Just curious what people's opinions were ........ (2 Viewers)

You might try throwing a little inlay design contest to the members here. I saw the thread containing the results of contest that Apache ran for the Majestics and there were some awesome amateur (and non-amateur) designs developed for just the cost of a set of chips.

I was thinking about it. Josh has done a number over the years. I won one once.
Of course the cost of a set of these chips is probably 3 times what I'd have to pay a professional designer :)
 
If that's the case FDL would be the logical choice IMO

Except it's shiny inlay vs textured. They will look completely different. And the FDL does not take 1 inch inlays very well.
 
Maybe it's not even the cost of the chips that would be prohibitive to potential buyers, or the designs not being enticing enough.

To be brutally honest, the web site looks like a private home page from somewhere between '95 and '00, selfmade with some WYSIWYG web site builder software.
In today's time - and here I can only speak of myself - seeing something like this as a first time visitor makes me ponder: Is this site/business really trustworthy if their web presence looks... somewhat outdated and amateur-ish? Are they even still in business, or is this site just rotting around, long forgotten?

I mean, you wouldn't even need one of those fancy Javascript-laden and mobile-first hipster website designs for me (of the masses, I'm not so sure on this point though) but at least something halfway professional. This also goes for the site content, product photos in particular. A professionally photographed product (with proper background and lighting setup) generates a lot trust. At least for me, seeing a product professionally presented does immediately create a good gut feeling, even though I of course still investigate more closely.
 
I'm out the door here in 5 minutes - really quick.

As a consumer advocate I would say a wider selection is a good thing for consumers. As a business model it seems like you'd only be competing against your existing stock sets. $125 difference may be enough of a discount to attract more attention. The hot stamped Atlantic Club are only, what, $610?

The website might play a factor in (my guess) less than 10 percent of transactions. Most people looking 'off the beaten path' ***cough**Amazon** don't mind.

Excited to see where this ends.
 
The website might play a factor in (my guess) less than 10 percent of transactions. Most people looking 'off the beaten path' ***cough**Amazon** don't mind.

I think I need to drop an addendum to my previous post:

I believe people minding/not minding this is not the same across all demographies. I am really going out on a limb here, but I think it's very likely people who were already adults when said private homepages flooded the internet, who "saw the internet grow up", are maybe less mindful of this than younger people, who only know the current, highly polished and extremely commercialized internet.
 
I think I need to drop an addendum to my previous post:

I believe people minding/not minding this is not the same across all demographies. I am really going out on a limb here, but I think it's very likely people who were already adults when said private homepages flooded the internet, who "saw the internet grow up", are maybe less mindful of this than younger people, who only know the current, highly polished and extremely commercialized internet.

From 15 years of selling chips I can say that those 'younger people' are not the target market (or buyers) of our chips. They want the cheapest possible and would rather spend their money on a new iPhone.

I've also had years of experience of having websites built. Even the simplest things end up costing thousands or a tied into some maintenance deal where you don't have control of the code etc. That's the way that market works.
You may have missed the point that this is virtually a hobby for us. I made a huge investment to buy CPC and will never get my money back. There is a limit to how much it is worth investing.
 
I reckon the board gaming crowd is a big untapped market for poker chip companies, since I've started collecting and using nice chips for cash replacements a number of my friends have picked up chips.

All of them ended up with China clays, but a number are keen to upgrade to a nice set of hard edged chips, and a bunch of them love my new CPCs but are a bit put off by the price (the shipping to Australia doesn't help here unfortunately.)

I reckon the Atlantic City hotstamps are actually a nice option for board gamers as the price is a bit lower, but it's a non starter without a 1 chip unfortunately.

If you were to ever think about doing a board gaming set, seeking a 200 chip set with the following breakdown would be the go:

1 x 80
5 x 60
25 x 40
100 x 20
 
From 15 years of selling chips I can say that those 'younger people' are not the target market (or buyers) of our chips. They want the cheapest possible and would rather spend their money on a new iPhone.

I've also had years of experience of having websites built. Even the simplest things end up costing thousands or a tied into some maintenance deal where you don't have control of the code etc. That's the way that market works.
You may have missed the point that this is virtually a hobby for us. I made a huge investment to buy CPC and will never get my money back. There is a limit to how much it is worth investing.

They certainly aren't your current, or core target audience. But if I interpreted the purpose of this thread right - finding ways to get the business to thrive - then you definitely should put this (and other!) demographies into consideration as well. After all, getting the business to thrive means selling more chips, and I assume the easiest way to do this is expanding the target audience. Be it a modern website to reach the younger generations (not as young as you caricatured though), or some specialized chips/sets to accomodate board gamers. It's all going the same route.

