Author: Dutchy
Date: 2007-04-12 18:58
Well, reedmaking at home for fun and profit isn't necessarily totally uneconomical and unworkable--it's just you have to be resigned to the fact that it's never going to make you rich, and you're just doing it as a sideline and not as a living. Professional reedmakers tend to be oboe professionals first, either teachers or performers, or have some other source of main income, and only make and sell reeds on the side.
As long as you ignore the true cost of your man-hours of labor, and focus only on transforming a piece of tube cane that cost you only 30 cents into a reed that's worth $20, then yeah, that's a tremendous return on an investment. When you make reeds for yourself, you do this all the time without a second thought, without subjecting it to a cost-benefit analysis. But when you're deliberately setting out to profit off the product, that's when the labor costs and the bottom line become more important.
The problem is that it took you 75 hours, or nearly two work-weeks, assuming an 8-hour day, to make that $6,750. That's $3,375 a week, or $175,500 a year. Not bad--as long as you're not counting up the cost of your labor in the bottom line, as long as you're only looking at the money coming in from the sale of the reeds, and not reckoning up how much it cost you in terms of labor to make those reeds.
So you can theoretically make a big pile of money making reeds--as long as you don't mind spending, basically, all day every day, making reeds, in other words, setting up your own mass-production facility. Most folks have, like, actual lives, and prefer not to go there, and just make a few reeds for sale, every so often.
I didn't intend to discourage you from making and selling reeds out of your home--I just wanted to point out that the economic realities of the situation make it not quite the cash cow it might initially appear to be.
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