Discounts, Deals and Decals

Seriously, who wants to pay for decals? I sure don't, and it's my damn logo on them. I can't imagine any November customers want to spend extra so that their wheels satisfy our egos.

We've posted a bunch of pictures of our wheelsets on the site, in the FSW and RFSW sections. You'll see they don't have decals. We're minimalist, but not quite that much. The wheels will have some decals. We've worked to strike a balance between tasteful, brand-enhancing and affordable. How we got there is an interesting story (to me anyway), so I'll share it here.

First, here is a sheet of decals we are using for the RFSWs:

(click to enlarge)Each wheel will have the "November" logo on the arc on one side, and the "Race Smart" circle 180 degrees opposite. Repeat on the other side of the wheel, multiply by two wheels and you've got 8 graphics total per wheelset - four of each type. Our cost per wheelset for this graphics scheme is about $7. We're having our decals done here in the states by Vince over at HoopSkinz.com. Yeah, we could save a little money having the decals done in Taiwan, but we give up flexibility. Since we're doing them here, we'll be able to offer custom decal colors. So we will.

The price of decals is largely a function of how many you can shoehorn onto a sheet like the one in the picture. Contrast the white space above with the white space on the sheet below, which was the original design for the alloy wheel decals:

(click to enlarge)The original plan for the alloys was to put only one of these on each side of each wheel, for 4 graphics total. But because of the wasted space on the sheet from the layout and the much larger sheet required, the price per wheelset would have been about $20. On wheels that retail for $345, $20 is way too much to spend on decals, no matter how cool they look. So we got on the phone with Vince to better understand the process and see if we could redesign the decals so that they still made an impact on the narrow 27mm rims, and saved us (and you) some money in the process. 

This is what we came up with:

(click to enlarge)We're using a similar "November" arc to the tubulars, but much smaller. The "Race Smart" circle will have a hole in the center for the valve stem, and will drape over both sides of the rim. Ignore the red - those are the cut-lines for the graphics. But don't ignore the grey - our default graphic color will be grey instead of the white you see on the sheets above. 

Because of the reduced size and better spacing on the sheet, we were able to lower the cost of the decals from $20 per FSW alloy wheelset down to just a few bucks. This way, it doesn't affect the selling price of the wheels at all - we'll gladly eat a few bucks of margin in exchange for logos small and tasteful enough that you may actually leave them on the wheels. 

I don't know how the other wheel brands justify the expense of 12 huge decals per wheelset. Oh wait, yes I do - it's because they charge $2300/pair.