When Is The Convenience Of Outsourcing Not Worth The Price?

Show notes:
Links:
Printfection

Swag.com

Full transcript:
Josh:
How's it going?

Ben:
I'm working on this Printfection migration and I've been thinking about what to do here. So we got this outreach from Printfection about our pricing going up, in our case, dramatically. We decided we just don't want to pay that much for what we're getting. So I'm going through all of our inventory looking at our Printfection items that we have, shirts and stickers and so on, and thinking, where... So I've got to send it somewhere. Well, I guess I have to send it to myself. I'm like, do I really want to get a box of 800 shirts? It's like, no, I really don't but I don't see there's much of a choice.

Josh:
Well, we could just pay Printfection.

Ben:
Well, I guess. Yeah, that is the other option.

Starr:
Yeah.

Josh:
Yeah, personally I'm on the fence about it because yes, it is a dramatic price increase but the value that they provide us is fairly dramatic from my perspective. So I'm not quite sure what price I attach to that, but I definitely attach more than $75 a month which is what we were paying them. Which just seems insane to me. I see why they would raise our prices, in their defense.

Starr:
How much is it raised by? I forget. I looked at it originally, but I forget.

Josh:
$500.

Ben:
I think it's in the narrative of $500 a month.

Josh:
Yeah.

Starr:
Okay.

Josh:
Now to be fair, we should explain they raised their prices I think a couple years ago, because I remember when they went up and I was like, "Man, I'm really glad that we got this sweetheart deal that they let all their past customers keep." But apparently they went through the same progression as everyone ever, same logic as us, over time... We're probably taking them for everything they're worth.

Starr:
I should probably back up and explain in case this makes it into the actual podcast. Printfection is a company that we have used to... They're an inventory company. They keep our shirts and all of our swag. When we want to mail it to people, we just give them the address, or they have forms that people can fill in themselves and magically shirts and stuff get mailed out to them.

Josh:
When we want to give someone a shirt, what we do is we mention our badger bot in Slack to a shirt meme and it gives us a shirt link that we then send to someone. It's like a magical shirt bog. Like a swag bot. Which is pretty cool.

Starr:
Yeah. I have a couple thoughts on this. The first one is, we were paying $75 a month plus shipping fees and handling and all that. We paid a certain amount to have things shipped out.

Josh:
Yeah.

Starr:
The second is that, as the person who was previously kind of in charge of mailing out shirts, it is a huge, huge time suck and a giant pain in the ass.

Josh:
I've got a closet full of shirts still that is just warehoused at this point.

Starr:
Yes.

Josh:
I don't want to go back to that.

Starr:
It is such a pain in the ass. So while it's like, yeah, $500 a month is a lot, it seems like a lot, if Ben Curtis ended up sending out the shirts, I am 100% sure that you would spend more than $500 a month in your time doing it.

Josh:
Yeah. We're going to pay someone like $300 an hour to ship shirts.

Starr:
Yeah. So let me-

Ben:
So what you're saying is, since I'm the only person that hasn't actually done the shirt shipping, that I'm not a good person to judge the value of this service.

Josh:
Oh, Ben, you don't know what you're getting into.

Starr:
Yeah, when I found Printfection, I was seriously... I thought I had died and gone to heaven. I was just like, please take this off of my plate.

Ben:
So why are you even letting me have an opinion on this? You should be like, "Ben, shut up. We know what we're doing. We're paying the $500 a month, just deal with it."

Starr:
Well everybody gets to have an opinion. Yeah, so I guess there's a couple reasons why this is just hard. So first of all... Since most of our readers probably haven't dealt with swag much, I'll just go through and explain why it's such a pain in the neck and you don't actually want to do it yourself. So, essentially when you order t-shirts from the printer, usually they come in a big box that's just full of shirts. They're not nicely individually wrapped or anything like that. And maybe some printers offer that as a service, but when I got them they tended to be just giant boxes of shirts.

Starr:
So that means if you want to, say, go to a conference and put them on display, you have to fold them up or roll them up in some way. If you want to mail them out, you've got to fold them up into a dimension that will fit flat and be nice in the little mailer. You've got to make sure you've got the right size of mailers at all times. You've got to basically have a little postage setup where you're always going to Stamps.com or whatever and buying your stamps.

Starr:
Then here's a little something that I didn't really expect, but we often would have people want shirts who are not inside the United States, at which time you have to fill out customs forms. You have to drive to the Post Office and drop things off. It's just a huge, huge pain in the neck. It was... Yeah. It was-

Josh:
You're bringing back memories with the folding shirts before conferences. Because there were multiple and I just remember entire evenings the night before my flight, me and Kaylin just folding shirts for my suitcase.

Starr:
And not only that, but do you remember how we had to get the shirts to the conferences? They weren't just delivered nicely folded to the conference organizers. We checked them. We checked bags of shirts.

Josh:
Listen, one time I checked a bag of... Or, I checked a whole box. This 25 pound box of shirts. I think it was to Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh's, the airport there, is a 45 minute drive in rush hour traffic to the hotel. We were five minutes away from the hotel when I realized the box was still at checking. I hadn't picked it up at the baggage claim.

Starr:
No!

Josh:
So an hour and a half... yeah.

Starr:
Well, I had... So these boxes of shirts are big. They're like two and a half feet cubed and they weigh, it seemed like more than 20 or 30 pounds. It seemed like 40 or 50 pounds.

Josh:
Might have been 50. Let's go with 50.

Starr:
50, yeah. Shirts are heavy. So I was at a conference in Denver and I'd never been there before and the cab driver dropped me off in the wrong location. So I was humping a giant box of t-shirts around downtown Denver looking for the right place. It was-

Josh:
Sweat dripping down your face.

Starr:
Yeah, it was miserable. And when I got there, I just kind of... I found my table. The shirts weren't folded or anything because I had timelines, and I just sort of... I made a pile as best I could. The other thing is that if they're not individually wrapped and labeled and stuff, people have to dig through them to find their size because the size is written on the label inside the shirt. So if you don't have everything nicely, neatly organized beforehand, five minutes in you will just have-

Josh:
And they will.

Starr:
... a big pile of shirts. There will be no organization anymore, it'll just all be-

Josh:
Just, it's mayhem.

Starr:
Yeah, it is mayhem. It's Fight Club in there because developers love their shirts.

Ben:
This is awesome. I can see myself right now going back to Kyle at Printfection and saying, "You know what? We're happy to pay that $500, please. ...