I recently made a purchase that was a little outside my budget, but turned out to be worth every penny and then some. I got tickets for my wife and I to see Cirque De Soleil’s “Kurios”. Bear with me, this is yoyo related. If you have never heard of Cirque De Soleil, give this a read (link). It’s an organization based out of Montreal, Canada that started with two of your stereotypical “starving artist” performers and has grown into the largest theatrical producer in the world. They are currently running nineteen different shows in two hundered and seventy one countries around the world. Click one of the pictures below to go to the website for Kurios which will give you at least a superficial idea of what the costumes, characters and sets look like. Picture links https://static01.cirquedusoleil.com/nl/~/media/press/PDF/kurios/kurios-presskit.pdf
Photo Credit: https://www.cirquedusoleil.com/kurios Chin-min managed to find some time in his busy performance schedule to make an appearance at the Vancouver Yoyo club meet, a major highlight that was really exciting for the kids (of all ages!). He demonstrated his skills in a variety of yoyo styles. It's no surprise that he was chosen by Cirque Du Soleil, he is very skilled.
There is no way to do justice to the amazing work of individual prowess and spectacular choreography. One of the really neat things about Cirque Du Soleil is that the entertainment never stops. When you enter the tent and take your seat prior to the show start, there are already performers on stage moving around and doing things. The steampunk theme facilitated constant movement of equipment and people. There was even an audience participation bit before the show! Once the show began you needed to be sharp to catch everything that was going on. When there was a solo performer front and center, there was also always a background mood being set, from ‘characters’ observing the act, to live musicians roving around. Performers moved around, contributing little bits to the overall mood, musicians, props and more. The show opened with what must have been the entire cast onstage. It featured a drum performance, but the background was constantly changing, tables and chairs being moved, objects being passed, dancers moving around all in perfect step!
The thing that was most striking to me was how many roles each performer played, and the fact that very little of the show was remotely controlled. Quite often the props on stage were operated by hidden performers moving levers. Chin-min, aside from being the yoyo star, also wore a number of costumes as background cast, moving props in and out. One of the more interesting props was a giant hand (the size of a car) that crept out at one point (as it turns out it was pedal powered from inside) with moving fingers. The act it was used for was a quartet of contortionists that were indescribable. The four did their entire act on top of the hand. The feats of flexibility and coordination were indescribable. As with every other aspect of the show, their routine was impeccably choreographed with lighting and music. What was interesting to find out after the fact was that while their act was going on the fingers of the giant hand were moving, and as we found out, Chih-min was the one inside operating them! This was one of the many roles he performed during every single show! Photo Credit - http://bluebesos.com/tag/kurios/
The show travels all over the world, and the actors and a lot of the behind the stage people all travel together. Backstage there is a training area for the performers, a first aid space, a large costume repair shop, a kitchen and just about everything else they need. Actors are responsible for their own hair and makeup and are trained by experts before the touring show launches. I can only imagine the volume of laundry that is done each day! The cast signs up for a two year stint with the show, travelling the whole time. They get one week vacation in each city (which could mean one week out of eight) and most weeks they only get one day off per week. The rest of the time they are performing two to threeshows per day. It is not a job for the faint of heart, you have to be dedicated and passionate about your art to keep up that kind of intensity. There are perks. The performers are put up in good hotels. They even have their own laundry machines backstage! The show travels with it’s own kitchen with a variety of healthy meals offered. I was amused when he pointed out that healthy drinks were free for performers, but if you wanted anything sugary you had to pay for it out of a vending machine! It makes sense, these performers are some of the most finely tuned athletes I’ve seen. They need to stay in top shape. I imagine the biggest challenges the performers face are exhaustion and loneliness. Working six days a week at that level of intensity would be very taxing. The show accounts for illness and injury, the cast has more available solo acts than are needed on any night and can be slotted in, but if Chih-Min is sick, there isn’t another yoyoer! Most of the cast is French-Canadian, but also includes performers from around the world. While English is the common language, Chih-Min is the only Chinese speaker, and he told me it can be hard at times to connect with others for whom English is not their preferred language. All in all I’m really glad he reached out and could at least come visit the yoyo club! Of course for me the best part of the whole experience was the giant smile on my wife’s face at the end of the night (and throughout it). She’s been a performer her whole life and has seen a number of Cirque Du Soleil shows (including a brief stint waitressing at one of them), but she was still so excited to see this one. I wholeheartedly suggest you save your pennies and the next time one comes to town you check it out! Vancouver is the last North American stop for Kurios, next it heads to Japan but it’ll come back around I’m sure.
