If you can do a better job than headphile and it only takes you twenty minutes, you
Definitely should. The people i know who have made them spend closer to 4 hrs per ear by the time it's all done. Then there is the cost of exotic hardwoods, tools, finishes, etc.

the cost of truly exotic woods would be the only kicker in the formula. It might take maybe an hour or two to get the very first fitting of X headphone can just right

i honestly do not see it costing more than 50$ a set with my own profit included, maybe 75-100 with the most expensive exotic woods i can find. 250-350 is just crazy for a block of cut wood

ive got a nifty hand held belt sander that does the exact job for the finish and overall nice edging, and i could easily fashion a custom drill bit for boring the holes needed just right with that dropped over edge like the grado woods have and then be able to crank them out without 10 minutes.

honestly the only thing i foresee being an issue is someone requesting a pair for a set hard to come by or crazy expensive like the hd 800s or gs grado series which i do not own lol...but i think the basic grado series and sennheisers can be done with ease and i am really thinking of starting this up.

i may create a test batch and post here for results, maybe even issue a few out to some friends or grado users here on head fi for review, if its positive i might just make a business out of it.

Be sure to figure in time to get the sanding done right, because the hole drilling part isn't really the time consuming part.

There's a lot more industries where the high end reaps a larger margin - DSLRs > compacts, SSDs > RAM, laptop (as a whole) > netbook and so on...

There's no use panning for a cost plus model of pricing. Think about it this way - if people will pay it, then you make them it. Say you have a product, it costs $10 to make*. If 8 people buy it at $12, then you've made it $16. But if 6 people buy it at $14, you've made $24. If you had insisted on cost + 20% (i.e. $12), then you would have been out $8. Basic Economics I.

Plus, cost plus pricing can be just as arbitrary. Who decides what profit margin is enough? What's just, fair and reasonable? Right.

Prices remain high for custom wood headphones because, under my speculation, it's a small market with wealthy buyers. No one has shown an interest in competing yet... if you want to try, that's okay too.

* yes yes, cost of goods, selling and general administrative expenses, overhead and all the accounting considerations included...

Also, don't forget the one thing that keep 99% of people from starting a business, Marketing. Starting a business is great, but you need to find people to come to you. Making them for friends and people here is only going to get you chump change.

Then when you start, there's the returns when something goes wrong. The constant emails, canceled orders, Is it something you want to spend all day making over and over? Oh, you'll need insurance in case someone's kid eats your earcup and your wood stain was not approved in section 13342.223a-1 in the Baby Wood Stain goverment regulation's manual that you overlooked unless of course you pay a lawyer $$$ to comb over all your business ideas.

I don't mean to discourage. I wish you the best if you want to go for it. I just want you to be prepared. There's a reason that most people work for someone else. I've never talked with a business owner that said, "it was easier than I thought". It's always the opposite.

I personally cannot stand it when companies arbitrarily limit a product just to sell it to somebody. It makes no sense to me, if you think about it:

Grado's plastic cans being cheaper than alluminum or wood doesn't necessarily surprise me, and the SR325i has tighter tolerances than teh SR60i. I do not know if plastic is much cheaper than alluminum when buying parts in bulk, I know that machining those parts would be cheaper with plastic. The same tooling you'd use for 1000 of those alluminum cups would go bad at about that 1000 parts, but due to the pliability of plastic, you'd see almost unlimited parts and you wouldn't have to run oil. Less tooling, less wear and tear, and less consumable usage.

Wood is similar, but I think that wood requires more intimate attention, though I have no experiencing machining that. That being said, doesn't Grado press their own shells for the plastic cans? I don't think they do the alluminum or wood parts. I believe based on the pictures that they are brought in from outside, so outsourcing increases cost a bit.

So there's some argument there, you could say it costs more for the higher end cans, plus they cherry pick drivers or at least claim to, for the higher end models. But when a company does what microsoft does with their server operating systems, or even stuff like windows home basic or whatever the hell it is that limits apps running and all that... that's going too far. They had to write additional code to make that do that. Why even sell a product that you're selling for less that you programmed more to even make? That's just ridiculous!

Also, for cheap woodies I'd gladly buy some. My girlfriend has some SR80i with the jmoney headband, and some woodied grado cups would be awesome. one thing I wish more people made was the inside part of the driver housing, the part that holds the driver and the cushion. If you made that in wood, you'd have a corner on the market since nobody makes those. I think a large part of that issue is that it would be prohibitively difficult to install. Thinking about it now that's probably exactly why nobody sells them.

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This is another situation entirely. The matter at the heart of the woodies is not product segmentation to tailor to each person's willing to pay (since woodies are not superior or inferior to aluminum or plastic; it's more a matter of taste) but simple pricing arising from supply and demand.

