“In 2023 alone, I spent $2.6 million on PCBs”: Josh Scott breaks down the costs of making a guitar pedal
Ever wondered what it takes to build a guitar pedal? Are pedal companies just ripping us off with inflated prices on components we could easily put together at home? Well, not as much as the internet might lead you to believe, says JHS founder Josh Scott.
In a new video, Scott discusses some of the common misconceptions surrounding the costs of producing guitar pedals and addresses claims about excessive profits in the pedal industry.
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To start, the pedal master addresses the misconception that pedal manufacturers are raking in massive profits, refuting in particular, YouTuber John Nathan Cordy’s recent claim that JHS is “building in quite a lot of profit” into its recently discontinued Ross pedals.
Scott clarifies that most pedal companies, including JHS, operate on a business-to-business model, selling to dealers rather than directly to consumers. This means that the retail price often does not reflect the true profit margins for manufacturers, which can be quite slim.
More importantly, the pedal master explains that building a guitar pedal involves more than just assembling a few components. The average cost of producing a Ross pedal — that JHS recently cleared at a fire sale of $79 each — for instance, amounts to $55 just for the parts (enclosure, circuit boards etc) alone. This figure does not even account for additional expenses such as payroll, raw materials, and royalties, which can significantly inflate the final cost.
“In 2023 alone, I spent $2.6 million on PCBs,” Scott reveals.
The founder also critiques what he refers to as “Facebook group math”, where people make assumptions based on simplistic calculations about sales figures and profits. He emphasises that it’s not as straightforward as multiplying the number of pedals sold by their retail price to determine profit.
“This is one of the most annoying things a builder sees on the internet,” Scott says. “Whether this is Chase Bliss or Caroline Guitar or whoever, we all sell out of something and then someone does this: ‘number of pedals sold’ times ‘dollar amount’ [and] they’re buying a yacht… It’s not how it works.”
Elsewhere in the video, Scott also addresses another common misconception: that there is little to no research and development (R&D) involved in cloning pedals, when in fact, “R&D work on exacting a clone is insanely difficult.”
Citing the JHS Muffuletta as an example, he says that the amount of effort put into cloning that pedal far exceeds what’s needed to “make an original circuit”.
“There’s a huge misnomer that research and development doesn’t apply to cloning. It’s ridiculous because you still have to do the exact same work,” says Scott.
Watch the full video below.
The post “In 2023 alone, I spent $2.6 million on PCBs”: Josh Scott breaks down the costs of making a guitar pedal appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.
Source: www.guitar-bass.net
