| I have to disagree with tomc and leeann on that subject, respectfully. If you want to be a serious breeder you cannot do it if you are branded as a junk artist who mixes and breeds anything for a buck. Even pet stores want to feel like they are giving their customers a cut above their competitors for the same price as junk dealers. Most of them would enjoy showing their customer the difference between good bloodlines and junk, and be proud to do it.
You want to be branded as a passionate artist or business person, in a niche area you truly are passionate about. People need to know you care about what you are selling them. Chuppa can be sold easily to local shops and distributors, since there is always a market in pet stores, and if you target locally you reduce their shipping costs and thus improve their profits and reduce risk of losses or color degradation from shipping stress. If you can find a tropicals breeder in your area who does tropicals, most of the time they ship varieties and quantities and operate as distributors as well. Most of them are more than happy to have someone else provide their koi, since koi take up so much water space and food money from them. They can then use their gallonage for higher profit margin things like discus, cichlids, and other fancy tropicals.
If you are smart you can get their total price down, and your profit up higher than those who have to ship over long distances to those markets. Having good dna is an important part of that. You do not have to start with million dollar parents, you can buy decent quality from really good bloodlines and build up from there.
One of the things I hope to do in the future is set up some demos in local pet stores with a small tank of low grade, one of medium grade, and then one of Momotaro koi. To educate and help people understand value. I gaurantee nine out of ten people will buy from the Momotaro or medium tank. You have to understand how people think, everyone wants the best they can possibly get. I want to see how the markets and store owners respond to that.
Once people can look at the larger ones and see the difference they will understand the value difference. If all they see is junk with no expalanations they have no clue. Education is the key to getting folks to buy higher end koi, not reducing our quality to get money to buy trophy parents. Say we have the trophy parents but only know how to sell junk, what then???? |