EnumeroCribbageboards.com State of the Union for 2010

State of the States Sold In

I’m up to 41 states sold. I’m still missing these 9 states: Arkansas, Delaware, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, Okalahoma, Tennessee and Wyoming.

A Quick Note about NotableWoods.com

I sold a couple of old band saw blades to Bruce over at www.Notablewoods.com via Ebay. This is notable for a couple of reasons. It’s from his website, I got the idea to dump the stock motor on my Hitachi Resaw BandSaw and replace it with a REAL motor. I put a 5 HP Baldor motor on my Hitachi and I blogged about how I did it, how much cost, how to calculate the right pulley size to get the stock blade RPM, etc.

Anyway…Bruce is quite knowledgeable about the bands for the Hitachi Bandsaw, unlike me. I thought the bands were OK and could be sharpened and used again. Turns out, they weren’t. So upon hearing this, I gladly gave him his money back. Bruce genuinely appreciated this and sent several beautiful pieces of Koa cut-offs my way. Notablewoods.com sells beautiful Koa (and other species of wood) to Luthiers all over the world. They also sell their cut-offs (small pieces) at very reasonable prices. I in turn made the “Variation on Theme – Series I” out of the pieces he sent over and sent him a complimentary crib board.

The boards sold well, so I contacted Bruce in November of this year. He provided a Box-of-Koa (shipped in band saw blade box of course). It’s a nice selection of Koa shorts/cutoffs that for Luthiers, might be too short/small. But just like the third bowl of Porridge in Goldilocks and the Three Bears, it’s just right for cribbage boards. I got a beautiful box of 25+pieces in various sizes and have delineated them for 4 new series (about 28 or 29 boards): Variation on a Theme Series II, III & IV and Famous Literary Rejects II (cutoffs).

An Annual Tradition I would like to Avoid – Double Booking

As it crept ever closer to the 2010 Holiday season, sales picked up, which is a good thing. The bad thing was I thought I’d repeated a mistake I’d made the year before. I thought I’d sold a board off the website and neglected to pull the board off of etsy.com. Fortunately I didn’t and the customer was very cool about a flurry of confusing emails I sent to her, and she got her board.

Money vs. the Cribbage Board

I sold a board for $1 in 2010. Such a deal! The great “secret” to my pricing structure is really quite simple. The more I like the way a board turned out, the more I charge for it. That’s not to say I don’t like the $1 board. I do. I like all my boards. But, for whatever reason, not every board turns out as well as I would like. Some boards simply turn out better than others. A $5.00 board is board that might have a mis-aligned drill pattern
http://www.enumerocribbageboards.com/images/guttenberg.JPG or maybe I drilled it freehand and the alignment of the holes if off a little bit: (http://www.enumerocribbageboards.com/images/resonator.JPG)

When I first started selling Crib Boards, I would sell my cheapest boards for $1.00 on ebay (http://www.enumerocribbageboards.com/images/apollo16.jpg) or (http://www.enumerocribbageboards.com/images/ChoOyu.jpg).

A lot of the boards are now ranging between $15-31 per board. The slightly nicer ones creep into the $40 area and the REALLY nice ones are in the $50-$60 range. I sold one board for $121 a couple years back. My highest board purchase to date. I suspect it will be a while before I venture back into that price range for a board. (http://www.enumerocribbageboards.com/images/siarnaq.jpg)

This board is REALLY significant (too me) since its 5 strips of ¼ sawn Cocobolo that are all perfectly book-matched and aligned. It’s tough to get 3 bookmatched strips to align, let alone 5! It’s the first board I got the idea of using ¼ sawn strips to design board faces. It’s the first board I did with Cocobolo. It’s THE board that kind of opened the flood-gates in terms of creating boards with unique and unusual grain patterns. It’s a board I created when I didn’t really know what I was doing and somehow got really lucky on my first try. And good luck inspires us to continue on. Unfortunately, I didn’t take a very good picture – but it still sold during Xmas 2008.

To that end, I’ve come up with a new 4 Tier pricing structure that rates the boards from 3 to 0, 0 being the best. Then the 4 tiers are broken down a little bit more depending on if the board is a Tournament Style, 2,3 or 4 Player board or a Giant Board (the 3 foot long board). Since any given board takes about 2 ½ to 3 hours from start to finish, I decided not to base my prices simply on how long a board takes to make – since they all take about the same amount of time. Instead, prices will vary based on the final appearance of the board and the type(s) of wood that make up the board.

The Custom Board Jinx

I’ve done a few custom boards, but I probably won’t do any more. They’re not really for me. I know of a few board makers that do custom work and have referred people who have asked about custom boards to them. Lots of folks on the Web make custom crib boards, but I can’t seem to get my head around it. At the end of the day, I can only approximate what a given customer wants and handmade objects are undervalued enough without adding an additional parameter (such as customization) into the mix.