I am aware that the website making business is a shitty one. My first contact with anything beyond "normal" computer usage, like as an user, was making personal websites when I was still in school. I really liked it in the beginning and pursued it for multiple years, all just for myself, and made a few really basic, tiny sites for friends alongside. But when I was growing older and the question what I'd do for a living later started coming up, I looked at the professional market. Temporarily worked for some web site agency. The problem nowadays is that the base expectations (by customers browsing the internet, and in turn also the businesses looking to have a website made) of a web site are so crazy high compared to back in the old days. Now since internet is so widespread today most people basically can no longer imagine a life without it, having a web site essentially has become a basic requirement for nearly any business, no matter how small, and they all somehow need to afford it. But real good web sites still take tons of work if you want really professional and polished looking ones. So web agencies are already taking shortcuts everywhere they can to meet the market demand. From what I've seen, professional work in this area nowadays mostly consists of picking some random content managing system, slapping an externally bought design (which is not exclusive but gets used by many others as well) on it and filling in the content the business customer supplied, merely to be able to halfway meet the price expectations of those small businesses. (Basically similar to home users building their personal homepage with a WYSIWYG editor and a default design that was supplied with the software - just with a result that looks a good deal better than the aforementioned). You want an unique design, that's already a lot more work, you pay extra. You want someone to keep your software updated and your server secured, you pay extra. Despite the high prices you see from outside though, the wages you can expect as a normal web designer are really crappy. (Which is also one of the reasons why I didn't stick with that, and instead switched over to software development).

But this is why I mentioned you will probably not need one of those "ultra-modern" hipster websites - because that kind costs a mind-boggling amount of money to have made. An off-the-shelf content management system where you yourself still update the content in most cases could probably already be enough. A custom design on top of it, of course, but kind of basic (and hence on the lower end of the price spectrum for custom designs) while still modern. Add some one-time expenses to have a professional photographer do nice product shots of everything you want to present on your front page and any page that's directly linked on/reachable from the front page. Modern CMS like WordPress for example all have gotten fairly usable administration interfaces and have a self-update function built in, so most of what you'd have to do for site security and maintenance you could likely do yourself - for the rest, it's the occasional consulting by a web agency. This all brings the costs down as far as possible in my eyes.

I am aware of the fact the business is mostly a hobby. Yet the way I interpreted this thread is you were looking for advice on how to drive sales a bit (if even it's just an effort to get some part of the investment back). So that was my suggestion, with the best of intentions. In the end it's of course you who has to decide about which of those ideas are worth pursuiting. It's your business, your money, and most certainly you know your own numbers better than anyone else could.
 
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They certainly aren't your current, or core target audience. But if I interpreted the purpose of this thread right - finding ways to get the business to thrive - then you definitely should put this (and other!) demographies into consideration as well. After all, getting the business to thrive means selling more chips, and I assume the easiest way to do this is expanding the target audience. Be it a modern website to reach the younger generations (not as young as you caricatured though), or some specialized chips/sets to accomodate board gamers. It's all going the same route.

I am aware that the website making business is a shitty one. My first contact with anything beyond "normal" computer usage, like as an user, was making personal websites when I was still in school. I really liked it in the beginning and pursued it for multiple years, all just for myself, and made a few really basic, tiny sites for friends alongside. But when I was growing older and the question what I'd do for a living later started coming up, I looked at the professional market. Temporarily worked for some web site agency. The problem nowadays is that the base expectations (by customers browsing the internet, and in turn also the businesses looking to have a website made) of a web site are so crazy high compared to back in the old days. Now since internet is so widespread today most people basically can no longer imagine a life without it, having a web site essentially has become a basic requirement for nearly any business, no matter how small, and they all somehow need to afford it. But real good web sites still take tons of work if you want really professional and polished looking ones. So web agencies are already taking shortcuts everywhere they can to meet the market demand. From what I've seen, professional work in this area nowadays mostly consists of picking some random content managing system, slapping an externally bought design (which is not exclusive but gets used by many others as well) on it and filling in the content the business customer supplied, merely to be able to halfway meet the price expectations of those small businesses. (Basically similar to home users building their personal homepage with a WYSIWYG editor and a default design that was supplied with the software - just with a result that looks a good deal better than the aforementioned). You want an unique design, that's already a lot more work, you pay extra. You want someone to keep your software updated and your server secured, you pay extra. Despite the high prices you see from outside though, the wages you can expect as a normal web designer are really crappy. (Which is also one of the reasons why I didn't stick with that, and instead switched over to software development).

