Not only can you buy a 3 oz. tin of drink mix on my wholesale pages on zazzle, but you can also buy the 7 ounce tin, which I wasn’t going to introduce at all, but here it is, delivered by zazzle! The price of the 3 ounce tin is $6.40 apiece, and the large 7 ounce tin is only $8.40!
Hey, a major breakthrough came through last night, thanks to my friend, Marketing Angel Archangel Zadkiel, who suggested this rather novel and eminently workable scheme, in which I list hundreds of buyable wholesale-priced — that’s $6.40 a tin — products, at the base wholesale price, disregarding the fact that I get a lousy quarter for each item in the bargain, but before you sigh out of pity, let me explain:
The Wholesale Hustle
Okay what the hell is a wholesale hustle? I really don’t know, but it had such a mellifluous ring to it that I could hardly refuse to duly exercise my digits accordingly to bring this concept to type. In short, the title is itself a hustle to get you interested, and me whipped into a frenzy of explanation to help you over the few higher hurdles of POD Marketing.
First of all, I’ve spent the past several days feverishly — some would say haphazardly, but they’d be wrong — working out the math on the wholesale end of the drink powders, which is all I’m going for, at the moment.
What I wanted to do was make hundreds or thousands of package and label designs, and yet have the luxury of not having to actually order the items and store them, let alone pay for them.
I developed a line of interesting drink packages both iced and hot, and made hundreds of designs, all of which work, but you can’t see, so you can’t order them, and I can’t make that happen without a great deal of personal effort and a lot of time that I really can’t spare.
So I took the next-best road.
I researched what product was actually going out through zazzle, and discovered, by working out the chemistry, that the product they’re selling through zazzle is in fact the same product that they sell in bulk as “double dutch chocolate”.
Wow, what a discovery.
It turns out that “Double Dutch Premium Belgian Chocolate” is their best-selling product on any site and in any distribution path, and they have plenty. These guys have been in the business 30 years, and really know how to make a good product at the lowest possible price.
They also have their licensing and packaging and printing and product handling, shipping and billing worked out.
Hell, 30 years into it, they should.
I don’t want to re-invent the wheel, so I obey the rule my Grampa Herman told me when I was just a wee sprout studyin’ for the gallows, to quote Mark Twain.
“Never manufacture what someone else is willing to make at a fair price.”
This assumes that the merchandise lives up to the quality standards you have in mind, but serves as a general rule of thumb, a guideline for living.
I’ll quote one of my favorite youtube characters, “Uncle” Raggy Ragsdale: “Hey, kiddies, don’t knock yourself out if you don’t have to.”
Of course, the young like to show off, and have plenty of extra energy to blow off, but us geezers have to sort of walk it past the finish line.
If I design packaging but don’t put it somewhere where you can see it, it’s useless, might as well have never done it.
On zazzle, I can publish my experiments and samples.
One important aspect is that on zazzle, you can see the product from various angles, determine the “look” of it, and of course, read the legal notices on the back, which zazzle supplies, of course.
Now, here’s the gimmick: you can buy a case of 6 units for a mere $37.20, which is only $6.20 per unit, and I’m not sure about the shipping, haven’t explored the retail side at all, but it’s not something I can control for my clients, so whatever it is, that’s what it is.
I know what you’re thinking — it’s an occupational hazard — and you’re absolutely right. The only way I could give you that price is to give the stuff away, and that’s what I decided to do.
Buy ONE carton of six units on zazzle or FOUR cartons of six units each, making a total of 24 units from me, if you need more than a single carton, or you want something other than what’s offered on zazzle.
You gotta realize that zazzle’s selection of flavors is strictly limited. If you want other flavors, we have to arrange it as a custom order, in which case you might as well have me add your website address and any other info you want on there.
I will also custom design a photo print label — you can take a selfie or use a pro portrait, or a photo of your shop, workshop, workbench or sekrit laberatory, and I’ll use that to make your private label.
You might also want me to design an entire line of totally unique items under your own brand, and I can easily turn that out, too.
