Still, $3.33 a cleaning is pretty spendy. Why so much for a piece of foam tape?
I’ve been getting this question a lot lately so I’ll address it. First, this is not an “off the shelf” foam tape, it’s custom made in small quantities, all within a very expensive clean room. Plus, every part that goes into the pad is cleaned, ionized and brought up to the level of the clean room. So, right there we have three strikes against us; custom, small run and clean room. On top of that, every pad is Quality Assured… every single one. Most manufacturers do what is called random pulls of a production run for QA. I wanted tighter QA on every pad because these are going on $8K camera sensor filters. Just this one QA step increased my cost $5 per pad. Then add the profit margins for the distributors and the retailers, the cost of trade shows, trade show mark-ups, marketing, salaries, employee tax, rent, phones, office supplies, trademarks, patent applications and on and on and on… and you can see why it’s priced where it is. The final topper is the “Made In America” stamp. Lets
