One might be surprised to find out that some of these LumiLEDs Luxeon flashlights are actually sold from the factory of manufacture for 10-20 dollars.
For specialized small run lights (~1,000 units), a one man operation can be very profitable, since you don't have to pay for the typical company infrastructure. It can be a pain to assemble all the lights yourself, but thats what a pizza party is for... One cpf'er even started a very healthy retirement plan with his proceeds.
But the quick profit is in many of the HID lights, where profit margins are often incredible, especially for the distributor and reseller. You don't have to sell very many of them to realize a sizeable chunk of change. This especially applies to the Chinese produced HIDs. Amazingly, they somehow manage to get U.S. made type prices for them, even though they are only a small fraction of the real cost of a U.S. produced HID light.
pilou said:
I wonder what the profit margins are on these lights. How complicated are the circuitries? Would a decent EE undergrad be able to design one in a day? How expensive is it to cut and anodize the bodies? You still seem to get the Luxeon lottery for many of these expensive lights, so I guess there isn't that much hand-selecting going on. I guess the reflectors need to be machined precisely.
So how much does it cost to fabricate a SF U2, a Gladius, ? Anyone knows? Anyone cares to guess? I know, one needs to know other factors such as production volume and design overhead to come up with reasonably accurate numbers, but let the guessing begin.
Doubtful a EE undergrad could design the circuit in a day and have it work properly, plus he would also need to lay out the PCB, and with the higher currents present in typical Luxeon converters, the layout could easily get the typical EE undergrad into trouble.
Fortunately, there are now comming on the market, constant current boost and buck chips, which have everything integrated, so with a little skill in layout of power supplies, one could get something together. It takes a little more skill to achieve the design of one of these that is actually regulated and is also efficient.
I think you'd also need a ME to design a produceable body, and a produceable item that can take into account all the system tolerances isn't in the skill set of even your typical undergrad students.
You'd need both of them to work together in many areas, to achieve a good design, so they'd need that skill also. One also needs to design for manufacturability, which is usually out of the grasp of a typical undergrad just out of school. There have been a number of flashlights here on cpf where manufacturability is an issue...
Usually alot of money is blown on the first flashlight model, under the terms of R&D, where in reality, many costly mistakes are made getting a concept to the first working prototype and then again trying to manufacture it in small volumes. If one is actually deeply and personally involved with the whole process, it is much easier and much less is spent on R&D the second go around.
Sometimes the mistake is made to hire consultants who actually do all the work for you, where you learn very little. As such, each time, R&D costs can be huge. It is better to use them to help spin you up, like a tutor, and being personally and intricately involved-doing the work yourself with their guidance, so in the future you can do the task yourself.
Then there is the long term reliability, understanding how the threads will wear over time/cross-threading, battery contact issues, battery tolerances, designing the electronics to survive drops, switches that don't wear out, using materials and techniques that handle thermal stresses, essentially a design that can handle typical use, user mistakes, and atypical abuse.
These sorts of things, imho, really separate the 30 dollar lights from the 150 dollar lights.
