OWJones

Give a man a fish, you feed him for a day - teach a man to fish and you feed him for rest of his life. Build a man a fire and you warm him for one night - set a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.

Welcome to the world of cheap but fast shipping. When I ordered my Graphtec with starter package, they shipped 3 large, heavy boxes for $9 and it showed up less than 48 hours after I ordered it. I've placed two orders with them in the few weeks since, and each time it showed up within 2 days of me placing the order. It's almost too good to be true!

And always be sure to ask for the original decal back so they don't end up with two for the price of one. Maybe he has a bigger window somewhere else he plans to use it on? If they don't want to pay to ship the whole thing back, send them a self-addressed, stamped envelope with the second decal and ask them to use scissors and cut out a #10 envelope size chunk of the first decal and mail that back to you to prevent the use of the original, or bill them for the second decal. That is standard practice in most businesses (i.e., if you order a computer component and it is DOA, many vendors will ship a second one before you return the original, but if you *don't* return the original, you get charged for both). If all you get back is a rectangle of application tape and release liner with no vinyl in between, you'll know not to do business with them again. If you let someone get away with this one time, you risk setting a precedent with them, or worse yet, having them tell all their friends that they can get two-for-one deals from you just by lying. It's fantastic to be customer service oriented and to agree to do a second decal at your cost, but you have to set limits or you'll either go broke, or have to raise your pricing to account for IRL - Idiot Related Losses.

Check Craigslist for your area for a used name brand heat press. I did a lot of forum reading and research and didn't find anything good about the generic heat presses. I ended up finding a gently used Sunie about 20 miles from me for a lot less than I could find one on ebay. It took me about 2 weeks to find one, but I'm in small town Iowa - if you live near a big city, you should have better luck.

I agree that the big bucks are in the big jobs. I live in a small town that already had existing sign businesses when I started up and I chose to focus on the smaller, mainly one-off jobs that are "too small" for the established players to want to mess with. There isn't as much money to be made, but this is all supplemental income to my "real" job, and like I said earlier, if I screw it up and have to eat the cost of materials, I don't lose any sleep over it. Also, I can knock out several small jobs in an evening, so although I make less per job than those doing the big work, I make some of it up in volume and generate a lot of good will.

You can send the small stuff my way, that's my preferred bread and butter - that way if I screw it up, I'm only out a couple dollars worth of materials.

I got my first set of Clean Cut Blades, ordered both 45° and 60° and thought it would be great to have two blade holders to make it easy to swap them out. Went to US Cutter site and holy cow, $105 for that little blade holder? I thought it must be a typo until I checked a few other suppliers - same price. US Cutter lists two blade holders for Graphtec cutters for the 0.9mm blades - one is silver with a black top ($50) and the other is black with a blue top ($105). They both say they are for the 0.9mm blades, but neither one says specifically "this blade holder works in Graphtec models X, Y and Z". I also see ones that look the same as the silver and black model on ebay for even cheaper prices. How do I know which ones work with my Graphtec CE5000-60, short of ordering the most expensive one that looks just like mine?

I know that attempting to make designs based around college/university names and/or athletic team logos is wrong, wrong and more wrong. However, what about local public schools funded by tax payer dollars? Has anyone investigated the legalities around producing "My child is an honor student at <local public school>" or "<local public school> Football is #1!" and similar items? I know I can't be the first one to be curious and I'm guessing one of you has already learned the answer - and hopefully you'll share you're knowledge! Thanks, Michael

I sent off an email to the president of the local school board asking about copyright issues. She forwarded it on to their public relations/communications manager and two weeks later she got back to me to say "public school names are not covered by copyright". I'm going to err on the side of profit and assume that means I'm safe. Right after I print a copy of her e-mail and file it away for safe keeping...

That's the one I got for $150.

Which one, though? The $105 one that appears to be almost all plastic, or the $50 one that looks to be made of metal? Because the $50 one looks *exactly* like the cheaper ones on ebay. I don't mind giving money to US Cutter, I bought my Graphtec from them and have bought all my vinyl from them since then, but I can't justify paying $105 for a plastic blade holder when there are other ones out there that are much cheaper *if* they're just as good.

That's exactly what I was thinking...

I also liked them all -- http://www.facebook.com/ottumwadecal

<cought, cough> That photo is one that Graphtec themselves use on their webpage, and I know I've seen it on other websites selling Graphtec products...including the company this forum is named for... Although it might mislead people into thinking that your decals come out of the machine already cut and weeded (and how SWEET would that be?) I don't find it terribly misleading - a "realistic" photo would just show a plotter with a big red square of vinyl hanging out of the front and that doesn't really show off what you're actually doing. Now, if they showed a 4-color decal cut, weeded, picked and layered coming out of the machine - that I would consider misleading...

So far all of my advertising money has gone into a) putting my company name and URL on the tailgate of my pickup (cost - $0 as I cut it out of the scrap from a paying job) and paying Facebook to run ads for my weekly decal give-away contest which drives people to my Facebook page and gets them to 'Like' me and see what all I can do, which then leads to them asking me to do work for them (cost so far <$5 per week for targetted advertisements - they let you pick your target age range, geographics, gender, interests, etc.). Just got a request this week to make name decals for a set of 9 plastic tumblers for an upcoming bacheolerette (sp?) party - because they saw my work on Facebook and thought it looked like something I could do. I need to take some time and get business cards made up that I can hand out, and maybe some kind of flyer, too. Really, so far, word of mouth has been my greatest asset in getting the word out.

