Hi, all,
As I've mentioned, the hunchbacks and I are going into the photoreceiver business. The first product is the QL-01, a 1 uA FS photoreceiver that's shot noise limited above 10 nA in a 1 MHz bandwidth, and about 6 dB better than that at 500 kHz. We've got working boards, nice boxes, UPC codes, and some artwork, and we've figured out the fulfillment-by-Amazon thing. Soooo, the last two things on the list are board stuffing and label printing.
We obviously want the boxes to look nice and professional, so the plan is to have a thick, clear plastic label on the top and one end of the box, fitting neatly into the recesses that Hammond thoughtfully provides for that purpose, and nicely printed in full colour.
There seem to be two main classes of label company. The fancy ones, such as Melrose Nameplate and Steven Label, will do whatever you want, including laser cutting, but there's a lot of setup charges and stuff that makes the labels expensive (like $3 apiece) unless you order a zillion.
Then there are the lower tech outfits such as Wizard Label, who'll print whatever you ask, on a more limited choice of material, for way cheaper, like 70 cents each for 400 labels. They typically only do die cutting, so there's a $200ish NRE for each custom size that we need.
We've got sample requests out, so we'll see what they look like, but I'd like to know what you guys use, how you like them, and how much they cost.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs