rfas
Member
I made the "mistake" of posting pictures of my chaos pens on my Facebook page. Now everybody and his brother and all of his cousins are messaging me wanting to buy them. I'm was completely caught off guard by the response. I was just sharing my handiwork with friends and had no idea people would be all over these. They're definitely unique and I guess that uniqueness is drawing people to them. I never expected that people would actually want to buy them. Some people are even placing orders. "I'll take 6 of those whenever you get around to making them." I find that one pretty funny because they're literally made from cutoff scraps from making cutting boards. It's not like I have an infinite amount of that stuff laying around.
The thing is, there's not much hard cost in these - basically a $5 pen kit and scrap material that I'd otherwise just toss - but they're pretty labor intensive. Lots of cutting, gluing up, cutting again, gluing up again, etc. And I'm getting relatively low yield out of the blanks. A fair number of them ended up with voids or otherwise disintegrated on the lathe. I'm afraid a lot of people I know would be taken aback if I sold them for what I thought they were worth based on the time I put into them. I'd almost rather keep supply limited and keep these as "high value gifts" to give away once in a while.
On the other hand I may have found my pen turning niche, but I'd have to make an awful lot more cutting boards to keep up with demand.
The thing is, there's not much hard cost in these - basically a $5 pen kit and scrap material that I'd otherwise just toss - but they're pretty labor intensive. Lots of cutting, gluing up, cutting again, gluing up again, etc. And I'm getting relatively low yield out of the blanks. A fair number of them ended up with voids or otherwise disintegrated on the lathe. I'm afraid a lot of people I know would be taken aback if I sold them for what I thought they were worth based on the time I put into them. I'd almost rather keep supply limited and keep these as "high value gifts" to give away once in a while.
On the other hand I may have found my pen turning niche, but I'd have to make an awful lot more cutting boards to keep up with demand.