Earlier this year, a customer made a custom request and asked me to repeat an earlier design. I made 4 boards in the design and the boards just didn’t come out very good. I declared all 4 of them “Postpono” and sold them for almost nothing. Naturally, the person who requested the board didn’t buy any of the 4 boards – I couldn’t blame him. He didn’t get what he requested and I couldn’t see redoing a 4 board series completely from scratch for the possible chance of selling one board from that series for the whopping sum of $24.

In my world, wood always dictates the final product. Least with boards that are complete and offered for sale, the customer chooses either to buy a board, because they like it or not to buy a board, because they don’t. Most people fall in the latter category. Most people are window shoppers.


As a Percentage…

My favorite place to sell crib boards, etsy.com, started offering coupons right before Cyber Monday! Yeah! I went ahead and offered a 31% off coupon (any board on the etsy.com site) and sure enough, people started using it. I’m actually pretty happy that I can do this now. I’ve been amassing a large collection of email addresses (from my 600+ template/boards sales over the last 5 years) and have wanted to start email marketing past clients – but I didn’t want to SPAM people just for the sake of sending them SPAM – I wanted to send them something they might actually find useful – like a DISCOUNT coupon for a future purchase.

I’ve played around with coupons on paypal, and it’s kind of doable, but it’s not very elegant and difficult to implement. It’s much easier on etsy.com.

CafePress.com

Custom made, short-run hats and T-shirts available over the Internet seems like a good idea, but seriously, it’s not. I am of course bitter because I’ve had items on cafepress.com for 2 years and have made exactly no money. Zip. Zilch. Nada.

On the off chance you wander over to it in search of an Enumero Bike themed bike Messenger bag, thong underwear or even a T-shirt, here is the address:

http://www.cafepress.com/enumerocribbage

It’s a Holiday…

I sold at least on board on the following Holidays this year.

Xmas (2009)
New Year’s Eve (2009)
New Year’s Day (2010)
Valentine’s Day (2010)
Turkey Day (2010)
CyberMonday (2010)
New Year’s Eve (2010)

Etsy.com is “Your place to buy & sell all things handmade ™ ”

Etsy.com still seems to be a great place to sell boards. As always, it’s a great place for the consumer/buyer since the immense amount of competition on the site can only drive places one direction (down) and the selection is equally immense.

Unlike flea-bay (ebay.com), etsy doesn’t gouge you on fees and your 20 cent insertion fee is good for 6 months! Their fees are reasonable and fair, not excessive. There are many things I like about etsy.com. The website is very nicely laid out, it’s easy to navigate and easy to post items to. If you want to promote your items on their site, you can easily do this for a small fee. In my experience, the buyers “get it” and respect the fact that the items they’re buying are hand made and not churned out by the thousands in some factory somewhere.

Pegging Along…

In order to make better use of my less expensive pegs on 3 and 4 player boards, I’ve taken to painting the pegs copper and black with some success. The trick is to spray on as little paint as possible, otherwise it flakes off too easily.

Recycling

I’ve had ½ dozen chess boards not quite done for some time. One chess board was hastily completed and given to a customer as a replacement chess board. The board they bought from me a couple of years earlier (one of my early chess boards, had warped rather seriously). Yes, I do honor my lifetime warranty. So that leaves 5 chess board to still be finished. Of those 5 chess boards, 2 of the boards had some issues – they also warped – so I re-glued them to a stable substrate. When I first started doing chess boards a couple of years ago, I thought I could do them in solid hardwoods, but I’ve since decided to make chess boards the same way I do crib boards: re-saw the material, glue the material to a stable substrate and then add edge layers, thus preventing any chance of warping. The old woodworker’s adage still applies: Wood Moves.

Even after re-gluing the 2 warped chess boards to a stable substrate, the 2 boards still had issues. Since both boards were Maple & Purpleheart squares, I thought, Ah-ha. I can make one good chess board from the 2 slightly screwed up chessboards. Well that idea didn’t pan out. So there I am staring at all these various parts of 2 cut up chess boards…trying to decide what to do…and the obvious solution didn’t really come to me right away. It took me a minute to realize that the random assortment of glued up squares would actually make interesting looking crib boards!

Which then got me thinking about my box of board rejects – boards I couldn’t sell even for $1, but hated to throw away. Perfect for re-purposing to another board. So I went to my freshly arrived box of Koa pieces and voila – in a matter of a few minutes, I re-purposed 8 dead boards – giving them a 2nd chance. In most cases the board face was the problem – the board bottom and substrate were perfectly usable.


