And, I'm sure that Dayacom has inventory issues as well. It seems that dayacom is not necessarily a monolithic producer of these products either. They sub out different components to smaller producers, a few thousand clips over here, a few thousand centerbands there, a few thousand endcaps to the other mom and pop producer who have to tool up, get supplies, do the initial quality control and finally produce a run of parts. The fewer parts in a run, the more of the initial costs have to be covered on each part. And lets face it, a statesman clip with the flat ring and undecorated front is MUCH cheaper to produce than the ones for the emperor/lotus/imperial with the thicker ring, the insert in the front. The cast, polished and plated inserts themselves are probably subcontracted yet again by the clip maker, and they have to be set up and produced.
Dayacom gathers all these parts together and assembles the kits, then deals with the nightmarish chinese government export department, and ships them to the distributers.
It's one thing to have a staff of a few skilled craftsmen who can hand produce prototypes of pen kits to take pictures of and put on a webpage, but you can bet dayacom don't have 500 of each of those kits sitting on a shelf eating up their capital. At most they have spec'd them out to their suppliers to get a rough price on a certain number of parts.
Let's face it folks, even at 35 or 40 or 50 dollars a kit, the kits we use are still very economical for the complexity and cost of production. Otherwise we would not really be able to do the fairly limited work of adding material to the barrels, assembling them and sell them for a profit at all.
As with any modern system of distributed production, the network is complex, slow, and very price sensitive to quantity of order, but incredibly efficient within it's optimum parameters. It has also taken decades to develop. It may be annoying to not be able to get exactly what we want when and how we would like it, but without the system, flaws and all, the few of us with the time, skill and equipment to produce totally kitless pens like Brian and Ken and a few others would be the only people with anything to talk about on here
