We’ve had fantastic feedback from everyone who watched the BBC One High Street Dreams featuring Bex Simon.  The one overriding question from everyone is this – what happened to the costs?  One moment the audience were told that it could be made for £7, and at the end they are left with a price of £250 .  We feel it is a shame the audience were left without an explanation for this and as it might seem as though a figure was plucked out of the air and we were trying to diddle everyone out of a few hundred quid, we wanted to fill in the gaps!

At the time when Bex was being grilled at HQ, her fantastic mentor Nick Munro had advised her, from his own experience, that we should be able to get the pieces made for around £7 overseas i.e. China. Shortly after this Nick Munro left the mentoring process and Nick Leslau stepped in as our business mentor.  We suggested to Nick Leslau that we may have to look to China to meet the demands of the major retailer’s mark up.  Not many people understand that a retailer will sell a product for three times the value that a supplier sells it to them for.  Working this through, if we get a product manufactured, shipped, packaged and delivered for say £10, we must sell it for at least £20 pounds to make a profit and cover our overheads.  The retailer will then sell it for £60 – that is six times the manufacture cost.

We were advised by Nick Leslau that we must begin manufacture in the UK and when we have large orders, take the manufacture overseas.  We had a week to get our costs in place and following Nick Leslau’s advise  we contacted over thirty foundries around the UK.  Taking the lowest quotes we soon realised that costs were spiralling.  We called for crisis meetings to review the situation but, due to the time pressures of the show, these were unanswered.  Regrettably we turned up at the Idea Home Show with UK manufacture costs built into a retail pricing model.

If we could get the Iron manufactured in the UK for around £20, it would retail at £120

If we could get the Bronze manufactured in the UK for around £40, it would retail at £250

We have since had quotes from overseas and we will be able to get the products to retail at the price points of £80 and £120.  Until then we are selling Limited Edition UK Castings direct from our online store at www.bexsimon.com/shop.  These castings will have an anvil on the back of the mortar, ‘BexSimon’ along the neck of the pestle and will be distinguished as Limited Edition by an ‘X’ for BeX and a kiss for FORGED with LOVE.