The road to production from green to a casting
1: Kev gets an idea, makes a basic armature (as he generally doesnt sketch his ideas) to fix the pose etc and then sits it on a shelf for a couple of months until he has decided what to do with it!! Once he has decided, he usually gets on with it and makes a green. As he has to fit this in around his freelance work this can take a few weeks.
2: That green is posted to Nottingham to be made into a master mould £5 postage with insurance and £47.50 plus VAT for a master mould. Also incurred is labour at £22 plus VAT per hour and white metal at £7.50 plus VAT per kilo. If the mini casts well immediately with little wastage then the labour costs are low, but if there are problems then labour costs are high.
DID YOU KNOW? that to get 10 copies of the Demonette on the altar of a good enough casting standard to be sold there were 100 made?? The reason for this was the chains that lay across the altar top. Due to the body of the altar being so thick, the metal wanted to stay there instead of filling the loops. Hence the altar top has been reworked and the limited ten editions were sold on Ebay at one per week. Of course we then had the extra expense of making another master and production mould of the altar base.
3: Once the caster has ten/twelve good copies of the green they are used to make a production mould. These cost between £27.50 and £38.50 each. Also added on is £22 per hour labour and the cost of the white metal. Not forgetting the compulsory 17.5% to the tax man which applies to each of the above items !!
4: If we need to have the moulds at home then the cost for posting each batch of moulds is £18.50.
5: Once we have told the caster how many of each copy we need, then they are produced (with the above labour and white metal costs) and posted to us. To send a 1kg package of miniatures by royal mail costs £6.55 with insurance. Usually though with the quantity we order the postage is £18.50 for each batch of figures we receive.
As you can see it isn't a cheap way to start off !!!
6: Once they arrive with me they then need to be checked for miscasts, bagged with bases and labelled.
We know that we are taking a while to build up our range but I assure you that Kev can't work any faster and it will be worth waiting for. In our first year we managed to array about 120 codes. Not bad for a part-time business (no wonder we are always tired!!)