I have an idea for a very tasteful and very rich-looking branded line of dark chocolate mixes, and if you’re interested in establishing your own brand of chocolate desserts and drinks, you might want to talk to me about that.
Okay, so when you order wholesale from me, the unit price is, in fact, going to be $6.20, but I can chop that down a few bucks on this end, so you could end up with a unit price of only $5 bucks a tin — the retail is always $12.50 or $12.95 — but you can’t order anything that zazzle doesn’t offer, so it takes a phone call to Yanesh to make that happen, if you want anything other than what’s on the zazzle menu, or if you want more than one carton of stuff.
So that’s the math behind my WHOLESALE PAGES on zazzle — you’re getting the product without royalties, making it a “handshake” item, a loss-leader, but there’s more to it than merely shoving product out the door.
Why are you bothering to do this?
I’m not interested in profit. There is no profit in this move, where I lower the price down to the absolute wholesale.
I don’t want you to pay more.
Putting these products up on zazzle gives me an opportunity to hang hundreds of designs out there, on curved body products, looking pretty much the way they will actually look in person, so you can see what it’s going to look like.
I want you to feel free to ask me to get a screenshot or photo or drawing or painting that matches your concept. I’m here to help.
If I had to actually order the physical product in order to photograph a few dozen samples, it would cost thousands to order them up, and we’d need a product photographer to get a shot of each and every one, and we’d be doing product photography for the next several months to get the designs up there for you to see, with no guarantee that they’d get past Marvette’s already-overloaded heaps of unfinished projects on her desk.
I look forward to finding solutions for your unique spiritual marketing needs, and it is my specialty. I’ve worked for years for the smallest agency working for the largest client, and you’re welcome to use those skills to help your work progress.
It’s my hope to see you work your way out of organic life and up into the next level, where your work is waiting for you. With luck, you’ll outgrow the seductions this time around.
If you wanted to see the offerings of the other drink mixes — and there are many hundreds of them — I could, of course, post the straight graphic that we’d send into the printer, but it’s no good posting the straight graphic. It won’t work.
It’s flat, and the “back wrap” sticking out to the left side confuses the eye. It needs to be seen on a can, with a lid, just as the customer will see it on the shelf or countertop, and that’s what I can do with zazzle, and once on the product page on zazzle, you can turn the object around and see all sides of it, using their software!
By the way, the zazzle software is by far the easiest to use of all the POD sites.
Think of the zazzle wholesale pages as a catalog, but it’s actually far more than that. It has a powerful purpose — actually two powerful purposes — that you’d normally probably overlook completely.
- The wholesale listings on zazzle serve as a catalog, making actual physical product unnecessary. Our battle-cry is, “We Ship!” and that’s what makes all the difference in the world. No inventory, no packing, no shipping, no billing, no customer service. Ya gotta love it.
- Those wholesale listings can help me to discover which designs are the most popular, and believe me, as a pro marketer, I’m plenty willing to PAY the customer in order to learn that secret!
You can take advantage of this marketing ploy, and as a matter of fact, even though I lose in the deal, I WANT YOU TO take advantage!
Think of the zazzle wholesale listings, the ones at $6.20 a unit, as a way to experiment with product in small quantities — as few as 6 items — at a price you’d normally only get down to with a much larger order.
At this price, you can afford to experiment. We’re talking $37.20 to see if you can build an empire and dig your way out of organic life.
Not that you can buy your way out. It’s not about money. It’s about participation. It’s about BEING IN THE FLOW.
In The Flow…
That, in a nutshell is my hope for you, to help you propel yourself out of your complacency and laziness, and off your ass and into Work Mode, which can START with marketing these items, and build from there.
You wouldn’t believe the potential, but I can show it to you, if you ask to see it, and even if you don’t — too scared, too lazy, too disinterested, perhaps???
Maybe so, but what if you could turn this little enterprise into a literal kingdom of wealth and prosperity? I don’t mean for yourself, but you could do a LOT of good with a little bit of wealth, if you don’t get sucked in and seduced by the comfort and luxury side of money.
