Many home business operators create unique gift products with logos and names using simple product printing equipment. Using simple product printing equipment such as a manual pad printer or dye-sublimation equipment, they create gift products quickly, cheaply and on a “spec” basis, meaning small quantities. With such equipment, the artwork, which is the valuable component of this idea, can be quickly applied to a blank product for a few dollars in setup costs and pennies per item. The value of white space is multiplied many times over by the application of a few cents worth of ink, if that ink conveys a fun image, a memento name drop, or a commemorative logo.
These are just two case studies. Ron Ellis was famous for printing, of all things, coconuts with zippers! Ron, a retired Marine, Shriner, and professional clown, worked out of his home in Albuquerque. He devoted himself to children’s charities. The coconut supplier produced them in India. After expressing the milk, they were cut in half and a zipper was glued on to make a fun keepsake case. This company had no way of printing on the uneven and varied shapes of the coconut. Ron solved the problem with his manual pad printing machine and, by adding a penny worth of ink, he made the zippered coconuts sell in large numbers. Who in the world buys printed coconuts? Chevron used them at a trade show. Disney Studios used them in a movie press release with a t-shirt zipped inside. Several Nevada casinos locked gold chocolate coins and poker chips inside and placed them on pillows in luxury rooms. Ron’s biggest customer was a naval museum that sold them as memorabilia from John F. Kennedy’s World War II PT boat service. Kennedy carved a famous ransom message on a coconut, which is what Ron printed on them. Ron eventually printed over 300,000 coconuts at a printing charge of 75 cents each. He made a fortune just from this product and customer.
A professional cowgirl in Wyoming with a homemade pad printing machine showed us all how cool this idea is. She had a flair for western humor and printed her own drawings of hers on souvenir coffee mugs, sending them to a gas station gift shop in Laramie. They were displayed on a 2 foot by 6 foot shelf. Once I asked the owner of the station if they were selling well. She told me that he makes $80,000 a year off that rack from road travelers who want a memento of surviving that long stretch of desert. Later, she created a gift for babies, printing little white tin cups with her own blue cowboy and pink cowgirl angel designs, along with cute baby poems. The blank glass cost the supplier $1.10. She shipped them to a western gift shop in Denver, where they retailed for $10. The store gave each of them $5 back with new orders from her. The store owner featured them in an American Cowboy magazine article that made the product go viral. That taught her, and later the rest of us, that reaching a national market can be as simple as consigning to a single local gift shop. Using that manual pad printer, she was shipping up to 20,000 pieces per month. With about $4 profit each, that project brought in a very nice income. The supplier of the tin cup told her that she was his main wholesale customer for that tin cup next to Target Stores.
Combining a dash of creativity with consignment offerings, these home product printers proved that shop owners are hungry for souvenirs with unique logos. The consignment removes the trader’s risk of trying a new product and removes the budgetary objection. That allows these home-based business people unlimited opportunities to come up with new product ideas.
