Comment 1346651351 on October 2026 Membership Drive: Connecting Your Tags | Archive of Our Own

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Comment on October 2026 Membership Drive: Connecting Your Tags

EchoEkhi Fri 16 Oct 2026 01:13AM UTC

It costs much less than that. Probably less than 1 USD from China

But the OTW spends a lot of money and volunteer time on postage and packing, I think they spent over $50k last year. Considering the majority of the $200 is meant to go towards actually donating to the nonprofit, the higher-than-normal "profit margin" makes sense

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1. Amy2 (OTW_DevMem) (Official) Fri 16 Oct 2026 02:05AM UTC
  
  The calendars cost about $9 to produce, and another $10 to ship within the United States ($22 if it's leaving the united states, though our regional shipping volunteers help defray some of those costs.) Our goal is to always keep production + average shipping for the donation gifts at a maximum of 10% of the total. Otherwise that "money raised" banner would be very inaccurate, since most of it would be going towards merch and a lot less towards maintaining AO3, Fanlore, etc, which is the actual goal of the membership drive!
  
  It also affects how you write it off on your taxes. If you're itemizing your charitable donations, and you donated $200 for the calendar, you can only write off $191.
  
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2. 1. EchoEkhi Fri 16 Oct 2026 02:26AM UTC
    
    Obviously I don't know who your supplier is but $9 is more than twice the market rate.
    
    https://m.made-in-china.com/search/product?word=desk+calendar
    
    But if they're made in the USA then I guess it's reasonable
    
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  2. 1. RuanChunXian Fri 16 Oct 2026 02:36AM UTC
      
      OTW probably doesn't produce enough for market rate, you can only scale down production cost if you produce in large numbers. (I am currently also juggling merch budget for work in a vastly different market but I'm sure the principles are the same.)
      
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3. Romanova_xin Fri 16 Oct 2026 05:27AM UTC
  
  okay? They're paying people actual living wages instead of exploiting people in sweatshops. How do you think China is able to sell not making a profit or very little?
  
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