I want you to get the break you need to do the job you need to learn to do. It’s about Bodhisattva Vows as-yet unfulfilled. We’re all waiting Up Here.
Okay, so what are the facts?
Wholesale prices are hard to come by in the food industry, and normally you’re happy with just 5%, but that means volume, and if you have limited volume, you have to make your profit some other way.
Yes, you have to make a profit. You can’t afford to stay in a losing business forever, nobody can. You need a profit in order to continue working, and someone must pay — make sure that if it’s you that pays, you can afford it.
And yes, that IS the whole plan.
Can you get the price down any lower than $6.20? Sure, no problem. I can give you a $5.00 per unit cost on any of those products in the 3 ounce tin, but you’d have to order at least 600 units — that’d be 100 flats of 6 per carton — to get that price, so the total of your order would be around $3,000 plus trucking or shipping.
I don’t think that’s going to happen anytime soon, do you?
Right. So we’re left with a marketing ploy that I have to use in order to generate samples. I can’t do that with physical product, and mocking up a product by printing labels and sticking them onto a can temporarily for the photo is not my Real-Life Answer.
So what is my Real-Life “Best Practices” Answer?
Why, it’s to totally give away free all the stuff I’ve listed on the wholesale pages of my zazzle account, and that’s exactly what I’ve done. I’ve put up many, many items for which we get nothing except a “thank you”, if we ever even see that.
Believe me, it’s worth it, so don’t feel guilty about taking advantage. I’d gladly pay next Wednesday for a Wimpy-Burger I have today.
I want you to experiment, to be able to afford to experiment, with these magical items that carry Blessings with them everywhere. The idea is not to make money from this project, but to make friends.
In short, DO take advantage, and DO feel totally guilt-free about it. I want you to be able to experiment, and I’m not interested in making money off you. I want to see you succeed, so you can hop on a plane anytime you want and take a retreat at the Ashram.
It’d be super-terrific if you used this marketing idea to springboard a multimillion-dollar industry, at which time, you could throw a 10% tithe this way once in a while.
So why bother to order wholesale from you???
I hear you, and you’re absolutely right. Thanks to my commercially self-destructive marketing concept for the double dutch chocolate drink mixes on zazzle, you’re able to buy a single lousy stupid flat of just 6 items, meaning that you’ll be ordering every goddam day, and spending a small fortune on shipping.
The upside of ordering from Zazzle is that the chocolate company will ship ONE FLAT, one carton of six units, to you, where they won’t ship less than 4 cartons — 24 units — to me.
This is part of their marketing plan.
So you can order a flat of 6 units of something from zazzle right from my posted WHOLESALE listings.
6 Units is the minimum for that item on zazzle, if you’re following me, and if you aren’t, it’s still the minimum order — and take those six items out of the carton and sell the hell out of them at the standard retail price of $12.50, and that IS the world standard for that item at that level of quality.
My loss is your gain.
You get to find out what sells at a price that is the same as if you bought them four cartons at a time, which is the minimum wholesale order, as I said.
The normal minimum order is NOT $240, as I had estimated, for the standard 4-carton shipment, but a mere $148.80, just a fraction of my first estimate, and a welcome price, because it yields for YOU the true wholesale price of $6.20 per unit, the same as I’ve got them for up on zazzle.
So what’s the catch?
I hate to disappoint you. There IS a catch. The catch is that, although you can get hundreds of my designs and marketing ideas on zazzle at the total wholesale price, you can only get three flavors of mix — chocolate, cocoa and lemonade.
Don’t even talk to me about lemonade. That’s their biggest number one seller, and it makes me sad.
Of course I’ll market it, but — sigh — what ever happened to real lemons?
Okay, so what’s the difference between the orders you make through zazzle and the orders you make through me personally?
Well, when you order through zazzle, the community gets no profit, but that’s not the reason you want to be ordering through me.
It’s because of that first factoid I mentioned a couple of paragraphs back — You can only get those three flavors on zazzle — they’ll give you better discounts on quantity, like 600 units — but I can do better. Still, it’s limited to just those three flavors.
All the other flavors, you have to come to me.
