Silly question about supply, demand and obsolescence

[DaFin]

Hi all,

Lately there have been a couple of threads that have made me think "why?". The three threads that I am talking about are The Jersey and SFL threads in this forum and the Cocker to Mag barrel adapter thread in the BST area. For each of these items there seems to be significant demand amoung the membership of this community yet no one is producing these. What ever demand may exist probably would carry outside of these forums given a modest advertising attempt. What I am trying to say is that all of these items *seem* to be economically viable on small scales yet they are no longer produced, why?

So, since this is a discussion board....

Am I being blinded by my perspective or is this a missed oportunity?

What other paintball related items do you think fall into this category?

[jenarelJAM]

Well, I know the SFL's are worth so much because there are so few of them, not because they are specifically superior to the xmag. You can't make more of them. You just can't.

I dunno about the others.

[REDRT]

Don't forget colored Xvalves.
There isn't much of a market for any of it. You get people all saying they want something and if it gets made, very few of the many even buy it. It just is bad business to make things that may not sell or have to sell at a loss. Yeah it sucks I know. Many cool things have come and gone, but that is life. One can only hope to experience what they can while they can. You want to experience some of the past? Save money and when it comes up for sale buy it...

[VFX_Fenix]

You're basically dealing with a niche market with a base of users who have aging equipment in the case of Twistlock barrels and Stainless Bodies. People who don't want the ULE bodies or just preffer the Twistlock bodies are forced into a corner, because of a lack of support in the Industry for the twistlock, they must find different avenues to persue new barrels if the barrels readily avalible in the used market place aren't to their taste.

AO Jerseys are, what you might call, a novelty item. Being that there aren't any other forums that come to mind that have signature Jerseys that I'm aware of (PBN, A5OG, SACPB).

And SFL's are just a rare item, like the AGD Six-Pack, Micro CA, BOA barrels of all types, KP rifles, and a load of other curio and antequated gear.

[GT]

I love to hear the niche market excuse. Lets put mags into perspective, by my estimates ther are well over 200K classic mags, 3-5k rtpro's/rt's, and 1k emag/xmags. To say that there is a niche market is complete crap.


Riddle me this, how is it that CCI can offer about 2 dozen different colors while AGD can offer only black?

[REDRT]

Riddle me this, how is it that CCI can offer about 2 dozen different colors while AGD can offer only black?

They used to offer colors until they entered the niche market.

[Doc Nickel]

[...] and the Cocker to Mag barrel adapter thread in the BST area.

-Because it costs me at a minimum of $2,000 to $3,000 to have a small run of them made, and then it takes me a year or more to sell them all, effectively making me about $20 a month in profit.

I've found that if ten people say they're going to buy something or want me to make something, as soon as I do, two of them, maybe, will actually make the purchase.

Tom Kaye found out the exact same thing with the roller triggers, didn't he? Huge demand, everyone wanted one... until he made them. Then, no buyers. Not one, after the initial prototype batch. He eventually sold them off at scrap prices to someone, as I recall.

Now, that said, there's another short run of my adapters in the works. The shop gave me a time frame of no more than 90 days, and that was at the beginning of December. I wasn't going to announce anything until I had them in my hands, since I'm already pretty bad with time estimates and deadlines.

If you want one, hang tough, I'll have some hopefully before the end of February.

Doc.

[Doc Nickel]

Riddle me this, how is it that CCI can offer about 2 dozen different colors while AGD can offer only black?

-I was under the impression that CCI was closely affiliated with an ano shop, if not actually owning or being part owner in the shop.

Remember that Mike Cassidy's (CCI) main business is making, among other things, dental tools. The paintball biz is a fair portion of their work, but still essentially a "side job".

Doc.

[CoolHand]

And that pretty much covers it.

Been there, done that, have the hole in my check book to prove it.

