We all know that in general Krink's graffiti mops, markers, and all of the other graffiti products
they sell, are priced way above the average for whatever graffiti product they're selling.
All you have to do is go to any graffiti site or store and you'll see that Krink is the single
most expensive brand for almost any graffiti product that you could be looking at. And yet
still, based on data from google trends and youtube search volumes,
Krink is still some of the most searched for graffiti products out there! Ao why is it that
Krink can charge some of the highest prices of any graffiti company for almost any graffiti product,
including very generic uniform products, and still have graffiti writers coming back for more?
In other words, how is Krink so good at making money off of graffiti writers? Well today i'm
going to be answering that very question and telling you why Krink is the best at
making money in graffiti and how exactly they do it. I'm going to be outlining how Krink as
a company is able to outdo the competition and how they've been doing this for such a long time,
right under everyone's noses! To start off i'll say this: As a graffiti writer on youtube,
i don't really get a chance to use my degree very often in almost any capacity here. but my degree
is in business administration and economics; so i do have a few insights as to what's going on
here exactly. And that's not to say that it's even remotely complicated, but it's all stuff
that you just probably haven't considered before about Krink. So let's get into it!
Normal graffiti companies offer the option to buy an empty graffiti mop and a refill of some
of their paint and ink formulae. Pro tip with Sciz here! (And i have mentioned this before.)
It's always cheaper or more economical to buy a mop pre-filled or empty and a refill, than it is
to just buy pre-filled mops. For example, let's take a look at Grog. You could buy an empty 70 ml
Grog squeeze mop for $2.95 US - we're gonna use us because it's a fairly standard currency
worldwide - and you can buy a 200 ml Grog full metal paint refill, just like this, for 11.95 US,
roughly. That combination would get you 200 ml of paint for a per ml price of just under six cents
per ml, and a mop for 2.95 per mop for a total of 14.90. Now to get 200 ml of this paint without
buying this refill, you would have to buy three 70 ml Grog mops pre-filled. And yes i'm well aware 70
times 3 is 210, but it's as close as we're gonna get. Okay? In that case, the price is roughly 7.95
per pre-filled mop times 3 is equal to 23.85 instead of that 14.90. "But Sciz,
you got three mops instead of one." Yes, you did. But aside from the benefit of being able
to fill three mops with three different colours, rather than just one colour of a 200 ml refill,
there isn't much benefit to having three because you're always going to be using one at a time.
And don't try and tell me that eventually mops wear out because that's what buying
nib replacements is for! That's another better way to do that. The underlying point here is,
if you couldn't buy this Grog 200 ml refill to get that 200 ml of paint, you'd have to spend
8.95 more, and you'd be left with two extra mops that give you potentially a little bit
of value... Even if you do wanna argue that those mops aren't useless, buying three empty mops and
one of these refills is still cheaper than buying three pre-filled mops. And also, marginal benefit
decreases with every unit of something bought / consumed. That's one of the oldest and most
basic economic models ever created! So, I mean, you can't really argue with that. But what does
all this gibberish actually have to do with Krink? Yup. You guessed it. Krink does the
exact same thing. And what they do is they don't offer any refills of their paint or ink formulae.
And just to prove this, i can tell you i checked (and you can go check too) bombingscience.com,
artprimo.com, oinkartltd, anonym-shop.ca, and a whole bunch more graffiti shops. Basically,
from the most major aggregators of graffiti supplies to the most minor, you can't find any
Krink refills being sold. Furthermore, and this should end that discussion, on the official Krink
site itself there are no refills available. Also on the review I did, reviewing the Krink K60 here,
out of 11 000 views that it got, many people in the comments were able to confirm for me that they
do not sell refills for Krink, but they did used to sell a refill of their silver paint formula.
And on the same video only one person out of those 11 000 viewers decided to try and contradict me
and say that Krink does offer refills. But when asked to provide a link to the store selling them
or to say where they got those refills, they just responded saying some exist in "shops" still....
okay. So if you do find any Krink refills, it's almost certainly very old stock. But how does
that make money for Krink? Well, the exact same concept applies that i outlined for Grog. And it
works in Krink's favour too. The bottom line is if you want any of that sweet, permanent,
Krink formula, you have to buy it in a pre-filled mop just like this one. For example, if you want
180 ml of the Krink paint formula because it's permanent and because you love it and because it
smells good (it smells pretty good to be honest) you would have to buy three of these Krink K60s.
And you would also have to pay a premium price to buy each of those Krink K60s. In this case
"premium" means that you're paying more for the mop and the paint because it's bundled together
and for some reason that's more convenient or something. And once these Krink K60s are empty,
they're empty, at least in terms of the Krink paint formula. You can obviously refill them
with something else, but that's not what we're interested in here is it? Now that explains how
Krink forces the graffiti writer to spend more money than you otherwise would have to buy the
same amount of paint, because to get that same amount of paint, you would have to buy more
mops than you could ever reasonably want, or let alone have carrying space for! But
that also leads to how Krink sells better than their competition even, using this strategy!
