DSF

soulclaimed, if you have a neat logo then as Andrew says the addition of your logo (small) on his mugs would be a way forward, it is too easy to fall into the trap of favours for mate customers, are you putting it together with an order for clothing for him - nice large logo on the back of the hoodies for when he is up a ladder ?? then around £3.50 a mug will be right but tell him he needs to order 20 for that price - if he scoffs then you know he is perhaps not as serious as you thought he was - just dont undersell yourself, by thinking well mugs are 70p bit of paper bit of ink will press them when im watching tv so no cost, so can sell them to him @ £1.50 and have made a bit.

If he is good mate, he will/should see the value in supporting your business. Fair enough to make a friend a mug for a birthday present, but if it's a few for his business then it's different. Unless he can give you some of his trade at equally discounted percentages in return.

Hi Guys

Although I am not going to share my prices, I will say that a few years back I was asked to quote on some mugs for Michael Jackson. They wanted approximately 5000 and they had quotes fom China that worked out at £1.35 per mug including delivery. I seriously considered the job as it meant a profit of around £1750.00. I was then going to get a girl I know to work nights for me to complete the order while I could fulfil other orders during the day. Probably would have cost me about £300 for her time but then £1450.00 profit while I sleep seemed okay to me

Our thinking is along the same lines as Social - we look at a bulk/trade order by the profit of the order, and amount of time it will take us, rather than profit per unit. We sell our mugs for around £10, and our stockists the same - for them to be able to sell them, they need to be able to buy them from us at a price which gives them enough markup.

Agree with Pisque

As an example I was asked to do 1000 framed pictures. These were to be individually signed by the band. The size of the frame was 16x20 inches and had a mount inside the frame. Also as they were going to be shipped all over the world they need to be individually boxed and had to be acryllic not glass. My main customers are very open and we discuss prices on an individual basis. These frames were going to be sold for around £50.00-£70.00 each so to reach their targte mark up they needed them to be less than £10.00 per frame. I then go away and see if i can work to that.

So if you are selling bulk for retail I would say the absolute minimum a retailer wants to work to is 3.5-4 times mark up. At £10.00 a mug £2.50 would be in the ball park. If you are selling to a company then it might be that they want it even cheaper as they are generally giveaways, on bulk orders I think anything over £1.50-£2.50 per mug is a good price bearing in mind you are selling 1000+ and are geared up to banging out 1000+ a day. But it does all depend on your set up etc. I have the ability to print that many a day and do other things. If however you can only do 250 mugs a day and without the ability to produce other work, your prices will reflect this.

We have some retailers (shop based) who want at least a 2x markup, but on the whole they seem to want a 2.5-3x mark-up. It does vary on the kind of shop they are, where in the UK they are based, and which of our product lines they are wanting to resell.

pisquee;56892 wrote:We have some retailers (shop based) who want at least a 2x markup, but on the whole they seem to want a 2.5-3x mark-up. It does vary on the kind of shop they are, where in the UK they are based, and which of our product lines they are wanting to resell.

Well then if they are selling at £10 a mug that makes your price to them £2.50. I think there is a world of difference between orders of say 1 to 100 mugs and orders for 1000s. On smaller orders the artwork layout time is a factor on large orders it is not.

There's no way we'd go as low as £2.50 on them. There is also a ceiling price for a product, so they can only sell them for a certain amount. Some items they can mark up more than others, and they've got to work out the value of having a product which they can not mark up so many times, in the scheme of how those products make their shop look, and what up-sell potential they have, as there are other products in our range which have a higher profit margin/mark-up potential than our mugs do, but design/colour-way wise they all complement each other. Most of our stockists buy in a range of our products, and display them that way, rather than just buy in one product line.

pisquee;56908 wrote:There's no way we'd go as low as £2.50 on them. There is also a ceiling price for a product, so they can only sell them for a certain amount. Some items they can mark up more than others, and they've got to work out the value of having a product which they can not mark up so many times, in the scheme of how those products make their shop look, and what up-sell potential they have, as there are other products in our range which have a higher profit margin/mark-up potential than our mugs do, but design/colour-way wise they all complement each other. Most of our stockists buy in a range of our products, and display them that way, rather than just buy in one product line.

So if a customer asked for 10,000 sublimation mugs of the same design you wouldn't go below £2.50 to secure the order? For the right size order there is plenty of profit to be made from jobs and going well below that price point.

Agree with Andrew here.

I understand how pisquee's has priced his items and it works well for that particular route to market, but it wouldn't work on a quote for 10,000 as Andrew suggests. I suspect Pisquee might be able to look at his prices should the oppurtunity to sell that many come about