Because we are Decorators we approached the creation of the Quote Magician from an insiders point of view. Originally we created the first versions of the Quote Magician to help us price decorated apparel for clients in our hometown. We created several versions using several different pricing philosophies. Almost 20 years ago we entered a new phase of our business. In addition to serving our local clients we began a new venture – serving as a contract decorator to the Promotional Products Industry. The Philosophy behind the Quote Magician was defined and refined around the needs of Promotional Products Distributors – specifically salespeople who sell decorated apparel.
The Promo industry has always been catalog based and reps used the Selling Price shown in any given catalog as their selling price. Built into the selling price shown is profit for the sales rep. This is still the model today. However when the major garment wholesalers began selling blank goods to promo reps there was a problem. The rep could not show a catalog with a selling price that included the decorating – wholesaler catalogs show list pricing for the garment only, or no pricing at all. So Promo reps had no easy way to give pricing to their customers.
Our system set out to solve this problem. Promotional Products sales reps compute pricing for the items they sell on a tried and true model – Profit Margins. They purchase items from manufacturers at a given price (their cost) and sell the item to the customer at the published catalog price (the selling price). The difference of course is their Profit. The Promo rep defines the cost of a printed or embroidered garment in two parts – the cost of the garment and the cost of the decorating. The cost of the garment comes from the wholesaler. The cost of the decorating comes from their decorator. Most contract decorators who serve the Promo industry have decorating tables that look similar to the one shown here.
In fact, contract decorators frequently have multiple pricing tables – one for tees and one for sweats and one for sleeves, etc. Some contract decorators make things really difficult by having one basic table and a bunch of add ons – add $0.25 for sweats; add $0.30 for long sleeves; add $0.20 for metallic ink, etc.
Boardwalk has an extensive set of decorating tables that attempt to simplify the pricing process for all of the various decorating techniques we offer. We include all of our decorating tables in the Quote Magician in an organized way to help distributors price items quickly and effectively.