WANTED: A business suggestion for the Purple Penny

[Fulvio]

I saw fulvios sealed bank bags but they are rolls

Rolls work well for bulk coins. Would you really want to individually store say double-bars, rabbit-ears, or any of the other common errors and varieties? Let alone sacks full of UNC coins? The cost, in money and time, would be horrendous!

That said, a byproduct of each roll made that way is a short Ziplock bag that can then be sealed and turned into two single-coin bags. Which can go in an album in place of a 2x2.

There's a lot you can do with a heat-sealer, free materials, some imagination and a little time.

The trouble is that tooling and setup costs for a product for the very small Australian market are horrific.

OK, so lets think about this for a sec...

The key to safe storage is materials. Presentation is a marketing thing, it does nothing for the core functionality.

So step one is to source the right plastics at the right price. Oz is a horrible place to do that of course, and the falling dollar doesn't help, but a roll of film is going to produce a TON of finished products.

Then comes turning that film into products. Which becomes design, tooling and hardware. While anyone can make their own storage if they have the materials, that doesn't work commercially, does it?

Hardware is basically ultrasonic welding or impulse heat sealing, with costs anywhere from $20 to thousands. There are even instructions around on DIY solutions.

Tooling in the case of welding is a block of aluminium machined into an ultrasonic horn. And it needs to be precisely tuned, and therefore expensive.

Design is arguably the easy part, involving mostly time and math.

You've done all this of course. How much of it did you do yourselves and how much did you outsource? Was the tooling local, or did you look at cheaper places to get it done? And did you buy the hardware, or get someone to manufacture for you?

[markn]

We did all the design ourselves, the tooling is all made locally, and the raw materials are all imported.  There are, of course, other constraints, such as initial production run setup costs, roll width, availability of the raw material and so on and so forth.  For example, it's nearly three times as much to make our pages out of a particular material simply because the roll is too wide and we have to pay for all the waste.

I spent 5 years advising people who were commercialising locally manufactured products and spent the five years before that doing the design and commercialisation for various Australian manufacturers.  I understand the process and I understand that the Aussie market is so small that products that would be successful in the USA are a waste of time here.  Our weakest point is our marketing, and despite that even if we achieved full Australian market penetration with our accessories it would still be nothing more than a part time income for one person.

[Fulvio]

the Aussie market is so small that products that would be successful in the USA are a waste of time here.

Yep. And its not simply a numbers game either. There's a difference in attitudes which has a huge impact as well. I'm currently fighting this trying to raise the last of the funding we need for Bathurst, and with the yanks not interested at all cos they don't understand it, its a tough uphill slog to get any traction locally.

Still, I put some feelers out today. I was in the area, so I dropped in on a major packaging supplier and had a chat. We'll see if anything pans out.. y'never know.

[trout]

We did all the design ourselves, the tooling is all made locally, and the raw materials are all imported. There are, of course, other constraints, such as initial production run setup costs, roll width, availability of the raw material and so on and so forth. For example, it's nearly three times as much to make our pages out of a particular material simply because the roll is too wide and we have to pay for all the waste.

I totally appreciate your hard work in doing this PP and  Mark and I recon if you set a target of getting 1 good bottle of wine out of this a month you would be struggling simply because of the market size and the lack of coverage that this product gets compared to the other inferior  products available.
It saddens me that new collectors don't know about the PP product and still fork out/waste money an crappy PVC albums and that Dansco rubbish especially the push in type :dash1: