How much would you pay for a macbook sticker?
It's been a while now since I've launched my MacBook sticker shop stickerlicio.us. Over the last couple of years I've shipped a lot of orders from all around the world, have been featured by some awesome websites and received overwhelming feedback from many of my customers.
The only kind of negative feedback that comes up every once in a while regards to pricing. I sometimes stumble upon some people wondering why they should pay 8 € (around 10.70 $) for a simple piece of vinyl decal. A good question that I asked myself too when I first thought about selling MacBook stickers. I always took the time to explain myself and thought I could just as well drop my pants entirely, provide you with an insight into the numbers to make you understand the pricing and help you decide wether you are willing to pay that much for a tiny little MacBook sticker or not.
Let's talk numbers
I order the stickers in smaller batches and after trying a couple of materials and local printers I found a little copy shop next to my workplace. That shop exceeds in production quality, delivery time and friendliness. A sticker costs around 0,50 €. They are cut on a plotting machine and the unnecessary parts are removed by hand. Transparent foil is attached to keep the floating elements in position. Sometimes I do the cutting, it depends on how busy the copy shop is.
Every order comes in a cute little packaging including 2 promotional stickers which do a good job of protecting the stickers against being bend on their journey. I ordered them in larger batches, so it's just 0,10 € of packaging costs per sticker.
Shipping is included in every order and lies around 0,67 € per sticker depending on how many stickers are shipped together and how far they need to travel.
PayPal wants a piece from the cake too and charges an average fee of 0,46 € per sticker.
Doing the math, every sticker bears the cost of 1,73 € to make it from production to your door.
So it's 6,27 € for me. Yeah! But wait...
An income of 6,27 € per sticker may seem like a lot but this is not the end of the story. Stickerlicious is a one-man project. Everything that needs to be done is done by two human hands - mine to be exact. This saves money but requires some extra work on my part.
At the beginning there was quite a lot of initial work required to get everything going. Trying out some sticker designs, switching between different materials and finding a printing shop which provides excellent quality. Coming up with a name, creating a logo, designing a website, finding a web-hoster and making the online shop work: I spent lots of spare time and I never thought it would take so many weeks to make all this work. No money had been earned till that point.
Besides lots of automation, there is some handwork left for each incoming order. Every shipping label needs to be created in the online system of the german post office (2014 and still no API yet. Seriously!). After the label has been printed I do the packaging and take it to the mailbox the next morning. Finally I log into my shopping system and trigger an email informing you that your sticker has hit the road.
In addition to the everyday work, I try my best to keep a close relationship to my customers. Doing some social media work, answering support questions, sending replacement stickers if one got broken. I even decided to open source all of my sticker designs so you're able to reproduce or recreate all of my stickers if you are out of money or have great ideas for your own sticker design.
Shut up and take my money
8 bugs for a sticker is still a bunch of money, but you're covering more than just material costs. Thank you everyone who trusted me on that and was willing to pay it without questioning anything.
Feel free to comment on twitter, I'd love to hear your feedback!
written on 8/25/2014 in stickerlicious