/thread

[Tao]

Hi all,

Lately there have been a couple of threads that have made me think "why?". The three threads that I am talking about are The Jersey and SFL threads in this forum and the Cocker to Mag barrel adapter thread in the BST area. For each of these items there seems to be significant demand amoung the membership of this community yet no one is producing these. What ever demand may exist probably would carry outside of these forums given a modest advertising attempt. What I am trying to say is that all of these items *seem* to be economically viable on small scales yet they are no longer produced, why?

So, since this is a discussion board....

Am I being blinded by my perspective or is this a missed oportunity?

What other paintball related items do you think fall into this category?

It may not necessarily be an issue of supply and demand but one of opportunity cost. Are the $$/day worth it?
Can I go into a bigger market which is simmilar and make more money instead?
It could be that whoever did it ended up competing with the ule bodies.

[GT]

This is getting easier everytimne someone posts it. I think you guys store up your response on clipboard and then drop them in I toil and I build...........build, build............ and build but no one buys. I have heard that sob story for the last 3 years on AO.

We all know AGD MAKES a great product but fails to SELL a great product.

Teacher, pick me! Me! I have the answer to the riddle?!

1) Oh, how we forget. AGD tried that with the XMag & PK selective, it was a disaster.It was also too difficult, as the body and breech were difficult to match on the XMag because they were made from different aluminum alloys.

2) AGD didnt offer aluminum bodies, valves, and frames until post-2000. CCI has for much longer. So, AGD doesnt have an established relationship that is over a decade old with an ano shop that gives them price breaks on individual markers.

3) Besides the Xmag, the halves of the xvalve and the ule body on a mag are made from 3 different 7000 series aluminum alloys that anodize differently.

Did I solve the riddle?

The xmag? , someone has been doing it longer, and parts are made from different materials. Lets all watch as the train passes us by.

Remember that Mike Cassidy's (CCI) main business is making, among other things, dental tools. The paintball biz is a fair portion of their work, but still essentially a "side job".

DOC doesnt AGD have a good portion of thier buisness wrapped up in less than lethal products? I can't espouse the the buisness of AGD but it would seem that paitnball is thier side gig as well.

Do you have the same rate of return with your other items?

[slade]

For each of these items there seems to be significant demand amoung the membership of this community yet no one is producing these.

demand for product = opportunity to earn money.
internet demand for product =/ oportunity to earn money.

a few people want something, a lot of people voice interest, but it is not cost effective to produce the part.

[thegrayghost]

unless you have a real hot selling item, you will not sell it...in our Forum, we tried our specialized logos on caps, coffee mugs, stickers, shirts, sandana's, barrel socks, etc...i could go on and on.......everyone wanted one, but when time to buy, no shows...we flunked out on everything for selling...

when someone puts up the start up costs and you have to eat it time after time, it gets old...everyone means well when saying i will purchase, but the final is no shows/no purchase as to speak....just my 2 cents worth...thegrayghost...

[Doc Nickel]

Okay, here's the deal. Ready? Take notes:

It Costs Money To Make Things.

Got that? Here's the next part:

People Won't Pay Too Much For Things.

Those two go together like cake and ice cream.

What does that mean? Put it this way: If I went out to the shop, right now, and made myself, from scratch, one- just one- of my barrel adapters, it'd take me probably around five hours, from bar stock to finished, salable product. I usually (try to) charge $40 an hour for miscellaneous machine work- and that's cheap!

But even half that is still $100.

You'd pay $100 for a barrel adapter? No, you won't. I know this for a fact, because I've been asked several times to make an alternate-thread adapter (usually Angel.) Typically I quoted $90 to $95, and no one, ever, took me up on it. "Too expensive". For that price, they could buy a new barrel, or toss a few bucks more in and buy a ULE body.

Now, I can have them made in a CNC shop. Easy, quick, often even fast. BUT, it costs a good deal of money just to tool up that CNC. Somebody has to install the cutting tools (and in the right places, and to exactly the right depths, etc.) and somebody has to set up whatever is used to hold the workpiece (chuck jaws, clamps, etc.) and somebody has to chop raw bar stock into small pieces to feed the machine. Then somebody has to write the program and/or generate the CNC code to make the machine cut the correct part, to the correct dimensions.