If you can’t get out to see Cirque Du Soleil, look into what else is happening locally. There are some amazing local artistic performances in any city that need your support. Don’t forget to bring a yoyo or two, you never know when you might make a new friend!
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The yoyo community is a relatively small one. With a niche hobby, the suppliers of hardware tend to be more closely connected to customers and as a result are more closely inspected and analyzed than in a bigger one. But for many people the process of running a yoyo company is a mystery. This article is going to focus largely on where my experience sits. The ‘boutique’ yoyo brand. For those of you other than my 6 fans who may not know my history, over the last 8 years I’ve been involved with 3 yoyo brands. I started as a sponsored player with MonkeyfingeR Design out of Calgary (Canada) as a sponsored player. From there I moved onto quasi-manager of King Yo Star Canada. It was an weird position, it wasn’t my brand (It was owned by a toy store owner in China) but I had full authority on promotion, sales and sponsorship outside of China. By the end I had a lot of say over the design as well. Currently I’m running my own brand (Rain City Skills) as the full on head honcho. Between King Yo Star and Rain City skills I’ve now got 9 yoyo releases under my belt.
Smaller brands are a different story. These are usually one-person operations run by someone who works a full time job to pay the bills and designs/makes/sells yoyos as a passion. They are often designing yoyos themselves and having batches of 50-100 made at a time, doing all of the assembly, packaging and advertising themselves. They don’t usually have the budget to hire people to do work for them, or to spend the big bucks to do google and Facebook ads, so it all comes down to making personal connections with individuals and with groups in the community through various social media outlets. Having said all of that, in both cases the process of creating and selling yoyos is generally the same. There are a lot of half-truths about the costs of making yoyos that float around. I am not going to list off exact hard costs because every yoyo has a different price to make, based on difficulty of design (time on the machine), quantity made, the anodizing, where you have it made and so on. Below is a list of the costs that go into getting a yoyo to market that are a ballpark average based on my experiences and those of others I’ve talked to. Direct costs
hidden costsOne of the challenges is that there are many costs that aren't directly about creating the parts of the yoyo. 1. Shipping. This cost can’t be emphasized enough. Here is a list of things that need to be shipped to get the yoyo run made. Yoyos are heavy, and shipping is charged by weight, so shipping 100 yoyos around is expensive! -prototypes - to you from the shop, then to players to test. -anodizing - shipping from the machine shop to the anodizer back to you. If you are making them in China those are usually hidden costs, you’ll just pay the freight to you, but if the shop is incurring costs you are paying for them. -bearings, pads and axles - if you are machining in china you can usually get the shop to source them for you and include with your yoyos, but they are added weight and you are paying either way. -boxes - you can avoid shipping on these if you go to a physical store near you, but it’s often cheaper to order bulk online and you have a better chance of finding something that will help your brand stick out. -stickers - same as with boxes. -throws to team members - The small brands main source of testing and advertising -throws to reviewers - Again, key piece of advertising -assorted accessories included (string, carry bag, etc)
