I was a little surprised at the price point these are listed for, so I went to the MM website to do some research on them, and found that 25% of the profits go to the Wounded Warrior project... :thumbup:
That is a great organization, and they do terrific things for the wounded Vets
Thanks so much for your post. I do want to point out a few things.
The cost for our building, sourcing straps, and coating in the USA is very very high on our current MM01 models. Our up coming MM1 models which I really need to get some names for will be priced lower than our current models. Having said that they will have less US content as well to get to that lower price. But we will still build them in US and of course donate 25% of the profit from each sold.
Also the groups we have so far raised funds for are The Gary Sinise Foundation, and Mercury One. With both 100% of the funds they raise go to their charity programs. None of the funds they raise go to operating costs such as marketing etc.
While WWP is quite popular a lot of their funds raise goes to operational expenses and their CEO is paid quite a lot. Currently only 57.9% of funds they raise goes to program expenses.
http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summary&orgid=12842#.VE1U8vnF83k
As we are just hanging in there and as such the amount we have been able to raise in our 1st 2 years is quite modest. We look for charities in which 80% or more goes to program expenses.
They are not many of those and generally those that are have their operational expenses bank rolled by wealthy people like Gary Sinise and his friends. Those groups also tend to get a lot less press etc as they have really almost no marketing budget and each of their employee's does about the work of a half dozen people.
As a brand we compare ourselves to brands like Shinola, Lum-Tec, Resco Instruments, Weiss, and others who also build their watches in the US and source some of their parts in the US.
We have been finding that for many like us things are really rough out their financially especially it seems in the last few months though it does not seem it's being reported on much.
Many have compared our pricing to mass producers like Seiko, Micro brands that source everything including assembly in China, as well as small efforts which are basically guys sourcing quality case parts, so so auto movements and then building in the US. I can tell you those last guys are not making enough money to really stay in business. But there will not doubt be 10 more guys for everyone that does not make it to take their place.
At any rate I could go into a lot more that I have learned from being in the business but I don't want to bore everyone.
So we are creating the MM1 series based on many lessons learned with our first effort. Things like most of the people are not watch people per say and they don't really no about watches with screw down crowns or care if a watch has 200 to 300 meter water resistance etc. Also many feel that our 43mm watches are like wearing a clock and the new sweet spot even in the watch world seems to be 40 to 42mm. I was pretty sure that was going to be the case way back when we spec'ed our current watches and was very close to at the last minute switching to a 40 to 42mm size. In 2015 we may re-tool and do that. We have also learned many women are interested in our efforts to build watches in the US and raise money for charity. Much more than we had expected. Another surprise is our brand does not really appeal to full blown watch collectors but really appeals to traditional watch wearers who are 50 years of age and older. Many of which are veterans.
So with our MM1 series we are going with a 38mm size. I have to be honest and say I am really questioning that but one of the ways we are saving money is by going with existing tooling. Otherwise we would have opted for 40mm. But I think we would have found that was still larger than what women would buy and would still be a bit large for old school watch wearing men.
We have not set pricing for the MM1 series yet but the goal is an MSRP of $299 for the brushed Stainless models and about $30 more for the black PVD versions. We plan to do a crowd funding effort 1st quarter of next year with the price for our most affordable model being around $200.
We plan to offer a 5 year warranty, and free lifetime battery replacement. We had planned on only offering these with a black leather strap. I think to add value we may ship each with the leather strap and a matching metal bracelet. We hope people will view these overall as a solid value based on the quality, etc.
So far the matte white dial seems to be the most popular which we totally did not see coming. We are also not sure who we are going to describe the color as when we got the samples in hand the dial color on those appeared to be closer to a light tan but to be honest we really can't decide what it is. We do know we really like it. =)