PDA

View Full Version : 200 cell phone/cermark job. What would you charge?



Zsolt Paul
06-17-2011, 4:43 PM
I have a customer who wants 200 cell phones engraved on the flat steel portion with cermark black. I have a pretty large table and can fit at least 100 in at a time. What should I charge for something like this? The engraving itself is only about 1.25 x 1", but of course putting them all in a template and running them in a batch would produce a file size of 24x48 (2). I'm thinking $10 ea???

Gary and Jessica Houghton
06-17-2011, 4:52 PM
I'm not like most.... It would depend on what you are putting on them, if you have to do anything with graphics...

If it's only words, I would start with $10 and go down a bit maybe to $7.50 for just text. Good luck to you!

Gary Hair
06-17-2011, 6:17 PM
How much time will it take to do the entire job, start to finish? By that I mean, unpacking, cleaning, applying cermark, creating the fixture, placing phones in fixture, lasering, cleaning cermark, packaging, and anything else for this job. Multiply that times your per minute/hour rate and you have a number to start with. It's pretty difficult to throw out a number without knowing all of the variables.

Gary

Rodne Gold
06-17-2011, 6:38 PM
In my neck of the woods , a guy with a 50w YAG would charge $2 max for this job , no cermark and probably 5-10x the speed of your flying co2
Your charge of $10 would be way out of line compared to this.. If you can get $10 a pop , you doing rather well , but in reality you are offering nothing more than the guy with a YAG and are charging a lot more cos its more difficult for you.

The customer would get more or less the same result if he went either way. Perhaps you can farm it out to a YAG owner and add on a few $ for yourself?

Dan Hintz
06-17-2011, 9:09 PM
Just a note to Rodney's point... YAGs aren't very cheap compared to CO2, so the people likely to have one are going to charge big bucks and look for larger projects. I agree... if you can get $10/piece that's great. If it were me, 200 pieces with such a small engraving area would probably come in closer to $5. That's $1k for less than a day's work...

Richard Rumancik
06-17-2011, 10:18 PM
Just a comment - if I was marking cellphones (which I don't) I'd sure be watching the job every minute - and I doubt I would have the confidence to run 100 at a time. Since you probably have to be there anyway, will you really save that much time making a fixture for 100 and running in 2 batches? I'd probably take the hit on laser time and run them individually (maybe 1 across x 6-10 high if you wish). With an array, if there is a glitch and 10 phones get messed up in one raster stroke, what do you plan to do with all the phones?

Mike Null
06-17-2011, 11:27 PM
I agree with Richard's point and I would be in the $10 per phone range. I wouldn't even consider a fixture for 100 phones--the time making the fixture and the high probability of error only serves to raise the price of the job.

I don't know of anybody with a YAG in St Louis who'd work for much less than $10 due to the cost of the equipment and associated costs. Gary's earlier point about the total handling time of the job is more relevant than the engraving time.

Rodne Gold
06-18-2011, 12:59 AM
Most of the Yags here are the $10k versions and the operators squabble over the promo and other "more than 1" marking contracts. Even tho a yag cost more , it is hugely quicker than the cermark/co2 method.
The point I am making is that laser marking has to be priced in relation to other methods. it's only when you cant use another method that you can charge "laser" prices and even then , the state of competition in your area will dictate pricing.

Mike Null
06-18-2011, 8:26 AM
Rodney

Your point is well taken though I don't see the kind of pricing here that you have suggested. For example, in this metro market of more than 1 million, I know of only two engravers who have a YAG. Neither of which is a low priced version. Your point is in effect the same as I've tried to make when somebody says I charge $60 per hour (or some other rate) of laser time. That may work in some cases but if you have a 30 watt laser and your competitor has a 100 watt laser who's "hour" are you going to compete against.

Bill Cunningham
06-18-2011, 4:24 PM
Yags are few and far between in North America, mostly because the Chinese ones are not well known. Even if they were, anyone needing a yag on this side of the pond is probably going to spend the big bucks anyway. Depends on what you have to do. The C02 won't do a lot of what the yag does, and the yag won't do a lot of what the C02 does, so you have to know where your $ are coming from. For Cermark, I charge $3.50 per sq inch with a 5 sq inch minimum for most jobs(consumer) , and a 10 sq. inch min. for some others(Industrial).. The minimum sq inch is accumulative if everything is being marked with the same artwork. Yup, it would be nice to have a yag, but I can do more of what my customers want with a C02

Rodne Gold
06-19-2011, 1:04 AM
There are plenty of galvo yags in the US , chinese and otherwise , we have at least 5 Galvo YAG machines in the city I live in , around 2 million ppl and its at the bottom of Africa !!!
You will find em in operations that specialise in high volume marking .. they will not have large marking fields like our flatbeds and arent meant to compete with our co2 flatbeds.
PS I would charge around $2-$3 for that job , using cerdec and a co2 , including any handling , $10 is excessive.

Bill Cunningham
06-19-2011, 10:01 PM
There are plenty of galvo yags in the US , chinese and otherwise , we have at least 5 Galvo YAG machines in the city I live in , around 2 million ppl and its at the bottom of Africa !!!
You will find em in operations that specialise in high volume marking .. they will not have large marking fields like our flatbeds and arent meant to compete with our co2 flatbeds.
PS I would charge around $2-$3 for that job , using cerdec and a co2 , including any handling , $10 is excessive...