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Of course it's ridiculous... if it doesn't lead to an increase in sales. However, by selling someone a $20, stripped down copy of Windows, you might have convinced someone not to use a pirated copy instead. So in addition to everything you make from normal priced sales, you earn a little more profit where before you would have earned nothing, even if it's less than your average selling price. This is especially true in developing countries. Whether it works is a more complicated story, some people will pirate regardless, so it comes down to number crunching at this point.

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Sure worked for me with the $30 W7 student bargain

Hey, cool, we just learned about price discrimination in my Econ 101 class! More college students pirate than any other demographic, thus their demand is much more elastic. And it's easy to prove who is or isn't a college student. So charge them a low amount that maximizes the total profit (which is mostly just a balance of quantity and price in the Windows example because the marginal cost of distributing another copy of anything digital is almost non-existent). Then charge the people who don't know about pirating and thus will have to buy a high price. For most people the demand for Windows is crazy inelastic.

This can be applied (after some tweaks) to the Grado line too. Grado knows, as do all other headphone companies, that audiophiles pay top dollar for small improvements in audio quality. Additionally, and more so than regular people, they also want the price they pay to reflect component quality. Metal and wood in particular. In effect they could probably sell an otherwise identical product made with good components at a high mark-up because audiophiles aren't picky about what they pay. Regular people, though, are. They're fine with plastic as long as it sounds okay. It's discrimination based on build quality, in a way. Sound differences are relatively small.

It's not actual discrimination and I'm making it all up. But it's convincing, yeah?

Basically right. But don't read too much into pricing theories here, the general ideas work well but the market simply isn't that efficient - it's tiny, information is very much asymmetric (less so for the DIYers) and with audio people often make very irrational decisions - marketing and placebo mess things up pretty bad at times. Plus it's difficult to quantify taste etc...

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I have, you're wrong.

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No, you can't, you're wrong again. Let me know how it goes without a lathe.

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Please do, and be sure to stop at the 20min. mark, I'd like to see what you get done. I'm betting you can't get anything remotely round looking done.

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Wrong again, you're on a roll.

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Here's a hint, it'll cost you that much just for the raw block of wood, not to mention tools, time, etc.

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Good luck with that.

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I my experience it's about 50/50, 3 to 4 hrs for turning, 3 to 4 hrs for sanding and finishing. Wait, this was only supposed to take 20 minutes.

hmm, I think you should give it a go. Quit your day job and get stuck in.

Average $50 per set...

24 sets per day @ 20 minutes each set less expenses (wood, tools, consumables, tax etc.) you should be able to make over 1/4 million in profits a year.


Not too bad for a days work. all you'd need to do is find the 8,500 customers to buy them

Sounds like a plan

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I don't have time to explain in depth but your timeframe is highly unrealistic for somebody who's doing this for profit. If you have a turret lathe, and some round stock wood you could do this process for not just one but many in that time frame. Given some sufficient planning and tooling I could knock the initial frabrication out for 50 of them in the time you suggested. The finishing and sanding would also be quicker due to the available of a turret lathe, but I'd agree that would take quite some time. The finishing would be a longer process no doubt as you'd want to do that by hand so you don't make a mess... but fabrication prior to finishing would not be 3-4 hours for 1, let alone a pair.

I myself would not settle to do one off jobs. I'd make them in bulk and then sell them off as customers demand. This would allow me to sell them for cheaper due to easier manufacture (I could make each step without re-tooling on every set), and plus, I could make them when I felt like it.

I'm simply commenting on fabrication. if you gave me the designs for this, I could prove you wrong on manufacture time, but cost of materials, research and development, etc I lay no claim of knowledge on. I only know how to work a turret lathe and how to tool one and I sure as hell can't see it taking that long.

Hardinge lathe right here: if the headphile guy doesn't have one of these I have no idea why...

http://cgi.ebay.com/HARDINGE-2ND-OP-...item5ad7833b01

The guy must be an economics major. He sure got his math right and there you go, Smeggy's given you an idea of the kind of profits too. Get on it!!

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Even on a CNC machine I doubt you could do it that quickly. And I have much better than average tooling available to me but you're correctly thinking that Grado doesn't make them the same way I do. But you're neglecting the fact that every piece has to be touched twice because it requires turning on both faces. And the sanding and finishing is a very slow process regardless of how clean the product is that comes off the lathe, trust me on that. I don't turn the few sets a year I do for friends by hand. I also know a bit about feed rates and speeds and even if you fully automate this you are not going to have a finished product in 20 minutes, it requires too much material to be removed.

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Larry does them different from Grado IIRC. He never does end grain cups, probably because they are much harder to do well. He shows side grain, which is fine and his choice and is much better suited to mass production using cheaper raw materials (planks). I choose to do it the way grado does because my time is free to me and my friends. Commercial entities don't have that luxury.