How much can I sell hand made pedals for?

[vacuumdust]

  I've probably sold 75 or so pedals on ebay in the last 8 years.  I've made as much as $350!!! for a pedal that cost 60 and made as little as 45 for a pedal that cost 35...in the last year the prices have definitely dropped.  But I love building and I can't own 70 pedals...so it keeps me strings, parts, a bottle of wine...toys for the kids maybe once in a while.  My only advice is master a pedal that a lot of folks seem to have trouble with...for me it was the Maestro S&H for a while...now I just build simple drives with cool features.  But like I said, I love building, i'm just one guy so no real overhead and i'm realistic.  If I lost my real job today, pedal building as a means of income...REAL income, wouldn't even cross my mind.

[Paul Marossy]

If I lost my real job today, pedal building as a means of income...REAL income, wouldn't even cross my mind.

Yeah, that's the case for most people. It really depends on your goal is. If your goal was to build a few pedals to raise some money to buy a guitar you want without going into debt and can wait a while to save up the money, then that might be a way to do it.

[Electron Tornado]

If I lost my real job today, pedal building as a means of income...REAL income, wouldn't even cross my mind.

Yeah, that's the case for most people. It really depends on your goal is. If your goal was to build a few pedals to raise some money to buy a guitar you want without going into debt and can wait a while to save up the money, then that might be a way to do it.

Considering the time involved in building and the fact that someone would be building speculatively most of the time, they would make more money at a faster rate by getting a part time job at McDonald's. Then, save some money by building some of your own equipment.

Not trying to "crush someone's dreams" here, but the desired end was to make money to buy some new gear. Making and selling pedals was only a means to that end. The point of this post is to closely examine the means being considered to achieve the desired ends.

[Flooflox]

Probably not news to anyone, but using the advanced search functions on Ebay allowes you to see the prices payed for sold items, which as Mark suggests is a more reliable guide.

It was news to me. Thanks Scruffyhound!

[fpaul]

Is it really only about how much money you can make it the shortest amount of time?  What about making something that is useful that will probably outlast you, that requires actually using your brain and skills to do.  I've never sold a pedal so maybe no one should listen to me, but I'd personally rather make $1 selling a pedal than $10 working at macdonalds.  Plus I wouldn't have to drive there in traffic and kiss the bosses and customers butts.

There isn't a good answer to the question.  You may make $1 per pedal.  You may make $30-35 per pedal like has been posted.  You may not sell the pedal and be stuck with $30 bucks in parts, most of which you could use to make something else.  You may make $200 per pedal and have a year long waiting list.  Seems like small enough risk to just TRY and SEE if you want to find out, screw asking other people. I may try it at some point.  If I fail to make any money I'll inform everyone that asks the question there's NO money to make because I couldn't make any.  

[Paul Marossy]

Considering the time involved in building and the fact that someone would be building speculatively most of the time, they would make more money at a faster rate by getting a part time job at McDonald's. Then, save some money by building some of your own equipment.

Yeah building "spec pedals" is a tough way to go. Spec = speculative buyer.

When I still had my job, I designed the HVAC for a lot of BIG spec homes here in Las Vegas. One of the last ones I did is still sitting around unsold. Last I heard, he was trying to sell that house for $13 million. This particular builder checks out the credentials of potential buyers and he told me when I was at the jobsite one day that the owner of Monster Cable was looking into buying it - IIRC, he had about $30 million in his checking account. He also had some famous people look into buying it, but he is still stuck with it a couple of years after completing it. This house was rad, too. One of the two garages had a half-court basketball court in it, with a $250,000 car stacking thing at the back of the garage. All the walls in the main living areas were Venetian Plaster, which he told me was like $34 a square foot. And there was a lot of it in that place. I did the math and there was at least $100,000 of plaster alone. It also had an awesome staircase fabbed on site. IIRC, that house was about 11,000 sq ft. The house was completed right when the big mortgage bubble was blowing up.

All that to say that selling things as "spec" products is risky. You could spend a lot of money and not sell anything. You just have to count the cost and be willing to accept the risk.

[El Heisenberg]

Bluh! Living in Vegas could drive you nuts! They clump all the nice big huge houses in the middle of a buncha dinky houses that all look the same. So all us folks who live in the cookie cutter homes drive by these mansions every day! BAH! I wanna have a freakin basketball court in my house!

[Paul Marossy]

Bluh! Living in Vegas could drive you nuts! They clump all the nice big huge houses in the middle of a buncha dinky houses that all look the same. So all us folks who live in the cookie cutter homes drive by these mansions every day! BAH! I wanna have a freakin basketball court in my house!

This spec home in my other post is at "The Ridges", way up at the west end of Flamingo. I did a whole bunch of houses up there, several for casino owners. One of them was for the executive vice president of Boyd Gaming Corp, $20 million home.

