modman wrote:431 EUR ????? Didn't even pay attention to that at all. Just before that I was looking at some prices for the Teese compressor dumped at musictoys for $79 before going out of production which I saw for 23,000 yen (half of this Abunai).
So I thought it was about $150.
It's not a bad idea to make them very very expensive then they will catch some attention on the japanese TS market.
I can't dictate what Japan sells them for, but I was hoping for lower prices. Dealer cost is dealer cost, so I don't make any more profit from Japan than I do here in the US.
Another thing they do is compare the Abunai with the LDO... that's a bummer because I've compared them side-by-side and they do not sound alike. It's very misleading. I guess it's my fault for putting a 3-way toggle.
The guy over at Harry's is the same person that brought Keeley, Landgraff, Lovepedal, etc. over to the Japanese market. He knows the Japanese market very well so my stuff got good placement in many of the high end guitar stores through out Japan. 20 units sell out within 3-days of arrival.
Harry's Inc. contacted me, which was a stroke of luck. I'm not sure why they picked me because I was still selling direct at the time and was very unknown. Partnering with Harry's really boosted things for my business in a couple ways.
1) Harry's buys a lot of pedals at a time. I was able to reinvest that money into buying bulk components and hardware to reduce my costs.
2) Having my name all over Japan facilitated more emails from resellers here in the US that wanted to sell my products.
I have a new deal with Japan in that I just send them my stuffed PCBs. They are so close to Taiwan that they can get much better costs on many of the components I use. So Harry's will be doing the assembly of any effect that they want to sell from me. I make much less money, but I save in international shipping costs and can get my stuff to market much faster over there. Harry's has their own mod line called "WEEDS", so they have a very good tech staff.
If there was no Japan, I would probably be still selling direct in very low volumes. Again, the Abunai is a TS808 variant that I personally like the sound of. But most of my modest success was being in the right place at the right time and the will to let other people assemble my product in order to make them more readily available than my competitors.