pipemakersforum.com

Hey, I wrote this incredibly boring pipe blog post for anyone getting into pipemaking as a business. There are no pretty pictures (Well, there's one at the end) and it's all about time costing and money. It's horrifically boring. But it might help save your business someday. Read it if you don't want to end up starving in the streets selling your limbs to blackmarket dealers for meth money.

http://talbertpipes.blogspot.com/2012/0 ... gness.html

Capitalist Pig!

Don't look at me, man, I'm very nearly a socialist according to the definitions of some really stupid people.

On the plus side, stressing how boring the article is will keep new pipemakers from reading it, so they will be that much more likely to end up living in the streets giving handjobs for crack while I can carry on with an assuaged conscience that I've "done what I could".

"Generational Passive Aggression in Artisan Communities"

Sounds like a postmodern PhD in the making, doesn't it?

great article... thanks for taking the time to write it.

sam a wrote:great article... thanks for taking the time to write it.

Ditto.
My $350 check is in the mail; do I provide the rolled up magazine, or do you bring that as part of the deal?

That is a great article and it addresses something that I personally have to stay on top of. Now not only can you say that you tried to help, you can say that if at least four of us flounder, it wasn't your fault!

Well-written, easy-to-read, but, most importantly, very helpful and informative. Thanks for a good read.

I think the most important lesson in your article is the value of outsourcing.
By calculating the cost of antique aviator goggles, adding the time spent growing a perfect mustache and wrestling Grandma for one of her scarves, compared to the cost of hiring an illegal alien with proper facial hair, the required helmet and whose Grandmother is much more frail/unwilling to fight for her scarves.
Then the only costs associated are the time spent translating English to French to German to Brazilian Portuguese to Salvadoran Spanish and back again through a bevy of translators, the time and costs associated with photography, the software to create catchy yet humorous inspirational posters and the webspace to tack the results to the end of a well thought out blog post.
You, Sir, are a genius .
Thank you for taking the time (and abuse), I do feel 300% more qualified.

One attitude you will sometimes run into among buyers is the, "Well, you sell these at wholesale so you're clearly overpricing them for direct sales - I'll pay you half that price." Completely missing the fact that photographing the pipes, assembling and tweaking the pics, putting the web page together, selling and then packing, boxing and shipping the pipes, is a LOT of work that you're saved from if you sell to a dealer. Hell, I've done so many web page pic sets in my time that I'm willing to take a wage cut just to offload that crap onto someone else - I hate it. When someone approaches you with that logic for a pipe on your website, they're missing the fact that you've already *invested* all that working time into the pipe on your website, so the price needs to stay where it is to cover it. And it's good to know just what you can bear - For me, after-workshop time cost on a Talbert Briar is about 11-19% of the total time, on average. So, I can't wholesale them for anything less than about a .8 discount, which is way too little for dealers to bear, so they don't get wholesaled unless it's to a friend or into a market I want to crack. LBs, by contrast, their after-workshop time is 47% of the total working time on average so hell yes, I'm happy to hand them over to P&P to sell for me. Your real wage in that case is going to be a somewhat complicated formula built around how many extra pipes you can get made in the time you are saving from not having to photo them and sell them yourself.

Anyway, I'm glad to hear it was somewhat interesting despite the dull subject, and I do hope that this sort of planning might help keep someone out of the poorhouse someday - I've seen too many promising pipemakers go down over the years due not to lack of talent, but lack of money awareness.

Trever, it sounds like you get more than your fair share of total fuckin' retard customers. Now, as a service to the rest of us, I say "Good man." but really, it strikes me as kind of odd.

Sasquatch wrote:Trever, it sounds like you get more than your fair share of total fuckin' retard customers. Now, as a service to the rest of us, I say "Good man." but really, it strikes me as kind of odd.

I've been doing this fulltime for 15 years. Just be patient. The stories accumulate.

I'm just pleased to have found an avenue for idiots. "You know who would do a REALLY good job on your triple stem green flame grain Oom Paul Churchwarden? Talbert. He's your man FO SHO!"

It's funny, because I'm currently trying to apply these same systems to the web comic I am writing & drawing. It seems like it takes me forever, so I've started time-comparing the working times of all-digital, half-digital, and hand-drawn with digital compositing. I'm hoping I can figure out which is the fastest. Time is the one currency we can never replace, and wasted time sunk into a slower process is time I could have spent lying on the couch watching monster movies. I have my priorities, after all.

Thanks, Trever, for kicking me on the butt
I've previously done some rough calculations on time spent per pipe, but really need to get organised and take accurate readings of the different steps.
Although I'm not fulltime, I still have to make money on every pipe. Without any idea on the actual costs for me, I also have no idea whether I am. Full stop!

Charl wrote:Thanks, Trever, for kicking me on the butt
I've previously done some rough calculations on time spent per pipe, but really need to get organised and take accurate readings of the different steps.
Although I'm not fulltime, I still have to make money on every pipe. Without any idea on the actual costs for me, I also have no idea whether I am. Full stop!

Yeah, when I got into this, my ultimate rule for buying any new gear or stock was that it had to be fully paid for by profits from previous sales. *Profits*, mind, not gross. Too many guys spend ten hours on a pipe and then price it for $150 and think, "Whee! That's $15 an hour for having fun!", without really understanding that it's more like $6-7 an hour after taxes, tags, insurance and dealer prep...