So Krink's strategy of essentially having a perceived high value paint and ink formula
that graffiti artists seem to be willing to pay more per ml for, and also buy it in inconvenient
mop to ml paint ratios, clearly makes graffiti artists pay more than they otherwise would have,
and makes Krink more money therefore. Because they're not selling these at a loss,
i guarantee you that! But it also helps them out-do the competition, because i'm fairly
certain that selling mops like this and markers has a far higher profit margin than selling paint
refills. And i'm gonna look over to my computer here because i have some numbers crunched for
you. So just briefly here, for example, if Krink were to sell 180 ml refill of their formula,
the cost of the bottle might be 10 cents and the cost of the paint might be three dollars for the
180 ml. If they sold this for 15 dollars, which would be a low price for Krink, they would make
15 minus three dollars for the cost of paint minus 10 cents for the bottle, (if it's a plastic
one like this - their old refills were in glass bottles for some reason,) minus some negligible
manufacturing and filling costs is equal to about 11.90 in profit. Therefore, their profit
margin on that refill would be 79.33% - not bad. Although the cost in companies and their pricing
strategies may be a little bit different within different graffiti companies, generally within
the industry across the board you're going to see very similar profit margins on products like
a paint refill because all the companies have to formulate it, all the companies have to mix it,
all the companies have to bottle it, and sell it. Those are roughly the same activities creating the
same costs; although i do suspect that Krink's profit margin is slightly higher to begin with
even, because they do have that brand equity that allows them to raise their prices. But that's
not the point. The point is, just offering refills like every other graffiti company,
like Grog does, wouldn't give Krink an advantage over another company in the market. Instead,
if they make you buy three pre-filled Krink K60s, and they don't offer empty mops either; that's a
whole nother thing, for roughly 14.90 US each, that's a total of 44.85. For this let's assume
that their costs of these plastic mop bodies and the nibs aren't particularly expensive. And i do
know that that's fairly accurate because i worked as a buyer within a company who manufactured
their own products and poly plastics like this really aren't very expensive, especially in bulk,
obviously. And i have pinpointed that Krink gets a lot of their mop reservoirs made in a factory
in niagara region. So again, i'm going to look to the computer here. Let's say 10 cents for the mop
reservoir and 10 cents for the nib, times three (because you bought three of them) is 60 cents for
the mops themselves that it cost them. Then the same 180 ml of paint, which is what's in the three
mops, cost them the same three dollars to put in those three mops. And all manufacturing costs
being equal, their total cost to supply the three pre-filled mops would be the three dollars plus
the sixty cents: three dollars and sixty cents total. This means that their new profit margin,
using this strategy, is now 91.97%. Krink just raised their profit margin by almost 12 and
2/3rds percent above the industry average, just by not offering paint refills! And not only that,
but by not offering refills of their highly sought-after paint formula ,number one, they're
making graffiti artists pay more than other companies are making graffiti artists pay for
essentially the exact same products. Number two, they're making graffiti artists buy more product
to get the same amount of paint formula as they could get with a different cheaper refill option,
and most importantly overall, they found an easy way to out-do the competition and make more money
per sale than other graffiti brands, which, in the long run, will help them get further and
further ahead and continue to help them prosper and make ridiculous amounts of money. And although
the industry average profit margin that we came up with is a guess, the concept still stands,
and that's the important part here. The way Krink is doing it, it costs them less to sell more! And
because of this they're able to outsell the competition, moving them further and further
ahead in market capitalization! And if this isn't enough to convince you of what they're doing, just
go to their site and look at all the ridiculous packs of 6 and packs of 12 of all of their mops
and markers that they're selling for well over a hundred and hundred and fifty dollars each!
It's incredible that they have a market for this, but they've managed to build one. They
have them in those gigantic packs because that is how they want you to buy their products.
And i do want to emphasize that the strategy Krink is using is highly assisted by Krink having paint
and ink formulae that appear to be highly valued within a lot of graffiti circles. And although i'm
not anywhere near an expert in a field such as economics, the way they're selling their paint
and ink formulae specifically has an element of scarcity to it, which makes it harder to
get than other paints like a Grog refill. I won't go through this whole model i'm showing you here,
but when you introduce scarcity into a resource market i.e making something limited or hard to
get, you have the ability to affect the demand of the resource and increase its price.** In this
case specifically the resource here is the paint, not the mop itself. And although the formula isn't
necessarily harder to get later, as opposed to the present, i'm sort of theorizing here
that the way it is limited might have the same effect as the scarcity graph shows. For Krink,
instead of selling 200 ml refills, they only sell 60 ml of their paint at a time. This doesn't
place a constraint on the overall amount of paint that anyone can buy, but it does make it hard for
individuals to get as much as they want because of their individual budgetary constraints. And
before some idiot says in the comments, "oh just rack it," you can't rack Krink, because the only
people that sell Krink are graffiti artists who own graffiti shops and they know what racking is
okay? So just shut those comments down. So that budgetary constraint would move the model out of
equilibrium to the left, where people are willing to pay at price Ps, a higher price for fewer ml
of paint within mops. The way I'm theorizing, the model doesn't exactly fit the scenario, but i am
convinced that Krink is somehow making scarcity rent or some other kind of rent somehow here. But
that's as far as i'm gonna go today on this sort of exposé on Krink and their business strategies.
But what i do want to know is, what do you guys think? Is it right for Krink to be doing this
from a consumer standpoint? Do you guys think this is good? There is probably an argument suggesting
that the way they do it actually does increase the total money available in a graffiti market;
i didn't get into that at all. But i'd love to see what the community is thinking on this,
so let me know in the comments what your opinion is! I guarantee you, i will definitely read it! If
you found this video interesting, maybe consider subscribing to see more. We now have over 300
graffiti related videos here on the channel that you can check out, if you want. I hope to see you
in one of those very shortly, including the ones on screen. Until then, peace!