The Future Of Foreign Coin Album Manufacturing...?

I'm happy to do the design aspect. I'm certain my skills are already up there to match what is expected in the market.

For now I will continue to tease what I can come up with.

Had to google it since it had no email contact...

Never realized how outdated it is - no idea how it manage to survive in today's business. I wonder how expensive it is to buy the whole business...

ace_ftw: this can be more than complicated for some world coins. Japan for instance started out with medal alignment in 1870. This was soon switched over to coin alignment in 1873. And then in 1918, it went back to medal alignment. Now imagine how difficult it was to put everything down! Especially with pages where both orientations appear on the same page. I cannot count how many times I nearly wanted to throw the whole project out when I was doing the Japan type set. Romania is also another country that comes to mind where coin and medal alignment do swap around depending on the era.

At this point of time, I would struggle to understand how we cannot replicate something that was done more than 50 years ago. Agreed, price will be a challenge but I'm sure with the right team, your idea is something should be doable.

It is rather easy to contact Whitman Publishing. I've done that many times in the past. And they do reply and sometimes it is worth the effort with them. One time they sent me a free book on Silver Dollars for my interest in their company's products. However, don't expect an organization of that size to change or modify their equipment to make a Folder or Album for probably less than a few million customers. If you go to their web site you would see they make lots and lots of things and most bring them money.

How about we start it from scratch? The market may need some competition to spice things up.

Design can be done as quickly from a week to a couple of months. I'm certain if I had time, I can redo the entire 7070 (my style) in under a month - I've already taken time to do the research and did a rough plan of how the layout should look like.

I'm curious - how can one look up information for manufacturing process for such albums? (We'll leave the marketing on the other side for now) Since some of the coin albums that I have are more than 50 years old - I really cannot imagine that this is rocket science...

The album companies need to sell a good deal of albums to recoup the expense of making it. How many albums would they sell for say, the Japan type set shown above? In Japan, probably a good many. World wide, not very many more would add to the total sold in Japan. Same would hold for say, Argentine silver coins, or Sub-Saharan Francs of Africa, that kind of thing. It could take them twenty years to recoup the cost of printing and storing a certain run of albums while waiting for them to sell.

I think if you want a custom page layout, buy some slab holders, put your coins in them, and then put the slabs on a special album page.

Sorry, didn't notice replies to this thread.

I guess what I am trying to say is that it's always easy to look at the negative aspects. Bear in mind that technology is always advancing and so is cost of manufacturing. If you look at just printing technology alone - guess how far color printing have come. I remember the time when dot matrix printer became portable and owning one at home was the envy. All that changed in a matter of 20 (?) years. Now it's the era of 3D printer.

I speculate that when such albums were first made more than fifty years ago, they were manually measured, cut, glued etc. Now with digital designing and newer machinery - I find it hard to comprehend that this is difficult to replicate. Of course, cost is always an issue but at this point of time, I do not know how to find out the cost of such manufacturing.

Isn't it a bit too early to throw the towel without doing any business analysis and potential market demand?