Posts made in November, 2011

Sales of hardware is currently on hold due to high demand, as odd as that may sound. Here’s why: The cost of manufacturing a batch of hardware is basically driven by four (five) parameters: (programming machines, one time cost), machine setup, material cost, time in the machines and amount of human intervention/manual labor. If you are a Floyd-Rose or Ibanez, production runs of many thousands of units make it worth automating processes completely and having dedicated tooling and machines set up and ready to go. Optimizing all the steps and spreading the one time costs out over a large number of units cuts the cost and you as a customer can purchase a high quality unit at a decent price despite several points in the distribution chain having taken their cut. The EGS hardware has the same costs of programming and the same setup cost for the machines for each batch but there are several differences, most notably that the costs are distributed across a much smaller number of units. The volume does not warrant complete automation, which means that there is manual labor going into the manufacturing process. By only selling direct with a low margin, costs are cut as much as possible. The batch sizes of manufacturing are...