tiki bar mats

Has anyone looked into having bar mats made with tiki designs?

I'd love to get a few tikified bar mats. I found this site: http://www.bar-mat.com/ that you can have custom mats made but the minimum order is 250.

I'm only throwing this out there, but it would be cool if one of our awesome artists could put together a design or two and we could get a batch made.

Maybe the background tapa pattern from tikicentral made into a bar mat would be cool.

I'd be in for a couple.

I like this idea. I would be interested in purchasing a few tiki ones too!

Short of finding a generic tiki design I have a couple of these mats on my bar.

http://tradervics.com/product/trader-vics-bar-mat/

I have that TV one and I have large rectangular black one. I'd buy one of the custom ones. Too bad the minimum is 250. Don't know if you can get that many takers. But if you do, put me in for one.

I'm guessing at 250 the cost per unit is probably pretty high.

On 2014-06-26 19:44, TikiTacky wrote:
I'm guessing at 250 the cost per unit is probably pretty high.

Actually you're wrong. You should not guess. The cost per unit is reasonable it's the quantity you would have to sell, 250, that is the issue.

Oh? So how much are they then?

The cost is around $8 per mat.

That's certainly cheap enough. Is that for two colors?

I need to check on the number of colors. The cost isn't bad...but I wouldn't necessarily want to front the $2000 (min order) and pedal them at cost. (I also have no interest in being in the bar mat business.)

One thought I had (unless someone more entrepreneurial wants to take on the project), was to go through one of the crowd sourcing type sites to raise the funds...then when we have enough place the order and ship. With that said, I haven't really looked into the finer details of what is involved with that either.

Also, we'd want to be sure of selling 250 of them in a fairly short timeframe so we didn't have to wait too long.

Also, there is the issue about designing the mat(s).

You also missed the note about the "one time molding fee". That may add a dollar or two to your cost/item. People's enthusiasm online does not translate into tangible dollar$. You may sell 50 and get stuck with 200.

On 2014-06-27 11:46, AlohaStation wrote:
You also missed the note about the "one time molding fee". That may add a dollar or two to your cost/item. People's enthusiasm online does not translate into tangible dollar$. You may sell 50 and get stuck with 200.

The cost per mat above has the mold cost factored in. The quote I got was a very rough quote so I don't know about the colors. I did not want to waste the persons time if this was a no go right off the bat.

If there is serious interest I might be interested in moving this forward. If not I do not want to bother the company salesman with a bunch of questions. As Jim mentioned above there is also the issue of the amount of work to get these things out once completed.

So........is there anymore interest than what is expressed above to have these things made?

A Kickstarter is an excellent idea. Lots of people say they'd be willing to buy something until it actually comes out, then they lost interest. A Kickstarter would lock them in ahead of time. You also have to get a design figured out. There are so many great artists on here, it might be fun to open up a call for entries, so to speak.

We'll have to figure it out with number of colors and any other artwork restrictions with molding mats. Then maybe we can see who all is interested in submitting a design.

Right now (and they do this once in a while as I have been on their mailing list for a couple years after researching the idea before), they are running a special and waving the one time molding fee. Obviously we aren't in a position to take advantage...but it may not be that large of a setup fee anyways since they are waving it. Like Jeff mention, I have never taken it past an initial inquiry because I didn't want to waste their time with a quote since I wasn't interested in 200 bar mats. But I think it could be a fun TC project and maybe with a site like Kickstarter we could get enough pre-sold to place the order.