might even lose sales because people already recognize it as it is, and you will need to spend a lot of effort to reeducate the market. If you ever tried to design a 1U 19" rack faceplate, you would know that there just isn't a whole lot of room to do anything interesting in that space, with the constraints of the hardware mounting room behind it. You mostly attract attention just by looking different from other stuff, and the echoplex accomplishes that already just by being NotBlack. If you look at a rack with an EDP in it, you spot it instantly because of the contrast with all the surrounding stuff. Even if you thought it was ugly, you still saw it first. Right now, the echoplex faceplate is fairly low cost to make, just stamped sheet metal, painted and silk-screened. We don't want to increase the cost by doing this redesign, which would raise the list price. That would reduce sales, countering whatever effect our redesign gives. So we have to limit our poor designer to avoid any fancy molding or extrusions, custom knobs and buttons, etc. unless we are willing to raise the price. He can only work with stamped sheet metal and paint.... If you ask me, that $55,000 is far better spent on advertising, in-store demos, endorsers, etc. That will bring a lot more sales than a different faceplate. Or you could spend it on new product development, etc. kim ______________________________________________________________________ Kim Flint | Looper's Delight kflint@loopers-delight.com | http://www.loopers-delight.com