So you might have two or three days' work, by two or three people making $45 an hour, to outfit a quarter-million-dollar machine with $500 in tooling... before you've even made one single part.

Let's say, for the sake of the argument, that it cost $1,000 to get that machine set up. (That's high for some small parts, but pretty low for larger complex pieces.) If you then have that machine make one single part, that $1,000 cost goes into that one part. Final cost, $1,005 per part.

BUT, if you make a thousand parts, that same $1,000 is split between all of them- final cost, $6 per part.

This is what's called Economy of Scale.

If I buy one foot of stainless bar to make my single adapter from, it might cost me $35. If I buy five hundred feet of bar, I might be able to get it down to $20 per foot. There's more savings.

Long story short: "Production" runs of 200 to 500 parts are absurdly small. My CNC shop hates projects under 1,000 parts, and often doesn't even want to hear about it unless I'm willing to order 5,000.

Those barrel adapters? Typically I've made about $3 to $5 profit each off those. But if I could order 5,000 of them, my cost could plummet down to $3 to $5 each.

That's great! You say. You'd be happy to buy an adapter at, say, $10 street price? Well, to do that, I'd have to order five thousand of them. Even at "only" $3 each, that's Fifteen Thousand Dollars I'd have to cough up.

And considering that in the past three and a half years since I invented the damed thing, I've sold around three hundred, including a grand total of twenty in the last ten months, I'd have enough adapters to last me over fifty years, and it'd take twenty years for me to just make my money back.


That's why you don't see companies like NPS or even AGD jumping right up and producing every little trinket, gadget or invention that somebody thinks up. You, me and Bob over there might think it's really cool, but the guys actually handling the money are going to want to know of we have 4,997 friends that also think that piece is really cool.

Because if not, it's not worth their time to make it.

Yeah, they could just make ten. But those ten would end up costing twenty times more than the mass production part, and no one will buy it. Would you buy, say, a CP reg that cost $300? Or a tank rail that cost $120? Or a barrel that cost $500? No, of course not.

So there's the problem. A problem shared by every company from NPS, with an operating budget in the hundreds of millions, on down to me in my little shop with an operating budget of whatever I can sweep out from under the sofa cushions:

You have a part, it's a cool part, and you have the capacity to make it. But to keep the price down, you have to make thousands of them. And you don't know for sure that there's the demand for thousands. But if you make only enough to support the demand, the per-part price goes up to the point where even the people who want the part won't buy it.

The term, of course, is Catch-22.

Doc.

[GT]

It Costs Money To Make Things.

The term, of course, is Catch-22.

Doc.

Try it some time. Gather some cash, invest in production, and sell to the masses. I will wait to hear the sob story Its always easier to throw stones at the glass house than live in it and watch others throw the stones.

The irony is that my orginial comments were directed at AGD. Everyone understands the diffuculy of the one man shop. What continuly haunts me is AGD's inability to offer all of the products they once did. For example colored Xvalves, Sluggs, etc. despite brand new mag sales. IT sounds like we are headed down SS lane while everyone offers different colors and mills. This smells like the late 90's.

But since you guys asked,
Every year the both of you introduce new products. RFP has those nice new ULE trigger frames, DOC I am on the list for your next fastback run; so as dealers and retialers you guys arent building and selling for free (with exception to the fastbacks). SO if managing multiple product lines are that bad then why continue to develop any product at all? If all this is a continue circle of loss then why bother selling anything at all?

Here is my problem there are a number of people on this board that seem to think that if there product is not bought in X amount of time they consider it a failure and the fault of the consumer.

Its the only way to know for sure, and it will be a good learning experience.

As soon as I can figure out the legal stuff I am all over it.