I make stuff. The banner I fly under is WCA / Watch City Armory.
Animated clone troopers, animated series Mandalorians (see current avatar), Boba Fett gauntlets and some other assorted stuff. I do resin casting, vacuum forming, sculpting, etc...
When I finished my clone armor sculpts, I headed up a local garrison run of armor kits at material cost. 25 suits. At the time I was using a pretty inefficient system, so with 3 people working on it, it took 5-6 hours to make a suit. If you do the math there, you'll see that those of us working on it basically lost a few months of our lives making armor.
That BLEEPED.
I've done a few runs of Mando gauntlets. 10 - 15 pairs at a time. I would make all the gaunts in one day, then for reasons that I really couldn't pin down, it would take me 2-3 weeks to get around to shipping them.
I discovered that I'm not good at shipping things either.
In one of those runs I encountered several people who were not pleased with my laziness with shipping. That is perfectly fair. However, I was not going to change my behavior because of that. So, I refunded their money.
From that, I learned that it's best to just cut the connection immediately if things seem awkward for either party. From there on out I have warned people up front that I am slow to ship, and if you aren't OK with that, don't order from me. If you do order from me and you nag, you'll get your money back in full and that's that.
So, round two for armor: I built a better machine. I got the time down to about 1.5 hours per suit. Cut the number down to 15 kits. Paid someone else to ship the kits for me. I'd pull the armor and leave kits in my garage. He would come by, pick them up, and ship them out for me.
Even with all that, by the end it still BLEEPED.
At that point I discovered that I was not good at doing big runs of things. I like creating and I like making a few copies, but the monotony of mass production makes me want to cry.
That brings us back to the runs. What do do there?
If I'm doing it myself, I limit things to VERY small numbers. 5 units or so at most.
I just don't do bigger runs at all.
The 3rd run of clone armor I outsourced entirely. I rented out my workshop to a couple of friends. They were allowed to be there any time I wasn't, and they handled everything: Orders, production, supplies, shipping, communication. I just provided molds and space to work. VICTORY! I got a bit of cash to help fund the next project, they got a bit of cash for their efforts, and 15 more people got clone armor.
The best run though was the "do it yourself" round. A bunch of people came from Pennsylvania to MA to make armor. They stayed at my place for the weekend and made 15 kits. I basically supervised and ate the food they bought me. It was glorious!
All of my helmet production is 100% outsourced. I do the sculpt, make the molds, make my own helmets, then pass the molds off to another caster. From there, I'm completely out of the loop. I don't take any cut of the proceeds, though I do ask the casters to hook me up with some resin, silicone and cast helmets as needed. It works out great.
So there's my niche. I do the creation, prototyping, initial few products, then I walk away to the next thing.
The biggest things I've learned are:
- don't get in over my head. even if i have 50 people that want something, i have to just say no. keep runs as small as practical. for resin stuff i can do 5 helmets at a time. for plastic it's got to be more because of volume pricing on plastic. it gets way cheaper when you buy it by the ton.
- get help! find people to assist whenever possible. it spreads the load, gets it done faster, and turns slaving over a hot oven into a social activity
- be honest about yourself and what you are willing to commit to. i tell people that i'm sort of a jerk and let them make the call whether or not to deal with me. if you feel strongly about customer service, great! if you want to just ship it and be done with the item and the buyer, great! just let them know what they are getting into.
- be clear up front about refunds! for small stuff i'll always issue a refund without hesitation if i haven't shipped. if i have shipped, there are no returns. if i had to drop $3K on plastic, i'm not eating your share of that. at that point i work with the buyer to find someone to buy their slot. once someone else takes the slot, they get their money back.
- consider partial payments. for big things (like the armor runs) we do 1/2 down, 1/2 upon completion. that way the buyer knows that they're not out as much money if we screw them, we know there's still motivation to finish, and then i'm not sitting on a ton of cash that isn't rightly mine.
- be prepared for problems! there is the "armorer's curse" -- something inevitably goes wrong mid-run, halting production. this is real, i've had it happen.
when i built the new vac table, i had someone else do all the welding for me. on the last kit of my first run of armor on the machine, i discovered the hard way that one of the welds wasn't solid. the carrier frame for the plastic broke, halting my production. i would have to break down the whole system, drive the parts out to the shop an hour plus from home where the work was done, and wait until the welder had a chance to fix it.
this wasn't acceptable to me.
it was a sunday afternoon at about 3pm. i drove out to home depot and bought a lincoln flux core arc welder, gloves and a mask. home depot is about the worst place possible to buy stuff like that... it cost about 2x what it would have elsewhere, but they were open. $700 later i went home, watched the "learn to weld" dvd, and then fixed it myself.
that little excursion ate 100% of the profit from that entire armor run. but, i promised armor and i delivered. and now i have a welder, so that's cool in the end i guess
my point with that story is that yes, real life does come first. but at the same time, when you go into a run, you need to be aware that your customers want their stuff, and you need to make all reasonable efforts to deliver as promised.