I’m down to the biggest question for my steampunkish playing card Kickstarter: Price or Prestige?
The prerelease version of the deck is live, and ready to go. I’m really happy with how it turned out, and it’s really fun to see it come together and “go live” out there in the real world.
So… on to the last bits of planning for the Kickstarter. I’ve done an updated design that’s a bit more polished, with things like a perfectly rotationally symmetrical back and a simplified and more unified color scheme.
I tweaked the border a bit, too, adding some corner and side braces, since it was looking just a little boring in a spread. (If you guys want to opine on that, please do so; I’m not quite sold on the braces. More of them here.)
But that’s just tinkering with art. I can do that all day long. I’m an artist. The bigger question now is what price point to put on the deck when I offer it via Kickstarter. This is where I want to air my thinking and ask for your opinion. I’d love to hear from you all on this.
Simply, it’s a choice between printing with Bicycle, the “800 pound gorilla” of the industry, or printing with an unknown Chinese printer.
Printing with the former winds up with a price point of $10/deck (which includes U.S. shipping) for a top notch deck of cards. (I could also print with USPCC without the Bicycle label, but that doesn’t change the calculus much. It could save 30-60 cents per deck, which isn’t insignificant, but I’m not convinced that such a saving is enough to compensate for the lack of the brand name.) It’s simple, straightforward and carries the heft of prestige and known quality. It’s not a guarantee of Kickstarter success, but it’s a bit of a force multiplier, leveraging the brand.
Printing with the latter means a price point of $5/deck (also including U.S. shipping) for a deck of cards with unknown quality. That’s a sweet price point. It also means I can do a print run of plastic cards for the same $5/deck (which would be a stretch goal), and even a third run that allows 14 backers to guest star on the face cards. I could also look ahead and do custom dice in China and save on shipping, getting all of them together. (Those would wind up being an addon, $1 for 6 brown and silver custom pip dice.)
Beside those considerations, though, printing with Bicycle means a higher Kickstarter goal. That’s not an insignificant mental barrier. I’d have to start with a $9000 goal and hope for the Bicycle to carry the day. Printing with a Chinese company means I can start with a $3000 goal and scale up as needed and add in stretch goals of similar size if things go well. For the same $9000, we could be looking at three different decks (paper, plastic and “People of the 19th Century”) or some other mix of oddments like the dice or gear-themed poker chips.
I wish I could find hardcore reviews of those printing companies, but such have eluded me so far. I do lean to the Chinese printer because I think it’s more flexible and I’m far more price sensitive than I am prestige sensitive. I’m not sure how many potential customers are the opposite.
I also have this little rebellious marketer in me that wants to prove that Bicycle isn’t the One True Way. I aced the marketing class I took at BYU, making over $200 million in our simulated computer company. (I was one of the top 3 in the class of 100+ students; most made $20 million or less.) I found success by offering a wider range of products at the lowest prices, my lower profit margins more than offset by higher sales counts. It was a simple simulation, though, and I’m a gamer who loves math. It didn’t stand a chance.
Still, it’s all just guesswork at this point. I’ve done what research I can, and I do lean to the Chinese printers, considering the pros, cons and costs, but it’s not set in stone yet.
What do you think?
