Klarinet Archive - Posting 001154.txt from 2000/02

From: Gil Guerrero <gil-man@-----.net>
Subj: [kl] Ligatures $$$: why is life so expensive?
Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 08:44:47 -0500

As a project manager for a "boutique" electronics manufacturer, I thought
I would chime in with some thoughts. We make short production run
products for aviation and the entertainment industry and are often asked
why things are "so expensive." This is not a defense of any particular
ligature manufacturer, but I hope can give some perspective on why things
can cost so much.

Any "boutique" manufacturing (which I choose to mean low production run,
often 10's or 100's of units) is going to have very high manufacturing
costs for several reasons. The customer ultimately must pay for all of
them:

1) Precision manufacturing, as is apparent on many of the ligatures
described, has a high reject rate. Parts that are machined or molded will
often come out misshapen or will have other failures. Extra units have to
be run to get a satisfactory number of "acceptable" parts.

2) Plating also has a reject rate. If you like
silver/nickel/gold/rhodium/unobtainium, the guy who is plating them may
not have cleaned it correctly, or left it in the bath too long, and there
will be rejects here, also.

3) That brochure you ordered to decide what ligature you wanted: it
wasn't free. Somebody is paying for it.

4) The phone line/watts number you called to order your new product from.
You paid for it.

5) The web-site that you visited 50 times before you made your decision,
you paid for that also.

6) Hand polishing/deburring - somebody shined that baby up before it
shipped.

7) The warm fuzzy you got from knowing that your "Wheezo 5000" was
personally play-tested before it got sent to you.

The list goes on and on. All of the line items listed above are part of
the "cost" of a part, not just the fact that it had 35 cents of steel bar
stock. After these cost are paid, then we can talk about setting a profit
so the business can thrive and survive into the future. Some times the
markup is 3/4/5 or many more times the cost of the raw materials. Is
that wrong? Go back and start adding up 1 through 7 again...

Don't get me wrong, we do live in a capitalist society and people will
charge what the market will bear, often for shoddy workmanship. But don't
be so quick to assume that some little guy is getting rich because the
hand-carved thing of beauty he put in your hand sells for a 100 bucks. He
probably threw away 4 of them to find the one that he sold.

On the other hand, I can't believe I can put an inverted Bonade on my
horn for so little money (and I use a thin mouthpiece pad so it doesn't
scratch my beloved Gennusa...)

Re-cloaking...

Best to all,

Gil Guerrero

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