Boutique Pedal Manufacturers Are Feeling the Tariff Pinch

LukeFRC said:
Now anyone can use KiCad and a Chinese PCB Assembly service and professional looking (if not engineered) boards made with very little knowledge - but just cos you can also means others can and doesn't mean anyone owes you anything ....
Click to expand...
As an "anyone" who uses KiCad and Chinese PCB manufacture, I know that, when people buy stuff from me, the value is in the novel circuit design (or at least a novel take), a well thought out and easy to build layout, and clear documentation.

I always include technical stuff in build reports because that's what interests me and I think that's what a lot of people come to forums like this for. It doesn't hurt that it can act as a kind of soft pitch to buy a PCB.

All that said, I'm making stuff I want and selling extras to subsidize the hobby—I'm not taking out loans to build YATS in hopes that I can quit my day job.
 
While there's lots of magnanimity on the technical side—several EE friends told me even in school 20 years ago analog circuits was a "yes this exists and you need some fundamentals, but on to digital!," ergo it's a passion to keep this "antiquated" way of doing things alive, the other side of success is obfuscated.

Marketing, networks, and sadly lots of scummy behavior. Entrepreneurial escapades aren't for the faint of heart, and of course nobody wants to share the secret sauce …or show you the skeletons in the closet. Or even where to get parts. I'm glad the classifieds thread exists.

edit: the "networks" are basically "grease the palms of influencers," these days, and it's sadly a requirement, but not a guarantee of success.

But then again, it depends on your expectation of success.
 
I feel for the guy in the Reddit post, truly, but at the same time saying stuff like "I think most people, outside of the most conservative planners, were caught off guard by this" just seems kind of oblivious. The pandemic comes around and everybody and their mother starts getting into DIY pedals. Some of those people want to capitalize on their new hobby and start flooding and completely saturating a small niche market with samey sounding derivative circuits where the main selling point is "I made this by hand with lots of love" or "I used this overpriced NOS transistor" or "My enclosure design looks cool and unique", and now we're surprised that this didn't last for more than a couple of years?
 
Einzeln said:
entitled to call himself victim?
Click to expand...
In the eyes of joe-schmoe-pedal-builder? nobody is entitled. Unless you see everything from the inside out, there's no way of understanding it enough to make an informed value judgement. And maybe even if you do see it all, there will be somebody crying foul, saying 'boo hoo, move on," whenever there's a story, post, open letter, etc. from anyone of any scale.

Have we seen the effects it's having on the market in action? Undeniably.

I think the object is to learn, adapt, and understand the source of the problem and not get hung up on the who of who's crying about it to understand that the situation is quite bad, to put it mildly.
 
I think we're being a little over critical of the guy here. I think he was just feeling the grief of a failed venture and wanted to share his story. I do think it's valuable to tell because everyone will have their own circumstances. I do think it's a good reminder, and opportunity to burst the bubble early that becoming an actual pedal seller, is a very low success probability venture.

My feeling reading it was that it was a fairly humble list of faulty assumptions and mistakes rather then any sense of entitlement.
 
i read through some of that post and just kept thinking "i admire that you went for it, but you put the cart before the horse". 99% of my work is on vero. it's cheap, it's easy, and there's virtually no overhead. i design and print my own graphics, i drill my enclosures by hand, i draw my own vero layouts at least half the time. my entire business is "made to order" and i don't routinely lose my ass on a project. I'm smaller than boutique. I'm hand churned Amish butter compared to even the other local guys i know. it is nonsensical to sit down and make 50 of some pedal, put them on the market and wait for the money to roll in without a preexisting RAVENOUS fanbase, especially with the world as it is today. brave, sure. admirable, almost. but look around. my goal was to sell locally. it's just a cool fact that i've sold to every corner of the US and a couple to Canada. I'm happy. my hands are full, my brain is occupied, all the horrible monsters that live in my head are quiet so long as i'm soldering. and i make an okay profit.

don't dump your entire life savings into starting a business making artisanal vegan shrek dildos unless you are certain there are 10,000 people waiting for you to list them for sale.
 
rossbalch said:
I think we're being a little over critical of the guy here.
Click to expand...
100% - I went and looked at his stuff and it looked nice, but equally, apart from the blues breaker with the clever name it was "my take on X circuit".
maertz13 said:
i read through some of that post and just kept thinking "i admire that you went for it, but you put the cart before the horse". 99% of my work is on vero. it's cheap, it's easy, and there's virtually no overhead. i design and print my own graphics, i drill my enclosures by hand, i draw my own vero layouts at least half the time. my entire business is "made to order" and i don't routinely lose my ass on a project. I'm smaller than boutique. I'm hand churned Amish butter compared to even the other local guys i know. it is nonsensical to sit down and make 50 of some pedal, put them on the market and wait for the money to roll in without a preexisting RAVENOUS fanbase, especially with the world as it is today. brave, sure. admirable, almost. but look around. my goal was to sell locally. it's just a cool fact that i've sold to every corner of the US and a couple to Canada. I'm happy. my hands are full, my brain is occupied, all the horrible monsters that live in my head are quiet so long as i'm soldering. and i make an okay profit.

don't dump your entire life savings into starting a business making artisanal vegan shrek dildos unless you are certain there are 10,000 people waiting for you to list them for sale.
Click to expand...
I mean if you work it out and the volume savings and margins work with 50 pedals it's not the worst idea - but you've got to have an idea that you both believe in, and know people will want. If you get that right then tariffs aren't going be much of an issue...


Last year I was messing with PCB A and made a tiny run of 10 tiny pedals, an out-of-production circuit, that I knew bass players would like, did 5 at first the 4 more... I could easily have done a lot more - but it wasn't valuing my time by much to be worth doing another. In terms of playing with PCB A and making cool things I'ld like to do another thing - but I know I can't think of anything that I know I could do a reasonable amount of without sinking loads of time into R&D (or finding and cloning weird out-of-production bass stuff the DIY world doesn't care about)
 
By the same token that owning a Strat doesn't mean you can play like Eric Clapton, having access to advanced EDA tools won't make you a good designer. I have seen some beautiful boards on these forums and the occasional POS. Somewhere I saw a board where the "designer" placed all of the parts in a neat little bunch. A row of resistors, a row of capacitors, a row of transistors... and then turned on the aurorouter. No thought was given to stray coupling between traces. It gave me a headache just looking at the final product.

As one of my mentors used to say: "If it's doable, somebody will do it!" It was meant as a critique of someone executing a poorly thought-out idea.
 
HamishR said:
Don't get me started on how owning a smart phone has turned people into being photographers!
Click to expand...
i guess while we're on this tangent, we could say the same thing about folks copping DAWs and then suddenly they're a producer/musician..

but i'm not sure it's that cut and dry if we're going to judge people on the basis of tools they use to make 'art'.
(so long as it's not AI, but let's not go there..)
 
vigilante398 said:
Chinese aluminum has a 100% tariff, but it's still cheaper than getting parts machined in the US.

View attachment 109399
Click to expand...
...which means the stated goal of encouraging domestic production is not being achieved.

Hanlon's Razor says we shouldn't attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence, but can the current administration really be that incompetent?
 
Aleph Null said:
...which means the stated goal of encouraging domestic production is not being achieved.

Hanlon's Razor says we shouldn't attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence, but can the current administration really be that incompetent?
Click to expand...
I mean they could very well just be this incompetent, but I could equally see a case for it being malicious greed to line the pockets of few at the expense of many.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top