4. Advertising - This is the big one people don’t think about. Out of a run of 100 yoyos, maybe 80 actually get sold. The biggest way to advertise a yoyo is to have people play with it. -Your average small brand has around 5 players representing them, so you send them a minimum of 1 throw each (more if they are competing with it). -Next you have reviewers. At least 1, sometimes more (I sent 4 gamers to reviewers). -Contest sponsorship. Smaller contests will allow you to donate product or a combination of product and cash, so you are looking at 2-5 throws from each run, and at least 200-400 cash per year just to sponsor one or two contests. You might pass up this advertising venue, but I’ve always received my biggest bump of ‘fans’ and the associated sales after I attend a contest, even if I don’t have a table. -For the larger brands there is also the cost of direct advertising on youtube, Facebook or google ads. Finally: The mathSo lets throw some imaginary math at this to put it in a bit of perspective. I’m going to pick some numbers that are a reasonable ‘average’ price for the various steps involved (Numbers in USD). These will be based on a short run of 100 yoyos made in China, with a medium complicated design. These are average costs, you can do all of this cheaper by cutting corners, and you can spend more for quality and branding. 1. Prototype run - $400 per run (shipped), we’ll assume only 1 prototype was needed = $4.00 2. Yoyo parts - $15 per yoyo. $1500 for the run. 3. Axle - $0.20 4. Bearing -$1.50 (decent quality budget bearing) 5. Pads $1 per pair (sourced through an existing company, not custom made) 6. Anodizing (in china) $4 per yoyo for 3 colour splash 7. String $0.15 8. Shipping to North America $120/100 = $1.2 (includes customs duties) 9. Simple boxes $0.50 10. Custom Sticker Art 100 = $1 each 11. Sticker printing (1000 is usually the best value) $50 (shipped) = $0.5 each yoyo 12. Carry Bag $1.5 (Incl shipping from China) Total that up you get a cost of $30.75 per yoyo. Lets account for 1 for the owner, 5 for the team, 1 for review and 3 for contest sponsorship. That’s $321. Divide by the remaining 90 adds $3.57 per yoyo, bumping costs up to $34.32 per yoyo. OK. Next bit of math - Finding a price. If you are selling direct and not retailing at all you get to make a bit of money, but it’s more work to sell through the run. If you choose to retail here is your math. Most retailers ask for a minimum of wholesale x 1.7. For some it’s closer to wholesale x2 (which is a standard minimum markup in any industry, yoyo retailers take a smaller cut than most businesses). Going with the minimum. 34.32 x 1.7 = $58.34. That’s your retail price if you aren’t going to make a penny on the yoyo. For retail stores I usually try to give myself $5 as a minimum, so new math: 40.7 x 1.7 = $66.84 If you have a look back up, we started with raw parts costing only $15, $20 anodized. At the end of this adventure the brand owner earned $5 per yoyo on a maximum of 90 yoyos which gives you $450. If you have ever tuned a yoyo you know how much time is involved in assembly of the 100 throws, add in packing them up, all of the design, testing, social media work and that’s peanuts.
Move to North America? Add $20 per yoyo at least. Have to do a 2nd or 3rd prototype? $5-$10 more per yoyo. Bi-metal or Titanium? Sponsoring a high level player or want a spot at the big kids table sponsoring nationals or worlds? The costs keep going up. Yes, you can get things made cheaper, the fact that there are metal throws on the market for under $40 tells you that. If you can afford to make 1000 yoyos the price can drop as low as $5USD for the parts, that’s how you can find aluminum yoyos on EBay for under $10, but can you sell that many? What is displayed above is not an unreasonable set of numbers for a short run of made in China yoyos from a reputable, quality controlled shop. So there. One persons averaged numbers on how yoyos are made. One of the wonderful things about the internet is that you can find just about any information. If you are thinking of making your own yoyos, I wholeheartedly suggest you do some research and see if it’s something you want to pursue. Companies like Magic Yoyo, Vosun and FPM all do yoyos on demand, or if you want to stay in North America hit up One Drop or Foxland Precision and get some prices. Feel free to comment or hit me up at [email protected] if you have questions on any of this! |
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