Yeah, I was looking on Google Earth one day just for fun and you can see how small tract home lots got as time went by if you know what part of the city was built when. At 1/4-acre, I actually have a fairly big lot for a tract home, but it was also built in 1993 when land was cheap. I could fit two of my old houses on it. But land was going for $1,000,000 an acre for a while around 2003 to about 2007. That's when they came up with "cluster homes" where at the end of the cul de sac, two homes have to share the same driveway to the garage - you can not park a car on the driveway or it blocks the neighbor's garage. That was a DR Horton project. I feel sorry for people that live in that sort of neighborhood. Or those KB Home projects where the front of the house is 20 feet from the street and there is only 6 feet between houses and there is no where for anyone to park if you have more than one carload of people visit your house. It feels very claustrophic. I was recently remembering a meeting at the beginning of 2004 with KB Home where they were telling us that they were going to be building over 3,000 homes that year in Las Vegas. That was just for one builder, and there were many. Now it's a ghost town here as far as new construction goes and more & more businesses are going broke every day. All of this is thanks to all of the fraudulent loan people putting people into homes that were two or three times what they could truly afford.

Gee, I think I totally derailed this thread now...  

[petemoore]

  These things are easy to store, perishable items have a much better turnover rate and demand.
  Anybody can get parts and plunk together a pedal, or buy a cheep-o circuit in a plastic box that by audio standards is identical, currency exchange standards something like 10:1 ratio in some not so rare cases. The thing that was 150 is 15, the plunked together in a hurry [if you value time here] pedal somewhere inbetween. Much less signifigant but still relevant, is that you'll find that parts cost a little more in smaller quantities.
  So, by any standard of income, startup costs and long term losses should be viewed as very likely creating an atmosphere of substandard conditions compared to just about any other occupation.
  Although you have no "syphon" to the ultra inexpensive labor and component market, I have a feeling that soon the "free labor lake" may soon start charging or dry up entirely. 83c might buy a hot dog.
 
 
 

[amptramp]

I was at a garage sale today where I saw a Schecter Damien 7 Guitar and an amp with effects built in.  At first I was tempted to swear off whatever was making me see seven strings on a guitar, but it was real.  (The bottom string is tuned to low A or B as the user desired and the person selling it said that he used low A to get some towering metal chords.)  He was in a band and said that the effects built into the amp were garbage and so are a lot of the stompboxes, so there is still a market for something good.  There are a lot of stompboxes that do not do what the guitarist wants and it is normal to see guitarists go through a number of them before getting something they are satisfied with (or being permanently pissed off at something they spent good money on or just not understanding that things can be made better).

The problem isn't making a good stompbox, it's listening to working musicians, asking what they would like to see in a stompbox and designing, building and marketing something that solves their problems.  For example, I cringe at the thought of a guitarist going to a gig in a blizzard or desert heat with a fuzz based on germanium transistors that vary substantially in gain, leakage and bias point with temperature.  There is plenty of room for improvement, so putting out the 7,945 th version of a TS808 is not the way forward (unless you can do exquisite case designs like Slade).  Learn what the market finds unsatisfactory about the status quo, find out what the market wants and provide it.  With so many vendors and so much stuff available (just check the pages of them in Guitar Center), you have to do something spectacular to stand out.

[DougH]

The problem isn't making a good stompbox, it's listening to working musicians, asking what they would like to see in a stompbox and designing, building and marketing something that solves their problems. 

Excellent point. The existence of most electronics manufacturing businesses is predicated on the idea that they solve a problem of some sort. Trying to cash in on the "kewlness factor" due to a paint job or forum buzz of some overworked idea in an oversaturated market is probably not the most solid foundation for a new business.

Want to get business? Come up with an idea no one else provides that a lot of people want.

[Paul Marossy]

Excellent point. The existence of most electronics manufacturing businesses is predicated on the idea that they solve a problem of some sort. Trying to cash in on the "kewlness factor" due to a paint job or forum buzz of some overworked idea in an oversaturated market is probably not the most solid foundation for a new business.

Want to get business? Come up with an idea no one else provides that a lot of people want.

Yep, from what I have seen being a part of the boutique world, that's right on target. That's what I have been trying to figure out, offering something that no one else offers. That's not that hard to do, the hard part is the "everyone wants one" part. As I said before, the way you make money selling pedals (like enough money to live on) is to sell a lot of them. It's all in the volume of sales.