I can offer strange and unusual hot and cold drink mixes of all kinds, everything from Dark Truffle to Double Decadence Belgian, and tons of other wonderful drinks that you’ve never heard of, plus all sorts of holiday drinks like nogs and buttered rum and more.
I have Healing Teas, Meditation Teas, Clarity Teas and Mindfulness Teas as well. I have many, many different Other-Worldly items that you will, I think, find amazing and fun.
I’ve got tons of ideas for things, and I’ll be putting them up on zazzle as long as they let me do it. Keep in mind that you can order anything you see in any variety of flavors — see my previous blogs for info on those flavors or read on, and I’ll re-examine them for your further edification, if you’ll pardon my language.
Strange & Unusual Exotica Drink Mixes
Think about being able to offer 50 different varieties of flavors of drink mixes, and much more — thousands — if you count the variety of designs and names you can use for your very own customized product.
Take the same item and rename it, and voila, you have a new product. Example in mind is the use of the Double Dutch Premium Belgian as the delivered product under the title of “Double Dutch Truffle Mix”.
Come on, guys, there can’t be actual truffles in there. It’s gotta be the SUGGESTION of a truffle-like flavor that is meant by that “Truffle” word on that package. Nobody would think that there are crushed-up truffles included in the mix.
Okay, then what about “Zen Tea”? How does that fit in?
It fits in as something you order directly from me, because zazzle doesn’t do tea. They only do cocoa, chocolate and lemonade, that’s it.
What’s the difference between cocoa and chocolate? Really, that’s sad. Even if you happen to know the difference, it makes no difference. It’s not about the ingredients, it’s about the label.
See? Just like beer and wine, Lord. It’s all about the label.
“What, Gabriel???”
“Uh, I said ‘It’s all about the label’, Lord”.
“Label?”
“Uh, yeah, Lord, you know — it’s not how you feel, it’s how you look. And you look — mahvellous!”
“Do you think so, Gabriel? I wasn’t quite sure about this outfit. Does my butt make the jeans look big?”
I can brand you like a maverick steer.
What I mean is, I can create a set of branded products for your next fair or for your shop or treatment center, floatation center or waiting room.
Why not sell these products as part of your client services, or use them as promotional giveaways to patients or clients???
Golly, I hadn’t thought of it at first, but it’s true — I can make a totally customized product or set of products for you, branded to you, at the same price as those already available from my stock supply.
I do mean totally customized for your shop or business.
It’s just as easy for me to create a new product, so feel free to ask. I have hundreds of thousands of graphics from which to draw, and I can easily paint, sketch, draw or fake an illio — that’s “illlustration” to those who aren’t in the graphics biz — to your specification.
You can get the artists of your choice, if we have the rights to them, and we have the rights to plenty of them, so get on it. Again, if you want those in our Vanilla — Double Dutch Chocolate — you can ask me to hang it for you on zazzle.
I don’t mind if you only order six units. I’m not doing it for the money.
I want you to have a good time with this, and to explore and FIND the work-potential, the alchemical formula that works within this POD project that seems so high-tech, but is actually similar in many respects to working as an apprentice in a fine bakery.
You would be well-advised to use my artwork. I can have items shipped here to me to sign with a Sharpie, then re-ship those items out to you for sale. Of course, signed units would and should be more money, maybe a donation, not sure — I’ll let you guys decide that issue.
My job is to get you started.
Oh, by the way, because I can post these design ideas on zazzle, I’ll be putting up many designs featuring offworlders, ancient aliens and other extra-terrestrials.
I have some Double Dutch Chocolate from several different dimensions, and from this one, I have such items as a Yoruba Dance Mask, a beautiful nugget from the Gold Rush days, a mountain cabin owned by my family, the Donners, and some wonderful Dags — that’s “Daguerreotypes” — which are Victorian and Edwardian vintage photographs.
Victorian is 1870s to 1901, the year the Old Girl, Queen Victoria, gave up the ghost. Edward lived to rule for a single decade, 1901 to 1910, after which he followed her lead and flew up to Heaven, where he was duly processed as just another turkey passing through.