Some Words about Drill Templates…Rants & All!

I finally ran out of the longer pieces of plastic and since I won’t pay full retail for plastic, I’ve been making do with what I’ve got. In other words, I’m not currently selling any templates requiring plastic over about 15” long. This eliminates quite a few templates, many of which sell well.

I tried to mitigate this problem by buying what I thought was the good, high grade chemcast (paper backed) plastic from the folks at http://www.freckleface.com. Unfortunately, the folks there are terriblely rude and just plain nasty/awful people to deal with. Don’t let the as asinine picture of the stupid Freckle Face kid on the web site fool you. These people are DICKS! And on top of that, they’re dishonest. And the owner of the company, with whom I corresponded directly with, is pretty much a royal DICK! Just my opinion, but I would never deal with them again. They charge top dollar for SHIT quality plastic (the lowest grade of plastic available). And when I pointed this out to them, let’s just say, the email correspondence between them and I went from PG-13 to down right nasty! A Better Business Bureau complaint produced nothing, further confirming my suspicion that the BBB is an equally worthless entity as these people are. Every single complaint I’ve ever filed with the BBB has gone absolutely nowhere and produced no tangible results.

So to mitigate my supply chain issues (aka the Scrap Bin at my local Tap Plastics), I came up with the idea of the NFS template. I quasi gave up Tap Plastics in Dublin. They started charging way to much for their chemcast pieces. They want $8 or $10 for little cast off pieces.

The NFS Template is a shortened version of the full size template. NFS is short for “Not Full Size”. The idea is that you don’t need full size templates – it’s really only a convenience. The only part of the template that is shortened are the straight streets in the middle of the template. If you have the turns and the corresponding streets to align from, then you can easily drill a full size board with an NFS style template. The only drawback is that you have to “pick up” the template and remount it. But the NFS templates are drilled in such a way you have to do this once. So you drill half the board, then pick up the template, remount it aligning it to the existing streets you’ve just drilled and then drill the other half. The secondary advantage to NFS templates is that people can’t use them for full size 120 point cribbage boards! The NFS template approach is similar to the “mirror” template approach, where you drill half the board + the registration holes for the 2nd half, and then flip the template, align it to the registration holes and drill the other half.

A quick check revealed that www.cribbageboardtemplate(s).com is still parked but not used. At last check, you cannot purchase templates off of this website. You can however, purchase the website (minimum bid is $100) if you choose to get into the highly lucrative cribbage board template market. Yeah…good luck with that!

A couple of URL derivatives that seem to still be up for grabs (in other words, no one has registered them yet):

http://www.cribboardtemplate.com/
http://www.cribbagetemplate.com/
http://www.cribbagedrilltemplate.com/

And of course my personal favorite…

http://www.its-a-cribbage-drill-template-dammit-and-not-a-plastic-cribbage-board-and-besides-plastic-crib-boards-are-ugly-lack-depth-and-warmth-unlike-wood.com/

The bottom line is that template sells were down quite a bit this year. It’s to be expected that template sells would taper off. As I will readily testify to, there is no money to be made making cribbage boards, so…why would there be any money in selling templates.

I clicked over the 300th template sold right before Halloween. It seemed like a good stopping point for templates made to order, thus I’ve decided to stop selling templates made to order. Rather, I’m now selling templates that are made when I drill out a given board. The obvious advantage of this is time savings. I mean it seems pretty obvious to drill a template at the same time you drill a board, but I didn’t come to this conclusion very quickly or easily. After all, I did 300 made to order templates!

So just like the crib boards, there is a picture of the actual template for sale, which would have been created at the time a board was drilled. And like crib boards, the template picture would have to be removed and the listing updated every time a given template sold.

In a perfect world of template making, I would have a $5,000+ CAD machine do the drilling for me and I would only make templates out of ¼” thick bullet proof polycarbonate plastic (the stuff that can’t crack or break and costs about $20+ sq. foot). And since this world is so perfect, I would charge $50 - $60 for these CAD made templates.


COA

I was never happy with the way I did my little Certificate of Authenticity cards. These are little Maple Veneer cards that I imprint my maker’s stamp on and on the back I write the board name and the series it belongs to. So…instead of writing the information out on the back of the card, I now print this information out on a medium grade copier paper readily available in most corporate laser printers. The advantage to this is 2 fold. One, since I have lousy handwriting, the board name and series is actually legible when it’s printed out. And the 2nd, less obvious advantage is that the paper on the back of the veneer card acts as a sort of a paper backing on the maple card veneer and stiffens up the card and prevents it from cracking or breaking after it’s been stamped with my electric maker’s stamp. These little veneer cards as so thin, I don’t think they were ever designed to have an imprint burned into them.

