Would a price of ~$500 each be acceptable though? The problem is, high inventory costs like this just make every aspect of small scale manufacturing very very difficult. For one, most manufacturers only want to deal with such low volumes once, because even very large amounts of money to do a small batch run is often times not interesting enough for them. The setup, the labor, the time, and effort… it’s often not quantified correctly and even at a super high price, a small batch production is simply not worth it for most manufacturers. The obvious goal and hope is that you test your small batch and end up ordering 1000s with an EAU of at least 100k or something.
The other aspect of high cost small batch is inventory cost… if we sunk enough capital all at once into producing a MOQ of these seriously expensive magnets, and then it didn’t sell like the hotcakes we wanted, we’d be in real trouble with not enough operating capital to remain afloat. It would reduce sales to batch jobs that may never be big enough to support a run, and then after a while people would want their money back, etc. it just gets messy as all hell.
Right now, our flex polymer is the best option, so we will continue to experiment and see if we can sort out the process issues… then quantify the costs… then see where we stand.