But this is why I mentioned you will probably not need one of those "ultra-modern" hipster websites - because that kind costs a mind-boggling amount of money to have made. An off-the-shelf content management system where you yourself still update the content in most cases could probably already be enough. A custom design on top of it, of course, but kind of basic (and hence on the lower end of the price spectrum for custom designs) while still modern. Add some one-time expenses to have a professional photographer do nice product shots of everything you want to present on your front page and any page that's directly linked on/reachable from the front page. Modern CMS like WordPress for example all have gotten fairly usable administration interfaces and have a self-update function built in, so most of what you'd have to do for site security and maintenance you could likely do yourself - for the rest, it's the occasional consulting by a web agency. This all brings the costs down as far as possible in my eyes.

I am aware of the fact the business is mostly a hobby. Yet the way I interpreted this thread is you were looking for advice on how to drive sales a bit (if even it's just an effort to get some part of the investment back). So that was my suggestion, with the best of intentions. In the end it's of course you who has to decide about which of those ideas are worth pursuiting. It's your business, your money, and most certainly you know your own numbers better than anyone else could.

Well, the thread title and opening post were actually a specific question relating to current stock sets. Other people managed to change the thread topic for me :)
One of the issues with CMS like Wordpress is that they are not readily compatible with the paypal interface unless you have a database driven stock model, so you end up using some 'cartserver' with high fees which won't accept cards from many countries (or Amex) etc. In my past I've actually had a reasonable amount of experience developing websites and FWIW I wrote the current one myself in a couple of days as that is all the time I had, and I host it on my own server (along with many others).
If I found the right CMS I might be tempted.

What you say you've seen is quite correct. Companies taking an existing template as a shortcut, doing a couple of days work and charging $5k instead of $10k is commonplace.

I have to say that I always thought people not knowing what they are looking for (ie to some extent the target market) would want to see more of a 2D representation of the chips rather than a photo. The website pics are actually the graphics off the chiptool in most cases.
 
From 15 years of selling chips I can say that those 'younger people' are not the target market (or buyers) of our chips. They want the cheapest possible and would rather spend their money on a new iPhone.

I've also had years of experience of having websites built. Even the simplest things end up costing thousands or a tied into some maintenance deal where you don't have control of the code etc. That's the way that market works.
You may have missed the point that this is virtually a hobby for us. I made a huge investment to buy CPC and will never get my money back. There is a limit to how much it is worth investing.
@David Spragg I can't tell you how thankful we are that you made the investment to buy CPC. And if I ever run into serious money (like winning the lottery), I will fork over a big suitcase full of cash your way. You can hold me to that promise!
 
One of the issues with CMS like Wordpress is that they are not readily compatible with the paypal interface unless you have a database driven stock model, so you end up using some 'cartserver' with high fees which won't accept cards from many countries (or Amex) etc. In my past I've actually had a reasonable amount of experience developing websites and FWIW I wrote the current one myself in a couple of days as that is all the time I had, and I host it on my own server (along with many others).
If I found the right CMS I might be tempted.

Maybe I've overlooked something, but from what I've seen the only thing you use are PayPal "add to cart" and "view cart" buttons, which are basically just copy-pasting some HTML code supplied by PayPal to your site. Of course a "real" full blown shopping cart system built right into the page would look a good deal better/more professional, but nothing prevents you from just placing exactly the same PayPal button codes on a web site running the CMS of your choice. (Actually there's even free plugins that will make this a little bit easier, but you could as well just do it manually)

I have to say that I always thought people not knowing what they are looking for (ie to some extent the target market) would want to see more of a 2D representation of the chips rather than a photo. The website pics are actually the graphics off the chiptool in most cases.

A combination of both is best I think. The 2D representation (especially when artificially rendered and not a real photo/scan) has the downside of not really being able to showcase the material texture, the sharp edges/manufacturing tolerances, and how they'd look in an everyday usage setting (colors in real lighting conditions etc). The other variant however has the downside of (sometimes) making it hard to see in detail what's on the chip.

Since the targeted audience would be new to real clay chips, I'd assume presenting them some nice (3D) photos will get them to notice and appreciate the big selling points of clay chips more easily. Then once they are convinced clay is what they want and they are then looking into design options (and generally for everyone who already knows what makes clay chips stand out) present 2D pics of the designs that you can inspect better.

For things far down the decisionmaking process of a customer like edge spot choices and things like this, a render from the chip tool will likely be sufficient, but for anything that plays a role in making the initial decision "yes I want to buy a set of clay chips", real photos are key (you can still supplement those with renders but the photos should be there).
 
Maybe I've overlooked something, but from what I've seen the only thing you use are PayPal "add to cart" and "view cart" buttons, which are basically just copy-pasting some HTML code supplied by PayPal to your site. Of course a "real" full blown shopping cart system built right into the page would look a good deal better/more professional, but nothing prevents you from just placing exactly the same PayPal button codes on a web site running the CMS of your choice. (Actually there's even free plugins that will make this a little bit easier, but you could as well just do it manually)

Maybe Wordpress has moved on as it's probably 5 years since I looked at it. The issue then was the paypal code only works when the button is in a <form> (which also automatically inserts a blank new para beneath which you can't control). The <form> command interfered with the Wordpress frames.
Also, the user interface back then absolutely sucked. I don't know how it's improved.
 