How do I get started?
Choose a design or concept you’d like to try to market, then contact me about it. What I can offer is a variety of different drink mixes that YOU CAN’T GET ON ZAZZLE.
One of those items is CAPPUCCINO, which you definitely can’t get on zazzle. Another is Bourbon-Pecan, and yet another is Italian Cappuccino.
Oh, you’re thinking that Italian Cappuccino is obvious, so why mention the “Italian” part, right? You’d be wrong. Not all Cappuccinos are Italian, and not all of them are made with traditional ingredients.
I’d be inclined to call it “Classic Cappuccino” — thanks to David, who came here all the way from Spain, just to make that suggestion.
You can’t get Caps on zazzle.
I have Iced Caps, Hot Cappuccino, and spiced and Dutch Chocolate and French Vanilla Cappuccino, and Cappuccino Latte and Hazelnut and Raspberry Cappuccinos as well, all of which will go very well at a fair where they can buy a sample and taste it right then and there, if you’ve got a food-handler’s license and know how to get your ducks in a row with state and county.
If not, you’ve got a real horrible learning experience just ahead of you, something like Hurricane Harvey, Hurricane Irma and Hurricane Jose all rolled into one.
Sounds awful, right? It is, and that’s exactly what I’m trying to help you avoid by showing you the ropes and giving you pre-packaged foods that don’t require food licensing — you can sell this stuff in a gallery, a boutique, a toy store or a dry-cleaning shop, and if you’ve customized it to the shop, the owner will have no trouble selling them or using them as a customer-relations giveaway.
Never underestimate the Power of the Force.
What I mean is, these little puppies are GREAT promotional items, and you don’t have to actually give them away for them to serve as promotions — customers will be thrilled to pay what YOU pay — $6.20 — which is what I also pay on zazzle for what I sell there.
LOSS LEADER is something important. It’s not just a word, not just a selling phrase, not just a customer tingle. It means something.
You put something out there at COST or even slightly BELOW cost, in order to make new friends, bring in new customers, and treat old customers with a nice surprise as well.
On my ZAZZLE WHOLESALE pages, I will have hundreds of SAMPLE products out there for you to buy and try at a mere $37.20 per carton of six units, so you can start a business for under $40 bucks with this plan.
PLEASE NOTE that you are also spreading the Sangha, the Dharma and the other stuff, when you take part in the distribution chain — your hands are an important link in the chain.
Blessings are packed into every tin.
In addition, you’re opening up paths of wisdom and clarity for yourself and those with whom you come in contact in the process of disseminating these wondrous goodies from the Ashram and Other Worlds.
Eventually, some day, we’ll have the equipment and the commercial kitchen to be able to prepare our own menu. If you can make that possible, please do. I’m ready to help you launch this project into the future.
Here’s the rundown of items you’ll have to order apart from zazzle, directly from me:
- Chai Tea
- Classic Cappuccino
- Dutch Chocolate Iced or Hot Caps
- French Vanilla Iced or Hot Caps
- Hazelnut Iced or Hot Caps
- Raspberry Iced or Hot Caps
- Chocolate Cocoa
- Dark Truffle
- Creamy Cocoa Bourbon Pecan
- Creamy Cocoa Dark Orange
- Creamy Cocoa English Toffee
- Creamy Cocoa Peanut Butter
- Creamy Cocoa Pumpkin
- Creamy Cocoa Smores
- Creamy Cocoa Double Vanilla
- Creamy Cocoa Cheesecake
- Creamy Cocoa Roasted Almond
I have many varieties of tea and lattes and mocha java and more, more, more.. plus a veritable wilderness of white chocolate mixes, holiday nog and buttered rum mixes, low sugar mixes, cider mixes and more.
You won’t believe the sheer magnitude of diversity you will be able to access — the whole range of Akashic Records all the way to Godly Powers and more, all through this simple action of GETTING INTO THE FLOW.
It’s safe, it’s simple, it’s easy, it’s very profitable, and it’s fun. I hope that doesn’t disqualify it for you as a spiritual practice.
See You At The Top!!!
gorby