I'll second that - watch the auctions, especially for one that will end around 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning and bid on those. They sell it through their website for $999 - or Buy it Now on ebay for $299 - I ended up winning an early morning auction and got it for $150 and I'm sure others have got it even cheaper. It is a metric butt-load (1 metric butt-load = 1.3 American crap-loads) of clipart. There are a lot of duplicates (you'll find the same naked girls and evil clowns in the "Biker" collection that you'll find in the "Girls" and "Clowns" collections, for example) - but there are so many pieces of clipart that the <5% of duplicates isn't an issue. The biggest weakness to the collection is the crappy set of thumbnail catalogs they provide. For some reason a lot of the vector clipart is shrunk down so it only takes up a fraction of the page and when they created the thumbnails they came out very blocky and pixelated. They are inconsistent with the number of thumbnails per page - some collections have 24 thumbnails per page, others have 100 thumbnails per page. I can understand why they would do that if they were printing the catalog and including it in the package, but since all you're getting are PDF files on a DVD, why cheap out? I ended up deleting their catalogs and used Adobe Bridge, Photoshop and Illustrator to create new ones with 20 thumbnails per page - that way people can look through my catalog without having to squint.

For example, before I ever got into vinyl cutting, I had a small side business making pin-back buttons. I lucked into a deal at a real-life auction and got about $800 worth of Badge-a-Minit button making gear for $27. I used to collect funny buttons when I was younger and had always wanted a Badge-a-Minit set, but the good stuff is a little pricey for an amateur who only wants to make stuff for himself - but at $27 I could afford to splurge. :-) I started off making buttons for myself and for the TV station where I worked, we would hand out custom buttons at local events like the Home Show and Race For the Cure. Someone approached me at the Home Show while I was stamping out buttons featuring The Simpsons and other FOX characters (one of the few opportunities I had to legally produce copyrighted items) and asked if I made buttons for other events. I told her that since it was my gear, I could make buttons for anything and next thing I knew I had an order for 130 buttons for her son's college graduation party. After that it just took off. I don't buy my button parts from Badge-a-Minit, I get them from a vendor on ebay. I buy them in qty of 1000 at a time and pay about $0.115 per button in parts , plus the cost of artwork (I can get 6 buttons easily out of an 8.5x11" sheet of paper and still use my automatic circle cutter - if I can find a way to run them through my Graphtec, I can get 9 per page) so the artwork costs only pennies per button. I sell them in single quantities for $2 (and could probably get more) or in large quantities for as low as $0.45 each. I can stamp out about 70 per hour while I'm watching TV, so that's $21/hr for just sitting there. At local craft shows, I have 1/2 page printouts with a circle drawn to the right size and a large assortment of crayons and markers and I let people design and color their own artwork, which I'll then cut and stamp for them - $2 each, so $1.80+ profit on each one. Not big bucks, but more than enough to pay for the booth and it always generates leads for more business. If you want more info about making buttons, let me know - I don't want to turn my post into a big ad for button making companies. Then in the last few months I got into vinyl cutting and making decals, and then sandblasting/etching using cut vinyl stencils, and just today I got my Epson WF1100 with high temp inks that I purchased from forum member kysportsxchange *and* got a Craigslist notification this morning that someone a few miles away was selling a Sunie 15x15" heat press, only a couple of months old - so I snatched that up and am ready to add dye sublimation and maybe heat pressed vinyl to my list of available products. Now I'm interested in what other product lines the rest of you are into... Surely I'm not the only person going every possible direction at the same time... am I?

Speak of the devil... I run a weekly contest on my Facebook page and give away one free up to 2-color up to 8"x8" custom decal to the person who wins. It costs me very little and encourages people to "like" my page so they can enter the contest which just provides me a free way to advertise... I kid you not, this is the response I got today from last week's winner: "I won last weeks decal contest. Do you any copywrite logos? Like nfl?". Doesn't that sound suspicious? Why would you specifically ask if I have copyrighted logos (at least that is what I assume they are trying to ask)? I wrote back and told her nope, don't have a license for those, can't do it.

I bought the whole library of clipart from www.clipartandfonts.com and one of their collections called "Swap Meet" has a ton of the "little boy peeing" variations, many of which do not look anything like "Calvin". It's a worthwhile investment if you like funny clipart and want to stay away from potential copyright issues.

I have a free app on my Android phone called CraigsNotification. It lets you create custom searches and will pop up and notify you when something matches. When I went to meet the lady, she thought my original e-mail must have been from a scammer because I e-mailed so fast after she listed it. I also texted her a short while later and mentioned my e-mail, and that convinced her I was legit.

I got a request yesterday to cut a logo for a famous sports team - I told them that I'm not licensed, but if they would be willing to pay the $5,000 license fee (a number I just made up on the spot) that I would be more than happy to cut their decal for them. They suddenly decided that maybe they would buy something else...

Wow, even though I don't like Mac's*, that is an awesome way to make use of your time!* There is nothing wrong with the Mac - they're actually decent little machines - expensive, but decent. Specifically I don't like Apple Computers or Steve Jobs - I don't like companies that feel it's OK to lock in their users, give them minimal choices and insist that they are entitled to a share of every dollar that can be potentially made.

Awesome, thanks to both of you! Saves me time and gas!

Also, with regards to things like the Land Rover logo, putting aside the whole "it's copyrighted and you shouldn't be cutting it even for personal use" issue, a LOT of brand name logos can be found in vector format at www.brandsoftheworld.com, but you should still download and learn to use Inkscape as it's a great program and has an excellent bitmap-to-vector tracer.