There are a few around here Rodney(my part of Canada) but are usually not available for outside jobs. The companies that own them, have them running full time on their own production stuff, and are not looking at outside requests.. I get one or two calls a month for jobs that would require one, so I just have them get in touch with the local rep company for the Fibermark. If anyone in the Toronto/Simcoe Country area has one, and would like to be referenced to some jobs I'm not interested in, or can't do with my equipment, please make yourself known.. A while back, I had Savage Arms Canada contact me to see if I could mark the Savage Logo their rifle bolts through a layer of oil (I didn't know if a fibermark could mark through a oil film, so I just sent them to the epilog site).. Jeeeze.. Maybe they should send me a finders fee.. I just bought a new Canadian Savage .223 and yup.. The logo was on the bolt..Even with the cost of the laser, it would 'have' to be cheaper for them, in particular, to own the machine than farm out the work.. On the same note, a local metal shop that had a 2000, 3000, and a much larger watt metal cutting laser, just went out of business, and had the auction at their building, the same with another local business that did waterjet..There is still one company left in our area that can laser cut steel, but not being too familiar with these machines, I don't know if they will 'engrave' a text into a metal surface or not, and if they will, to what limitations?

Neil Pabia
06-19-2011, 10:54 PM
Looking at your location, I would say that while I would probably give a little bit lower price for doing 200, your prices aren't too far out of line for the area. I would also make a deal with them to buy the phones from them first and sell them back after they are engraved for the same price (about $1-$2 per phone)plus engraving costs just to CYA incase there is a problem with the engraving. This part of the country does have a high markup on everything mostly due to overhead for businesses.

Rodne Gold
06-20-2011, 2:18 AM
The problem with the megawatt lasers is competition , high capital costs , high running costs and the lack of work. All of these conspire to the making of marginal profitability and thus failure of many jobbing and metal working businesess. The same actually applys to the YAG marking market in my area (and to large format 1kw+ lasers) , too many folk fighting over the same pie , throat slashing , price slashing etc.
Thats why my next purchase is a co2 galvo , there are very few of em here and I will be able to do general marking much quicker - I'm not even going to consider the promotional product marking market as I have a low opinion of most (but not all) promotional item selling co's , fickle to a cent , lots of fly by nights , cretins when it comes to artwork and they always need their order the day before they brought it in.
Big largge format kw lasers will engrave , albeit with poor quality, they were made for cutting and thats what they do best.
Where I see a nice market is precision "thin" sheet processing , something like a 650w YAG that can cut 1-3mm (1/25th to 1/8")stainless or other materials with high precision.

Joe De Medeiros
06-20-2011, 11:20 AM
On the same note, a local metal shop that had a 2000, 3000, and a much larger watt metal cutting laser, just went out of business, and had the auction at their building

I did some projects with Mike, he was a nice guy.

Zsolt Paul
06-21-2011, 12:53 AM
Many thanks for all your input. Many great points! Turns out $10 was def way too high, but $5 would have been also (as I found out) and I def was not interested in doing it for $3. I don't do well with small items. My bed is 51x51" and I do best when I make "large" items. There is no competition there either. Every time I am asked to give a price on small items, ppl expect to pay next to nothing. I am working on 3 different projects over hundreds of square feet. I love the work and the money is great. The time it would take away from my money making projects, anything less than $5 would be losing money. However, if the machine was just sitting there, then believe you me, I would do $3! So, besides what others may or may not be charging, one must consider how much time (value) it takes away from other projects and it has to equal or exceed that.

greg lindsey
06-21-2011, 11:38 AM
There are plenty of galvo yags in the US , chinese and otherwise , we have at least 5 Galvo YAG machines in the city I live in , around 2 million ppl and its at the bottom of Africa !!!
You will find em in operations that specialise in high volume marking .. they will not have large marking fields like our flatbeds and arent meant to compete with our co2 flatbeds.
PS I would charge around $2-$3 for that job , using cerdec and a co2 , including any handling , $10 is excessive.

Must be location , location , location... I think $10 is cheap, considering if your unpacking, spraying, cleaning and repacking this job. I just did a job of 900 IPads , there is a thread on the job, and got $15 a unit, and could have gotten $20, kinda under bid that one. I learned long ago that just because I wouldn't pay that for something dosen't mean that someone else wouldn't. I price my jobs at what I feel they are worth to me to do, if that's too high , then they can take it somewhere else, I have no problem with that as my shop stays plenty busy.

Bill Cunningham
06-21-2011, 11:19 PM
I did some projects with Mike, he was a nice guy.

Ya it was a bit of a shock.. I sent him an email to quote a job, and heard nothing back.. Then I seen the auction ad..He told me he had a large Universal, but the only C02 I seen in the auction ad was a chinese machine.. The stainless cutting job I needed, was re-quoted by Barrie Machine, but as it turned out, the company that wanted the pricing also wanted 60 day billing so basically they couldn't afford the job.