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2010-11-17 06:55:06 (6689 views) Hundreds of types of paper and cardboard. Intense color experience. Huge machines that cut, bend, fold, pamphletize, bind, stitch, glue, laminate and more.
A tiring day of negotiations! They gave us a high price because of the "imported materials". Then we changed materials and the price didn't go down, now they said it's the color. Changed the color, still price remained the same because of the silver stamping. Ok, no silver stamping how about printing. Price unchanged, now they have set-up fees. But subsequent orders will not have set-up fees, right? Wrong. They want a set-up fee for EVERY PRINT RUN.
In the end it doesn't matter what we choose, 4 layer boxes with silver stamping, gloss surface and black cardboard, or junk brown cardboard that looks like supermarket left-overs.... The price is the same. Now escalating this to the CEO who seemed friendly but had to run out in the middle of the meeting to pick up a payment (lucky him).
Negotiations are tricky but math helps. See, they claimed they had basically no profit and that material costs were 80-90% of their estimate. But, we tried to ask the price for double the quantity and surprisingly the price went up by less than 30% (it should have almost doubled for their story to check out).
They didn't expect us pointing out that the amount is too LOW, so they were caught off guard. The only way out was for them to claim there is waste material. To back up the initial story they had to set the scrap material to 33%. In other words for every 100 square meters of material they would waste 50. That doesn't sound right. We're already calculating the box cut area as a square so all the waste material at the four corners is already accounted for. Here they're saying they literally throw away 50 square meters when they begin a job ??
The real problem is - as usual - quantities... If you make 100,000 pieces of something you pay cents per piece, doesn't matter if you're printing, sewing, stitching, assembling PCBs or buying components. If your quantities have only two zeros then you're really asking for trouble.
No factory wants to take a job with less than 2-3000$ profit. Even if they rip you off, they're still doing you a favor by taking the order... These machines are huge, they look like newspaper printing machines with hundreds of perfect color copies coming out each minute.
The smart thing we've done is to find a factory that can do everything (foam, molds, cutting, laminating, stamping etc). Incredibly the price for just the foam at a foam only factory and the price for everything including instruction booklet and stickers at this comprehensive factory is almost the same! Which again proves all the calculations are bogus they just decide how much they think they should be making to take the order and then divide by the number of pieces :)
This isn't over yet! Round two coming up tomorrow...
                     
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Don't burn up your energy on this. Who keeps boxes anyway?
Personally, I'd prefer a practical nylon bag like the CB-6000 comes in. Anybody else have any options on this?