"He who marches out of step hears another drum." ~ Ken Kesey
Contract side is filling up the shelves though, luckily the majority of it is frequent re-orders.
I've decided to sell our plastisol ink and invest in an RFU (as close as possible) system. We have hundreds of gallons of various PMS colors and I want to sell it all but need to settle on a price for them. I'm thinking a certain $/gram so I'll weigh the buckets and price them that way unless someone has a better idea. I could just put a base price for popular colors based on how much we have, for example: half a gallon of brite red could be $25? I'm basing that price by a new gallon costing us $90, half of that is 45 and it's slightly used so about half of that. I don't know if I'm overpricing or if a flat $/gram would be the best way to sell it. Any idea of how much per gram I should charge for standard colors? I've already culled a ton of bad inks so what's left on the shelf is decent at worst and at least half of the ink is a great mix of opacity and wow ability that I've built over the years for various jobs. So many of these quarts are labeled with the name of the job so I'm not sure how I'll go about documenting what colors we used for jobs that will be repeated once the ink is sold, but I have some ideas. We do a large amount of repeat work, and over the years the sales staff has allowed everyone to have a custom PMS color so this could potentially be an issue when we do a repeat job with the ink no longer being on the shelf, but we need to do this. Short term I see the issues but long term I know it's the right thing to do. We have so many quart buckets that will never be touched that we mixed up for jobs that will not be printed again and for those inks there is no downside. Our ink inventory has gotten out of control and when you have 35 choices for red ink and 65 custom PMS blues I think it's a bit excessive. It can be handy to have a job with a custom color we already have on the shelf and that does happen on a regular basis so I do have reservations about getting rid of that type of stock.I guess I'm having second thoughts now that I've typed it out. Talk me into it, or out of it, what would you do if you had hundreds of different PMS colors on the shelf with about 60% of them collecting dust?