June 18 — pricing blackout kit for drop shipping
By: Ruth Grace Wong
Tags: Startup

Alex from HighTech3D gave me a great opportunity! He offered to do drop shipping with my blackout vinyl on his website. The deal is that he’d list the product on his website, and if he gets an order, he’ll send me a shipping label so that I can ship it.

Here’s the pricing breakdown for the goal price of $20:

$4 materials

$1.50 for Alex (exposure on HighTech3D and shipping logistics)

$1 for a 1.5" x 24" mailing tube

$1 Paypal fees (30 cents + 3.4% of price)

$4 shipping (to New Jersey from San Francisco as a test)

$8.50 my time and 10% cut failure rate (the vinyl often slips in the cutter and messes up the cut, also I’ve spent hours debugging the vinyl cutter)

I think this is pretty reasonable as it includes shipping, and if you were just to buy the matte vinyl from TAP plastics, it’s $3 per 1ft of the 2ft wide roll, so it would cost you $15 to buy the vinyl domestically anyways. I was able to get it cheap because I paid $400 for three 1.52x30m rolls (shipped via FedEx from China).

Now that the pricing is sorted out I bought the mailing tubes and we’ll have to make some nice photographs and copy for the website.

Shipping

My vinyl roll weighs 175g rounded up.

I bought this scale for a wagyu beef costco group buy that never happened… did you know costco sells wagyu beef for $1200 for 13 pounds? wagyu steaks are supposed to melt in your mouth like butter. :O

The mailing tubes on Amazon are 12.4lb for 50, so about 115 grams. 290 g to oz is 10.23 oz, so let’s say my package weighs 10.5 oz.

Shipping from San Francisco to New Jersey is $4! I figure shipping across the country is a good estimate.

Packaging test

The biggest piece of vinyl is just over 15" tall, so a 24" length mailing tube should be perfect.

I checked to see if the vinyl would fit inside a 1.5 inch diameter (well actually 1.38 inches taking into account the width of the mailer walls), and so long as I wrap it around a dowel that is the diameter of my marker (1.5cm) or smaller, it should fit fine. This is great news because the next size up is twice as expensive.

I also noticed that painter’s tape sometimes leaves sticky residue on the vinyl, so I made sure that the pieces of painter’s tape holding the rolls together were small, and it looks like it works. This one’s been in storage for about a month now, and no sticky residue left from the tape.

Never perfect

The thing I’m self conscious about with this product is that sometimes when I cut it the backing is not cut through on the whole cut, so there’s a bit of extra backing sticking out past the edge of the sticker.

It doesn’t affect the vinyl sticker, it just looks less professional. I experimented with doing a kiss cut instead of cutting through, but if you have to take the sticker off the backing before application it gets deformed really easily and it’s hard to apply it nicely (without tons of wrinkles). I can also adjust the blade to make a cleaner cut, but with a completely through cut the vinyl is more likely to slip and ruin the cut. I have been convincing myself that it should be fine as it doesn’t affect the function. To have it consistently nice I would either have to trim them off by hand (which would take a really long time), or invest in super expensive die cut tooling, which is how the professionals do it.

Similarly, the other things on the website are 3D printed rather than professionally injection molded with expensive tooling. We’re not rich corporations after all, just people.