To Finish Up…

I continued to enhance my techniques this year. A good finish is elusive, but I’m very pleased with my results this year.

My 2nd Advertising Link

I picked up a 2nd ad link in 2010. The gentleman didn’t pay as much as the guy for the first link…but with the economy as rocky as it is, any ad revenue is appreciated! My first ad link from late 2009 renewed as well.

Schwag Alert

The template counting Odometer clicked over 300 on Oct 29th with the 4 Player Compact template. The buyer naturally received some schwag with it. I’ve loosened up my rules on giving schwag (cups, T-shirts, mouse pads, pens, tote-bag, key chains, hats, etc.). And of course, the person who buys Cribbage Board #300 will not only get some schwag, but the pretty fancy Austrian pegs, just like the folks who purchased board #100 and #200. I still get all my schwag at vistaprint.com. For example, my last order of enumerocribbageboards.com imprinted schwag consisted of the following 5 items:

1. XL T-Shirt
2. Hat
3. Custom Rubber Stamp
4. Mouse Pad
5. 25 Small Business “Fridge” Magnets

And all of it cost me a total of $7.45. All the items were “free”. The $7.45 was the cost of shipping.

Trading

I nice gentleman from the Pacific Northwest and I traded an assortment of pegs and a couple of templates for a piece of Indian Rosewood. I think he was a little surprised when I told him I would make 10 boards (10 Notable Native Americans Series) out of it. It was a blind trade on my side – I didn’t see the wood until I received it on my side. I like the wood, but I would probably not use it for board faces again. For my style of boards, Indian Rosewood would work much better an accent piece.

Coupons work very well. Who knew?

The good folks @ etsy.com started supporting coupons on their website right around Thanksgiving. They seem to work really well. I believe if you’re going to give someone a discount or coupon, at least make it worth their while. 10% coupons are lame! I opted for a meaty 31 point discount (enough for a skunk!)

Made In China

For the last few years, I’ve been buying pegs (in bulk) from woodexpressions.com. I include metal pegs and playing cards with my board as a courtesy so people can start playing on my boards right away – no need to cut up match sticks to start playing. For me, pegs are a supply expense and not something I construct from scratch and sell. Much to my surprise, I started to run really low on pegs during the Holiday Season.

I get the pegs at quasi-wholesale from woodexpressions.com which is quite a savings over retail. Not surprising, the pegs that I have gotten from them are made in China.

So I started wondering what it would take to cut out the proverbial Middle Man and just buy the pegs directly from the manufacturer in China myself. So I asked “The Google” and I found alibaba.com which is a website that connects overseas suppliers with buyers. I made few email inquiries and found I could get 10,000 pegs for a very good price, much less than what I’m paying WoodExpressions.com. Following the Henry Ford mantra of “You can get it in any color you like, as long as it’s black”, the first order of 10,000 pegs will be silver. Even with shipping factored in, I still realize a substantial cost savings. And yes, 10,000 pegs is the minimum order. So if you need silver pegs for cheap, look no further!

The 300

For some silly reason, I really wanted to hit 300 total cribbage boards sold before the end of 2010. And I did so on Dec 13th, 2010. I also picked up a new state, Utah. My basking in the glow of this personal milestone didn’t last long and about 20 hours later, board # 301 sold. You got to love the Holiday Shopping Season!

And the final count was…

I have I sold out 17 series in and 99 boards in 2010. A nice increase from 2009, largely due to etsy.com. Comparing page views from etsy.com to page views to my website, they definitely seem comparable. If anything, my website is slightly more in terms of page views. The bottom line is that page views on etsy.com translate to actual sales – not so much on my website. I think folks inherently trust a product hosting site like etsy.com (or ebay.com), over an individual’s website. Also, I think etsy.com has really grown and people recognize it as the place to go when looking for something vintage or hand-crafted, especially during the Holiday Shopping Season.

For 2011…

Tropical Exotic Hardwoods of Latin America have provided me with quite a bit of material to some nice single piece Cocobolo tournament size boards. As always, Cocobolo ain’t cheap, but it is sure pretty!

I had very good success with another vendor on ebay, Chitswood. I really dig the smaller thinner pieces he sells, perfect for travel size boards. I did the Comedic Teams IV – Monty Python series using his wood as well. That turned out to be a very popular (sold out relatively quickly) series as well. I hope he starts selling wood again!

The Koa boards should do quite well as well.

And as usual, I have a large collection of boards on the shelf that have been drilled, they just need to be finished. So I will be throwing those into the mix as well

Changes for 2011

I finally got all the states and appropriate shipping rates entered into my paypal account, so I can do location based shipping costs (assuming someone buys