Re: Looper development and production costs?

[Kim Flint <kflint@loopers-delight.com>]

At 12:01 PM 10/13/2001, Mark Sottilaro wrote:
>One thing that I don't think has been mentioned here is promotion.  I've 
>NEVER seen and add featuring the EDP.  Ever.

for almost the entire history of the EDP, sales and demand have far 
exceeded the supply of them. There were long waiting lists up until only 
recently. Why would you bother spending money on advertising if you were 
selling everything you managed to build anyway?

Now, the guys at Trace-Elliot have done a great job of getting the 
production line in order and happening. They finally sold through all that 
big waiting list and overwhelming demand. So only now does your suggestion 
make sense, when they finally need to go out and find new customers. Prior 
to now, advertising only would have exacerbated the problem of more demand 
than they could supply.

>Now Electrix is not doing much better, in my opinion.  They really need 
>to 
>buy some ad space.  Send reps out to the stores to do demos.  The 
>usual.  I know that's money, but it takes it to make it.

What are you talking about? Electrix had repeater ads running for almost 
the entire last year in all the major magazines. Trouble was, they didn't 
have the product shipping, so it was likely money wasted...

>That should help get the word out.  Gibson needs to give a couple of EDPs 
>to Fripp or Belew.

They did that already a long time ago. They did a lot of endorsement 
deals, 
from Chet Atkins to Neal Schon and a whole lot of people in between. In 
fact, I delivered the edp to Robert Fripp personally and gave him a brief 
demo of how to use it. I think he used it for a while in performances and 
probably still has it. Belew has one also. They slacked off on that 
because 
of the aforementioned overwhelming demand problem. Since that is fixed, 
now 
might be a good time to renew those deals so those guys talk about it in 
interviews.


>Also (I'm going to get it for this)  The EDP is ugly.

>  If Gibson cares about selling EDPs, they'd get an industrial designer 
>to 
> redesign the face plate.
>Graphic designer to redo the logo.

hey man, I designed that logo and faceplate. :-)  I thought I was doing 
pretty well because I used a font different from the basic AutoCAD text 
font, like every other piece of gear around at the time used. And my logo 
fit around the knobs pretty well. Again, reality check: this is not a 
field 
where there are budgets available to pay for "real" graphic designers and 
industrial design and such. The sales volumes and profit margins are just 
not that big. If somebody on the staff happens to know something about 
using a page layout program and getting a silkscreen made (as was my case) 
you think you are doing pretty well and let that guy run with it...

kim


______________________________________________________________________
Kim Flint                     | Looper's Delight
kflint@loopers-delight.com    | http://www.loopers-delight.com