I am not sure if this has been said somewhere else but I wonder if a large denomination watermark design like Sidepots Proteges would be the best way to go. No doubt many of these will be gifts for holidays and special occasions. This is a passionate and creative community but your average person really is only going to notice the superior feel of the chips and be excited to have denominations printed on them which are major improvements for the non-chipper.
 
A combination of both is best I think. The 2D representation (especially when artificially rendered and not a real photo/scan) has the downside of not really being able to showcase the material texture, the sharp edges/manufacturing tolerances, and how they'd look in an everyday usage setting (colors in real lighting conditions etc). The other variant however has the downside of (sometimes) making it hard to see in detail what's on the chip.

Since the targeted audience would be new to real clay chips, I'd assume presenting them some nice (3D) photos will get them to notice and appreciate the big selling points of clay chips more easily. Then once they are convinced clay is what they want and they are then looking into design options (and generally for everyone who already knows what makes clay chips stand out) present 2D pics of the designs that you can inspect better.

For things far down the decisionmaking process of a customer like edge spot choices and things like this, a render from the chip tool will likely be sufficient, but for anything that plays a role in making the initial decision "yes I want to buy a set of clay chips", real photos are key (you can still supplement those with renders but the photos should be there).
I remember sending pics to Michael Dambach for a gallery so the web site would have real chip pics. I don't know if any of those made it onto the site, but it seems like a gallery of finished products (besides the "featured chips" scroll) would be good. If there's already a gallery and I didn't find it, sorry. :oops:
 
I remember sending pics to Michael Dambach for a gallery so the web site would have real chip pics. I don't know if any of those made it onto the site, but it seems like a gallery of finished products (besides the "featured chips" scroll) would be good. If there's already a gallery and I didn't find it, sorry. :oops:

I will do something with some of the photo's people sent me.
Just trying to decide whether it should be all splash pots for example, or a mixture.
 
"Why copy the Paulson spots and colours?"
Because I get requests for them every week. More than anything else.

I think this is the key. We all have our opinions, but you're in the unique position of knowing what customers are seeking. I think take a few of the tweaks suggested here, but if you make these chips I bet you'll sell a ton, especially if you're able to price them below what a similar used Paulson set would sell for. I might even be tempted!
 
I think this is the key. We all have our opinions, but you're in the unique position of knowing what customers are seeking. I think take a few of the tweaks suggested here, but if you make these chips I bet you'll sell a ton, especially if you're able to price them below what a similar used Paulson set would sell for. I might even be tempted!

"below what a similar used Paulson set would sell for"
That is a pretty wide range of prices. If you are fast enough on eBay buy it nows they can be found for a dollar each. Nationals and TH&C are going for up to $3 each.

Actually I see several TH&C sales in quantity for $4-$5 a chip.
 
David, I think the design is baller!! I'm a bigger fan of the Emperor because I like progressive edges. I'm an infant in this community and with not having a ton of money can't afford them right now but I could see myself making the purchase in the future. These and the Chesterfields would be my favorite stock chips of yours if you made them.
I'm sure you have plenty of brains to pick but feel free to shoot me a PM if you want an honest opinion from a blue collar midwesterner. And happy Labor Day!!
 
Just to make sure they are not confused. In the movie prop collectors market the originals are still worth $100-$200 a set.
Same reason that even if the roman mold was still around we would never have made Rounders on them.

Would it be possible to negotiate a deal where the rights are temporary licensed to produce the original rounders chips with the original mold? Where would one look to find the original movie prop set?

I'm sure it would sale like hot cakes. It would make a lot of dreams come true.
 
I’m not sure the Roman Mold is available for use.
 
I’m not sure the Roman Mold is available for use.

It's been a while since I've been in a copyright class, but it might be possible if they agree to some deal and license the rights. If it's anything like music, it would take forever to fall into public domain and it be pointless by then.
 
Based on my recollection of Mr. Spragg’s answer to this question in other threads, it is my understanding that the mold is worn to the point where it cannot be used to make chips and that making a new mold would cost something like $25,000.
 
This is prolly the closest I'll ever get to owning an original Rounders chip... :D

full
 
Just to make sure they are not confused. In the movie prop collectors market the originals are still worth $100-$200 a set.
Same reason that even if the roman mold was still around we would never have made Rounders on them.

Is it possible to create a crowd funding project to remake the mold for the original rounder poker chips? I don't think it hurt to try. I don't know exactly how crowd funding works.
 

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