Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Calendars and Red Bubble

Thanks for your comment Anonymous. Actually we did not lose or make any money from the calendars but that was discussed heavily from the beginning. It was an experiment to see how it would go, and if we had ordered a lot more to be printed their individual costs would have gone down, and we could have sold them and made a profit, but that would have required taking a risk that no one wanted to take. The only cost was the time involved in designing it and getting it printed and collecting the money. Most people enjoyed having the calendars for themselves and to give to friends.

Sorry to have not explained the Red Bubble site more clearly. The Red Bubble site is totally and utterly free, and once again the only cost involved is time. There are no set-up costs as everything is made to order. It is up to every individual to decide if they want to purchase something or not, and once they place an order then Red Bubble make it. It takes a couple of weeks to get the final product sent to you. If people are not comfortable buying on the internet they may be able to organise to pay cash to someone who is comfortable to buy it for them.

Red Bubble set the base price they need to make their money and we choose a percentage mark-up for the money we want to make. For example a card is $4.00- it costs Red Bubble $2.50 to make and we have set a 40% mark-up so we get $1.50 on top of that. We can make a fair bit more from the tshirt sales- about $8.00 per tshirt. We can increase or decrease our chosen mark-up at will.
We will have a cheque sent to us when we make $100 or, we can opt to have it direct deposited in our account once we reach $20. Currently we have chosen the cheque option so as not to risk the bank account details on the internet in case members don't like that.

We may not make a cent from this, but it will not cost us anything either....except time. Recently a site on Red Bubble whose entire profits go to an African village sold a large number of cards and wall prints and made quite a bit of money, so it is possible.

The Red Bubble site can be very easily removed completely if it is offensive to members.

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