Alright guys, I may not be an edukmatd man, but hear me out.
If GH were to set up a business entity for the sole sake of preforming community GBs, this pretty much entirely for the purpose of cheaper pricing, then that is going to be VERY large amount of work. This has been stated though earlier in the thread ranging from money/record keeping, the logistics itself initially to get that legally setup, one person then handles shipping, money collection, payment, sorting, and then after that comes the logistics of missing, wrong, broken, and errors, getting those sorted and shipped out as well. Where do you plan on getting the money to handle the extra shipping for remakes and such? A fee built into the GB? Charge the end buyer for this? They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Now I am not putting anyone down, pointing fingers, or have a lack of trust with any of the names that have been suggested, but lets face it, **** happens. We have seen this with many group buys in the past. And like was just mentioned, this is all assuming we can get enough volume of material (not number of GBs) to actually warrant wholesaler pricing. Just looking at the last drop for Granite, they had close to 6k orders. When was the last group buy to even come close to that? This is why they are getting the wholesale pricing.
They provide massive quantities of stuff for SP to make. As was mentioned in the response from Bob, tooling changes for a full sculpted profile requires 32 tooling changes at 2 man hours per swap. This is over one person getting paid a week and a half of pay just in tooling changes. When you get an order for 6,000 sets, you still have the same number of tooling swaps, but you can run the machine for 6-10 times longer than what I have seen for GH community group buys. Not only does this save SP money in tooling change, but actually changing tooling is where 90% of tooling damage has the greatest chance of happening.
Now this is where my idea comes in. What if we were to talk with SP and see if we can setup a GH PMK account and do that instead of a GH business entity. Not only does this take a TON of requirements and logistics off our end, but it still lets SP monitor our traffic and potentially still get us a bit of a discount. If this were to work, the only thing that would need to be done would be marketing, direct logistics with SP, and GB initiation. All money handling, shipping, sorting and such would still be handled by SP. But they already have people in place, and probably well trained in this. This already makes this a very attractive idea in my book. Hell, they probably even get shipping discounts on shipping due to volume. We could possibly even see about getting a quick training course so we can ask questions to the GH SP liaison about process requirements, cap sizes, manufacturing process, etc. Not only this, but the 5% comission could then be put back into SP in terms of new molds for a new profile, IE cherry profile/DCS but the thickness of GMK, but with the color palatte of SPs offerings.
What say you??