Author: Dutchy
Date: 2007-04-12 14:02
I'd be amazed to find that any reedmakers out there even make a decent living at it. It's just simple economics: the most expensive item on the balance sheet, when you're developing a product, is going to be the labor costs, and reeds are practically ALL labor costs, since there's no good way to mechanize the process.
And the more labor you invest in your product, the less cost-effective it's going to be to produce the item, because you can never recoup all your labor costs in an extremely labor-intensive finished product unless you charge extremely high prices (a Steinway piano springs to mind).
There's a good breakdown of what it takes to start a home business here. Of the three things required for startup--costs, labor, and overhead--labor is by far the most expensive.
Do the math. Say 1 lb. of tube cane is $100. And say you can get 300 reed blanks out of 1 lb of tube cane, so that's 300 potential reeds. Now subtract, say, 10% for duds (I'm assuming you're a gifted reedmaker ![[grin]](http://test.woodwind.org/clarinet/BBoard/smileys/smilie5.gif) ), so that's 270 reeds you've got for sale. And if you charge $25 a reed, that's $6,750 dollars you've just made on reeds.
But wait, you have to figure in your labor costs. If it takes you 15 minutes to make a reed, that's 4,500 minutes or 75 hours, to make those 300 reeds. Assuming that you paid yourself near-minimum wage of $7 a hour, you'd have to pay yourself $525 to make those 300 reeds (30 of which were duds and thus unmarketable, and so you basically wasted 7.5 hours of labor or $52.50), for 1 lb. of tube cane that only cost $100.
So it's five times as much for the labor as for the materials. And if you paid yourself what a skilled laborer is worth, closer to $20 or $30 an hour, your labor costs go through the roof, but you can't recoup those increased labor costs by increasing the price of your product because the market won't bear it, and consumers won't pay it. The $35 reed is a no-go in the current market.
You begin to see why clothing manufacturers go offshore to Third World sweatshops. It's all in the labor costs.
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