I found a merchant on Taobao to order some NixOS logo necklaces. These necklaces are made of stainless steel (316L according to the merchant). I ordered 30 pieces, the average price of each piece is 20 RMB(CNY) (2.8 USD or 2.6 EUR at the time of writing). As I want more people to own it and at the same time reduce the price of each piece, I chose to give away part and sell part (at the cost of each piece plus shipping fees).
However, 30 pieces does not completely reduce the unit price. For comparison, the merchant quoted a price of 15 RMB per piece for 100 pieces and 12 RMB for 200 pieces. The price for only 1 ordering should be 25 RMB.
Of course I’m not posting them here to sell them (you probably won’t get a reasonable shipping fee), but I wanted to provide a not-too-bad idea for the NixOS foundation and other events. Hope to get your suggestions!
The merchant is in Ningbo, Zhejiang, China, and I am in Chengdu, Sichuan, China. Yesterday I wanted to give one to a German friend, but I couldn’t find a plan for less than 500RMB. But I’m not familiar with the international express delivery business, so maybe I didn’t check carefully enough
Yeah I’d also love to use this as keychain. Is there a custom model that you sent to the supplier? I can visit some international shippers online to ask for a quote for ~100 pieces or so. Maybe it’ll not be so bad
I still have 24 here. I originally planned to wait until I got it before reminding others to order, to make sure the product meets my quality requirements, but unfortunately my Telegram account was suddenly revoked yesterday (possibly resulting from registering with a dirty virtual number).
I think the best way is to order a lot of them at once, and then send them with China Post to places where users are geographically concentrated (see Community | Nix & NixOS), such as Germany. In this way, the postage is not obvious in the cost. If you need me to contact the merchant on your behalf, I can also give it a try.
I just asked customer service, and they said that designers are generally unwilling to provide design source files (yeah so not reproducible
But this one comes from the SVG in nixos-artwork, with just a ring added to it. The length of the entire pattern from the left endpoint to the right endpoint is 3cm, and the thickness is 2mm. I’m not sure about the size of the middle seam, but as long as it doesn’t take away from the main focus, it shouldn’t be that important.
The chain is provided for free, and there are several styles, all of which are relatively common.
Alright I thought we had to send the design file to cut. Even better if they’re handling it.
I now found some merchants too on interwebz, which works similar (just send us an image / your idea) with free sample options. Will check those out. Thanks!
@Aleksanaa would you mind asking the vendor what the total cost would be with shipping? @tomberek and I have been collecting recommended vendors for distributing swag for future events in the marketing repo. Would be great to know what the total price would be for 100 units shipped to Los Angeles, CA, USA and Germany (separate quotes). If it’s okay with you, I’d like to add those details to the doc.
We had this kind of shipping problem a lot in the early days of the mechanical keyboard community. low quantities and expansive shipping. If you have more necklaces to spare, something like 10. You could do a group buy kind of thing. You see if you can find 10 people in Germany (for example) that want that a necklace. collect their addresses and the money (1/10 of shipping,shipping inside Germany, and cost for the necklace). You send those 10 necklaces to one trusted person, that person repackages them and send one to each of the other people in Germany.
This obviously only works if you have people you trust, like your friend, and are willing to do the work( repackaging and sending). The more participate the cheaper it gets, but this only makes sense to a certain size.
Example for 10 ppl:
500RMB /10 = 50RMB shipping to Germany
10RMB shipping inside Germany
20RMB cost for necklace
-----------------------------------------------
SUM 80RMB or 10,46€
Obviously there are some assumptions baked in, like cheapest letter shipping in germany, cheap envelops, no tracking and such.
If you find a group of interested and dedicated people, this could be a cool thing. You can do an IC (interest check ) to see if and how many would be interested in this. We mostly used a google survey thingy for that.
I asked the merchant and after waiting for two days, he said he really didn’t understand. Well, he certainly doesn’t look like he’s in international trade. I might need some time to figure it out.
In fact, I think that a local ordering and distribution strategy should be adopted for these swag, such as sharing design files, letting agents purchase and distribute them in various regions (we can require this process to be made public), and then providing various purchase channels on the web page. We should order in large quantities and transship cross-border shipments only when it can really reduce costs or provide new products.
(yeah so not reproducible