The cost of pedals

raulduke

It's like the the restaurant I went to the other night.

I paid £15 for a main course, then did my (expert of course) calculations and came to a total raw ingredients cost of 50P.

And the waiter wanted a tip! Cheeky bastard... just think how much money they must all be making!

Heartfeltdawn

deano said:

So no marketing goes on in the holier-than-thou pedal building industry? It is a bastion of little artisans, all crafting boutique pedals with nary a thought given to maximising revenue, profits and resales? I stand corrected. You have, one and all, converted me.

Except for that one Vertex guy of course, who did use those techniques. But he was outed, and nobody else does.

Okay.

Moving on, the phrase "reasonable definition" of few quid was used, which turned out to be £3-£5 pound out of my £50. So Sporky has worked out that between 6% and 10% of the pedal is for the components. I didn't come up with those numbers. I said a few quid.

Now it may well be that the cost of components in a pedal is 10% (as was said, I wouldn't know). But if that is the case, is someone going to confirm that the "MXR 5150 Overdrive EVH Signature Drive Pedal" available at Andertons (I know, I couldn't resist) for £220 contains £22 worth of MXR-purchased electronic components?

I think the difference we are talking about is the small artisan maker and the bigger companies like MXR. A smaller company might well use components that are expensive to start with, and because of reduced purchasing power they have to pay even more for them. Which means they have to have a high retail price for the pedal.

But the component was built by the manufacturer for 20p, but retail them depending on volume for say 50p for 10,000 or more. Now MXR buy 10,0000 from the manufacturer and get them for £5,000 (50p each). A trade re-seller company (Mouser for example) goes along and buys the same 10,000 and again gets them for £5,000.

An independent pedal builder goes along to the trade re-seller and buys a hundred but the re-seller has added their bit on so he ends up paying £4.00 for them because his costs for stocking, warehousing and so on are higher than MXR because they just put them straight into a hopper and they go onto a pedal and out of the door. So our independent spends £400. Now of course he has to build the pedals, and so that component now has to go up to say £8.00 once it goes into the pedal, contributing to the higher cost of the pedal compared to MXR's use, which might by £1.00 when they put them in their pedals.

Have I made an error in working out the basic premise?

Hopefully not. So I come along and say there are no components that cost more than a couple of quid. Sporky and other's take offense. But the component cost the manufacturers 20p. not £8.00. Its price got inflated due to the original company's retail pricing structure combined with the re-seller's pricing structure. But it is still only truly worth 20p. Not even the 50p.

The components in pedals, when you work out the cost of producing by the manufacturer them, are much cheaper than what they end up being priced at when put into a pedal. The in-pedal price is different to what it truly cost for a whole raft of inflationary reasons.

I stand by my comment that the true cost of the components in a pedal is genuinely a few pounds. What individual pedal builders have to pay depends on their size and ability to bulk purchase.

Okay, you might complain that the original manufacturer deserves their profit and of course they do, but guess what! Texas Instruments and TT Electronics, and the like (a) manufacture in low cost countries anyway and (b) use the same marketing strategies to inflate their prices to people like MXR and the re-sellers, and the re-sellers use the same marketing strategies to inflate their prices to the independent builders. So the true cost should be somewhere between the 20p and 50p and given the marketing strategy inflation runs at much more than a few percent, will be closer to the 20p.

The marketing strategies add on large percentages, which escalate up and up as the component passes through hand after hand. I am self employed, as are many on here, and marketing inflates costs much faster than VAT does, and we all know how quickly that increases.

Somebody said I am offering opinions on something I know nothing about. I would like clarification on that if I may, do I know nothing about (a) pedal building, (b) economics, or (c) marketing?

Because this thread isn't about (a). It is about (b) and (c) and their impact on (a). We have to look at the entire pricing chain, strip out the inflation due to marketing, and then we get to the true "worth" of the component. Again I stand by my statement about there being only a few pounds worth of electronic components in a pedal. All of the rest of the costs is due to the supply chain inflation.

Now some of you are complaining that it is not fair to compare like that because you don't have the opportunity to purchase directly from the component manufacturers, which is true, but only due to the way economies and companies have structured themselves, to take advantage of manufacturing processes. If Texas Instruments used their size to build pedals using components they make themselves, they would probably be able to build a pedal at such a low price (those few pounds I keep harping on about) that most pedal manufacturers would go broke overnight given they couldn't compete economically. The reason they don't do that is because they focus on making components for others to use, because they know how to extract the most profit out of those components, and do not know how to go about marketing pedals and extracting the maximum amount of profits from those (and it's too small a market for them anyway). But those components are only really worth pennies in and of themselves. Supply-chain inflation takes care of the rest.

Having seen you here and in the Vertex thread, you manage to use a lot of words to say very little. 

Vegetables and meat cost comparatively little. It's the skill of a chef and his brigade that add value to those items in the form of a complete meal. So it is with components and pedals. 

Wazmeister

Bored bored bored bored bored

guitarfishbay

Heartfeltdawn said:

you manage to use a lot of words to say very little. 

(Cost of broadband + cost of computer) / words typed = value for money

Sassafras

This thread has really opened my eyes. To think that some of the money I'll save on pedals can now be spent on drugs and prostitutes. The rest I shall just squander.

VJIves

Honestly, I used to be able to tell the difference between elite level trolling and weapons grade stupidity. All I can picture is Deano in a restaurant, wide-eyed in shock after the waiter's handed him the bill & it's more than the cost of the ingredients

slacker

I was wrong

 Accurate and efficient. 

guitartango

Although I agree with the op, I remember buying a cheap plastic OD pedal and after Three goes it fell apart, you could say it had same components as a Boss pedal, but being made so cheaply and it being so noisy, i threw it in the bin. You don't need boutique pedals to sound good, just a good amp and your fingers.

having said that, I do have a okko pedal built in Germany and it does sound amazing.

carlos

Sassafras said:

This thread has really opened my eyes. To think that some of the money I'll save on pedals can now be spent on drugs and prostitutes. The rest I shall just squander.

Yes, but how much does it cost the prostitute for a shag? Maybe cost of water and soap for the shower before and after, a condom... really, why do they charge so much? How about drugs? Why so expensive? I mean a bunch of organic oregano is like £2.5, why are you paying so much for weed?

munckee

Sassafras said:

This thread has really opened my eyes. To think that some of the money I'll save on pedals can now be spent on drugs and prostitutes. The rest I shall just squander.

You don't even need to drug the prostitutes so that's another saving. 

guitartango

And you wonder why Mr Gilmour uses Cornish over Joyo pedals

57Deluxe

The Knobs on the Kokko (a NuX brand) pedals are beautifully molded AND come with a Glow in the Dark marker!

I paid £11.60 (new inc del) for my Booster and is one of my most used pedals for its wonderfulness with everythingness...