Just this past week I had a customer call me that needed a small wooden piece laser engraved with some information for a wedding gift.  Here is a great example of a piece that took not only woodworking skills but laser engraving as well.  The customer provided the pine piece of wood and let us at MBJD Laser use our creative skills to add the information that they wanted.

Our challenge was to design and get the image to pop or stand off so that it could be easily seen.  Pine can sometimes be difficult.  What we did was mask the entire piece of wood before we lasered it.  The masking allowed us to do a black paint fill after lasering so that it could be as dark as possible.   Once we paint filled the freshly rastered wood piece we removed the excess masking and viola!!!  The pictures really don't do this project justice but it really did turn out fabulous!   What a great gift!

So for todays blog post I have decided to talk a little about pricing.  I won't be posting any work photos or jobs with prices etc.  This is just bits and nuggets I have learned over the past few years as it relates to pricing jobs.  In the laser engraving business the variety of projects we do is massive, and the scope is wide and broad.  Many times we do jobs we have never done before and tread around in areas nobody has ever been.  Thus pricing is tricky.

From firearms, and glass mugs, to urns and one of a kind heirlooms we see it all so how do laser engraving shops know what to charge?  I will try to break down pricing as simply as I can but keep in mind there are no hard and fast rules on pricing.  All shops operate differently. I can tell you though as a rule of thumb here at MBJD Laser we average between $1-$2 a minute of laser run time.  So if the laser is running for 15 minutes one can expect to pay between $15 and $30.  

Now with $1-$2 a minute as our standard pricing we also take into consideration the following:

QUANTITY:  How many items need engraved
ARTWORK:  Is the customers art ready to go or do we need to do artwork in our shop
PRICE OF THE OBJECT:  One might ask why does this affect pricing.  The risk reward for rare or expensive items might take more time in research to make sure that lasering can be done.  Also if the item were to be ruined what is the replacement cost.
REPEAT CUSTOMER:  Is the work being done for a repeat customer?  I always try to work with long time repeat customers who use me over and over.  It just creates good PR with your steady customers.
WHO IS SUPPLYING THE SUBSTRATE:  If I am supplying the substrate and know how the laser responds my mind is at ease as to the outcome of any given product.  If the substrate is given to me by a customer it is always a risky wild card.
TIME FRAME:  Rush jobs are obviously a slight up charge.  
LARGE JOBS:  Large jobs are probably the most tricky to price.  Obviously when quoting a large job you want to be in the ball park with other bids but you don't want to work for free either.  My rule for pricing large jobs is by the end of the job I should still feel excited about doing the work.  If you get to the end and you just can't wait for it to be over because it is more work then you thought then you didn't price it high enough.

Wow how the time goes by so quickly.  It has been a while since my last blog post but maybe that's a good sign that we have been busy.  One of our latest jobs had us lasering onto stainless steel flasks and a couple tumblers.

Just like in past stainless steel jobs it is necessary for us to use Cermark.   With any job, there are always unique problems to work through and this job was no different.  The nature of working with flasks is that the face of the flask is not round, and it is not flat.  Using the laser in this scenario is  a bit of a challenge because when focusing the laser it became very important to find the "sweet spot".    As you can see in the picture the flasks turned out great!  We made the logos as large as we could while keeping the laser in focus enough to render a quality image.

These flasks were purchased from Walmart online and they even came in their own individual boxes making them easy to wrap for gifting.  

Speed on our Epilog Zing Laser was set to Speed of 20 and Power of 100.