[Mark Hammer]

When I still had my job, I designed the HVAC for a lot of BIG spec homes here in Las Vegas. One of the last ones I did is still sitting around unsold. Last I heard, he was trying to sell that house for $13 million. This particular builder checks out the credentials of potential buyers and he told me when I was at the jobsite one day that the owner of Monster Cable was looking into buying it - IIRC, he had about $30 million in his checking account. He also had some famous people look into buying it, but he is still stuck with it a couple of years after completing it. This house was rad, too. One of the two garages had a half-court basketball court in it, with a $250,000 car stacking thing at the back of the garage. All the walls in the main living areas were Venetian Plaster, which he told me was like $34 a square foot. And there was a lot of it in that place. I did the math and there was at least $100,000 of plaster alone. It also had an awesome staircase fabbed on site. IIRC, that house was about 11,000 sq ft. The house was completed right when the big mortgage bubble was blowing up.

When we first moved to Victoria, BC, my wife and I were driving around the city and as we passed through a very posh neighbourhood, we passed by one estate that had a gold leaf sign out front stating the name of the estate.  I turned to my wife and said "I don't know what the owner does for a living, but whatever it is, it probably isn't ethical or is possibly illegal.  This isn't old money.  The person appears to have made a lot of money very quickly, and is in a hurry to show it off."  As it turned out, several weeks later we learned that the house belonged to a televangelist.  This was 1985, and the televangelist game was starting to tank because of too many "vendors", and because Jimmy Swaggart hadn't helped their brand very much.  The estate went on the market for $7M.  He had to eventually drop the asking price to $4M-and-change because apparently the fresco in the dining room depicting his ascension to fame was not a big selling point.

I suppose as a contractor, one waits for clients like that, simply because for once you have someone willing to spend the money to "do it right".  "Whatever it costs" is music to some people's ears in the right context.   As a non-contractor, though, I have no use for people like that.

More on topic......

The problem isn't making a good stompbox, it's listening to working musicians, asking what they would like to see in a stompbox and designing, building and marketing something that solves their problems.  

Bingo.

Several years ago, MXR started selling the CAE Boost/Overdrive, designed by Bob Bradshaw.  Bradshaw has made his living (and his name) from doing custom work for higher-end clients, many of them touring pros.  The Boost/Overdrive is a great example of what amptramp is talking about.  Plenty of musicians were saying,: "You know, I like the basic sound of the pedal, but it'd be nice to simply be able to make it louder for solos".  Boom.  The boost stage gets built into the pedal as a footswitchable option, and we end up seeing that as a more frequently adopted form factor in many overdrives.

Multi-FX units often have innumerable ways to customize them.  But often, the working musician wants this one little thing that will make their job easier, and it doesn't require anything as complicated as a digitalmulti-FX.  All it may need is this one little tweak to be exactly what they need.  Personally, I think that is one helluva service, and the sort of thing that a lot of erstwhile "pedal empire builders" should consider as their starting point.

[Paul Marossy]

I suppose as a contractor, one waits for clients like that, simply because for once you have someone willing to spend the money to "do it right".  "Whatever it costs" is music top some people's ears in the right context.   As a non-contractor, though, I have no use for people like that.

Yeah, normally general contractors are trying to whittle everything down to the last penny so they make the most profit possible. They used to call that "value engineering".   One of my engineer friends used to say "yeah, they engineered all of the value out of it".

The other thing that sub-contractors used to do all the time was bid it very low to get the job and then hit the owner/gen contractor with bunches of change orders to make more money on the project. Plumbing and HVAC contractors had their games that used to drive me nuts. They would change stuff in the field and then come to us with their emergency and tell us that the whole project is held up because the can't get the inspector to approve the installation until the plans matched what was installed. My employer would always make me drop everything to bail these guys out of their own self-inflicted crisis. If it were up to me, I would have told them that I would change the plans when I got around to it. The way it is supposed to happen is they are supposed to come to us first and discuss changes first, before installing anything. But they never did.

Anyway, there are some parallels between pedal building in hope of selling them and building spec homes. Just a different market and a different price tag.

[Electron Tornado]

Is it really only about how much money you can make it the shortest amount of time?  What about making something that is useful that will probably outlast you, that requires actually using your brain and skills to do.  I've never sold a pedal so maybe no one should listen to me, but I'd personally rather make $1 selling a pedal than $10 working at macdonalds.  Plus I wouldn't have to drive there in traffic and kiss the bosses and customers butts.

Well, for the original poster, building and selling pedals is, in fact, an idea to make money for band equipment. So, yes, making money is the stated goal. That being the case, a part time job somewhere will get him closer to the goal in less time than building pedals.

Regardless of whether you're working at McDonald's or building pedals on your own, you will have to deal with customers. Pucker up. 

[Electron Tornado]

Multi-FX units often have innumerable ways to customize them.  But often, the working musician wants this one little thing that will make their job easier, and it doesn't require anything as complicated as a digitalmulti-FX.  All it may need is this one little tweak to be exactly what they need.  Personally, I think that is one helluva service, and the sort of thing that a lot of erstwhile "pedal empire builders" should consider as their starting point.

Agree. Repairs and mods are a much better way into effects pedals as a business.