Hey first what our peoples feeback on Cobra high temp ink for Epson also what are peoples thoughts when the Sawgrass patent runs out do you think its going to drive the price of products that we make down example being (Iphone cases, t-shirts ect)
When Sawgrass patent runs out
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Don't see how the price of Sawgrass or cobra inks will effect the price of the substrate. Maybe some new ink supplier will show up but at first I suspect getting the ICC profile correct for printers supported may be an issue. I think I will continue on present course and see how this plays out
I think the gentleman was referring to the price of the finished product and not the raw substrate ... in that case the ink costs do matter in the price of the finished product(s).
Perhaps you read him wrong?
Hey thanks for the replies, I was actually wondering how people liked the Cobra High temp ink on say iphone cases did it give out true to colors and was quality good, also do you think once the sawgrass patent runs out will their be alot more competition with end users driving down the price of custom finished products like iphone cases ect due to the fact the sublimation inks might drop significantly in price.
It will depend on how much inks the substrates use for the most part. IPhones don't use much ink. T-shirts, larger tiles, mousepads and items with larger sq inch coverage will be more impacted.
On the t-shirt side there have been a significant cost reduction on the performance shirt side, so those should be going down some more.
But the bigger players are large format anyway and have always had a cost advantage on inks and paper.
I think once SG can't extort a license from the large format suppliers there will some ink cost lowering there, but would be a smaller ink cost reduction vs. the desktop folks. In large format the licensing fees are just wrapped into the bulk ink costs, but a much smaller % of the overall cost there I believe.
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When you look at the average cost of a printed dye sublimation substrate, what is the percentage associated with ink cost? From my experience, the blank substrate is much more. So a 50% discount on ink price for example is less than a 10% discount on the substrate in some cases. For the price of the finished goods to drop noticeably, you will want the cost of the substrates to drop. For this to happen, you will want a large number of new dye sub users to enter the market. This way there will be more companies to sell the blank products to.
Just my opinion,
Mark
Just my opinion,
Mark
It depends if you are on the desktop or not. SG inks are running $3 - $4 per shirt on a 13 x19 transfer more per piece than large format, or those that have desktop and are off the SG plantation.
A $3 drop in BOM costs is huge on a shirt that normally goes for $15 - $20. It also means you can reduce volume costing as well.
A mousepad is around $1 cheaper. So on low order quantiites that would be around 10%
But when you selling in volume orders and your mousepads are in the $5 range that extra dollar saved per piece or 20% is huge.
And so you know the inks costs savings are not 50%, more like 400% to 500% on the desktop. Hard to say what LF ink costs will change once the license isn't being extorted any more for those. 50% might be a reasonable figure there.
For me of course I look at BOM cost vs retail sale amount for an individual item, but the real number is how many units per hour you can make per item and how much is the total ink costs and substrate.
So ink costs do matter where you have large sq inch coverage. If I do say 20 sublimation t-shirts per hour on an order then my costs saving of $3 - $4 per shirts are huge ... $60 - $80 an hour going positive into my run rate. This means I can do one or both of 2 things.
1. Put more money into my pocket for just the ink cost savings delta.
2. Reduce end price to increases my sales volume, which means a higher net overall.
Typically I do both.
So ink costs do matter where you have large sq inch coverage. If I do say 20 sublimation t-shirts per hour on an order then my costs saving of $3 - $4 per shirts are huge ... $60 - $80 an hour going positive into my run rate. This means I can do one or both of 2 things.
1. Put more money into my pocket for just the ink cost savings delta.
2. Reduce end price to increases my sales volume, which means a higher net overall.
Typically I do both.
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