As our story continued to unfold, we found ourselves seriously considering starting a guitar pick business and so we started looking for ways to make the picks.
What would be the most practical, inexpensive and efficient way to make the picks...?
How do the existing picks in the world get made?
Injection molding, usually with the molds and even the picks being made in China, usually because of costs are lowest in China.
Ok, injection molding, in China..
Hmm, China? Nah, i dont think so, not for me. i like injection molding, but im not into China.. but when looking at the costs of molds here in the USA- Starting around $10k each - i thought i better find another way.
And so as i often do when needing to find something, i went to FB and posted looking for ways to make guitar picks and it wasnt long before i had the answer i was waiting to find: 3D-printing.
3D printing is the newest technology for mfg and it uses printing technology, coupled with computers and 3D spatial technology. Add some filament to build the product and there you have it. relatively low costs as well. Not the printers- they are expensive and complicated, at least for a small business like me. But the cost of printing the picks? Around $0.75/ea with $0 needed upfront for molds or anything like that, other than a template in a special program for the printer to decipher, if you can find someone in the business of 3D printing, that is. And then came Justin.
Justin had replied to my post on FB regarding his 3D printer and his interest in doing this project. I replied with our interest and we were off to the races. Samples were ordered and now all we had to do was wait about a week they would be in our hands for the first time, this was exciting!
On cue, about 7 days later, we received our first-ever prototypes from Justin and we were able to take our concept and now sit down with a guitar and see what we had designed. Would the PickPlus sound good? Would it stop you from dropping your pick as i say it would? Would it help prevent it from spinning in your fingers when playing? Would it be comfortable? Those and many more questions would come to the party as we now had the means of creating our products relatively inexpensively and relatively quickly and we could begin to see what the market had to say about our new guitar pick designs. All we had to do now was figure out a way to get them available online to sell to see if there was interest. And that was how we discovered Etsy and Go Daddy! Now all we had to do was learn how to build websites and we would be good to explore the vast world of the internet and make our picks available to the buying public. Now we would see what kind of interest there was in a new guitar pick design. Would we have something of interest? Would the market tell us to move forward or go home and try again? What would we learn from all of this? These questions and more would be asked and answered in a relatively short period of time and soon a new path would be discovered!
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