A common question that we receive at conventions and sometimes even online is how do we decide what to make, or come up with the ideas for our products? Its easy just to pick a body part or imagine something that’s going to be creepy looking or make people feel uncomfortable, the thing that sets the idea’s that we actually make a reality apart is that in most cases they have a use. Our little business has been going for some time now and we really do try and do some research on our product idea’s before we even consider entering the build phase in order to ensure we can reach as big a potential market as possible.

When we are trying to come up with a use for our products sometimes it is painfully obvious and easy to think through the possible options…take the example of our skulls. Now, are there people who would love to own one of our skulls just because they look (in our opinion) awesome and it would be a great item for them to own? 100% yes…but that is not going to appeal to everyone right? So how can we make the item useful so that it appeals to a larger audience? Well…your skull is a part of your head…and what kind of things do we use our head for other than thinking? Wearing stuff is the obvious one…so straight away the skull is useful as a hat stand if nothing else. Lucky for us Kenny is in the Armed Forces where they are required to use head dress as part of their uniform and our skulls make the perfect way to store those whilst making sure they keep their shape. Plus they look awesome! So we now have a use and a target audience. Is there any other way we could use the skulls that has a target audience?

Again we turned to Kenny for inspiration for this one. He is an avid gamer and will be online with friends chatting whilst he plays so he has a headset on in order to do that. But what does he do with the headset when he doesn’t play? Well most of the time it was just sitting off to one side and did not have a place to live. Why not place it on top of one of our skulls? Boom! We now have a use as a gaming headset stand and a huge target audience in the gaming community! Not only that but it also allowed us to expand out into making the hand controller mounts as a natural extension of that idea. Now we have multiple products for the same target audience and the ability to make our gaming bundles as well!

You can already see how having a use for our skulls has massively increased its potential and target audience plus spawned a whole new product line aswell.

The next thing on our mind when we are looking at making something new…is it going to be commercially viable? In other words will it be so expensive to make that we would have to charge more than people would be willing to pay to buy it? How do you even figure that out? Well the first thing we do is look into our expected cost of materials. Lucky for us we now have a large supply of re-usable clay which has been removed from our cost of making new things…but you still have a lot of stuff to buy just to make the mold, to name a few you will need silicone, plaster wrap and whole list of smaller items such as cups, gloves and stirring sticks to name a few. Then you have to consider what you’re going to make the product out of. The shipping costs for all of the above and how much of each thing you will need per unit of whatever you’re making. Now imagine you have all of that and something goes wrong with the molding process…you’re going to have to do it all over again and then factor that into the cost over time aswell. There is risk in making something new which is why we take our time with creating and releasing new products.

We have now decided that we want to go ahead and create something new…how should we price it? What is it worth? We want to keep our prices as low as possible for our customers because at the end of the day we want you to be able to have and enjoy the things we make. We have had discussions with people at conventions about how they think we are undervaluing our products and that we should be charging way more for certain things. Fine, if you would be willing to pay that amount for one of our items then we take that as a compliment…but it doesn’t cost us enough to make one of them to justify those prices. We want to make sure that we can keep prices as low as reasonably possible whilst still giving us the chance to invest in new items and to attend new conventions, because we genuinely enjoy what we do and the things we create and we want to be able to continue to do that. When deciding on a price we will have a number in mind and then we will go out and ask some trusted friends and other small business owners that we trust what they think before we make a final decision. If it’s too high we will adjust it lower but so far we haven’t adjusted any of our prices for our products up. It has always been a price reduction.

So…through all of the things we have talked about so far we haven’t even touched a piece of clay yet and not all of our product idea’s are as easy to work out as the skull. The USB thumb drives took us a bit of time, ear key rings as well. We have a list as long as our arm of things that we want to make in the future and each one of them has to go through the grinder to figure out if the juice will be worth the squeeze so to speak. Not only that but like with the skulls and hands sometimes one idea will spiral into 3-4 idea’s that will then take priority over other things that we want to make. For example we just finished our zombie hands…we now have another completely new hand related mold to make another idea that came from making these zombie hands that has just jumped to the top end of our to do list and pushed other new products down the pecking order. Put that beside our custom orders and mainting stock levels/shipping things then we get very busy in the studio at times.

Hopefully this blog entry has given you an insight into what it takes to make a successful product for our customers. If you own or are starting your own business then remember that not all products will be successful no matter how much thought you put into it so never invest what you can afford to loose. Grow slowly, take your time and do your research…and when you see our next brand new product you will have an idea of the thought process and attention to detail that made it a reality.

Pigeon Creek Team

Making the cut!