Summary
The earliest engraving patterns in Indonesia date back to somewhere between 5,40,000 and 4,30,000 years. This implies that engraving is a seasoned art. With the advancement in technology over the years, engraving has attained the form it is in today.
Out of a number of engraving methods, laser engraving is the most popular one today. If you too want to venture into custom engraving, a laser engraving business plan would be the best.
List of Laser Engraving Product Ideas
Below are a few products on which you can engrave to help turn your custom laser engraving business plan into a success.
Invitation Cards
Owing to the ever-growing need for uniqueness and innovation, gift retailers wish to stand out. For that, they are offering ‘personalized engraved business cards and invites’.
Several businesses need to give out high-end engraved business cards made from wood, plastic, metal, etc. to their clients. These personalized business cards are becoming increasingly popular. The reason is that they help businesses reflect their personality, stand out, and connect better with clients.
Another industry that has tapped into engraving is the wedding industry. At grand and high-end weddings of royals or the rich, they send engraved wedding invites instead of paper invites. Personalized invites not only add to the ‘grandeur’ but also appeal to the invitees.
Further, guests keep these engraved cards as life-long memoirs unlike traditional paper invites that don’t last long. Engraved cards are useful even in other ‘grand’ celebration events like birthdays or marriage anniversaries.
So, collaboration with wedding and party-planning magazines and companies can help tap into customers’ need for personalized invites.
Toy Boxes
Dealing in themed toy boxes can be a profitable domestic business venture. You can engrave unique and appealing designs on colorful toy boxes made of metal. A themed box should be depictive of an elaborate theme like cowboys, dinosaurs, horses, etc.
You can collaborate with various toy-manufacturing companies and toy sellers to sell them on a wholesale basis. You can also sell them directly to end consumers via your business site, trade shows, or a mall kiosk. To market your business further, you can also expand to creating wooden engraved toys and give them away as a surprise gift with every toy box order.
Decorative Wooden Pieces
There are several types of wood like pine, oak, maple, mahogany, etc. that you can laser- engrave intricate designs on. You can engrave patterns, texts, or small images on various wooden pieces in different shapes and sell as home-decor wooden pieces.
Junkyard Furniture Creations
It might sound a bit odd, but junkyard furniture is trending. The key to the success of this business is creating funky yet operational furniture from thrown-away and discarded junkyard items.
Couches and chairs are examples of a few furniture items that you can manufacture by partially assembling from antique auto parts. (like the auto parts from ‘57 Chevy front end).
Note: This type of engraving business requires you to have artistic ability, a well-equipped workshop, and design and construction skills. Though a bit more expensive than others, this business idea is worth going for if you are an aspiring entrepreneur and love creativity and fun.
Mirror Art
Mirror art is nothing but small mirror pieces of varying colors and shapes put together to create a landscape, picture, or abstract design. You can visit a nearby glass shop, collect small discarded cut-off mirror pieces, and engrave beautiful patterns on them. Then you can compile them to get a mirror art.
Once you finish this mirror art, you can sell it at sales kiosks in malls, gift shops, or your online store.
Wall Clocks
A clock might sound quite a simple thing for engraving purposes. However, if you have creativity and skills, you can become a full-time horologist. A one-of-a-kind personalized timepiece can help you engage customers more.
You can make and sell different types of clocks like nursery time clocks, gothic-styled engraved clocks, wooden engraved clocks, etc.
Wedding Albums and Decoration Accessories
Be it a wedding photo album or a guest book, an engraved cover gives it a ‘classy’ touch. You can engrave anything like the couple’s initials or photos on a wedding guest book or photo album.
Laser engraving goes beyond just wedding decorations. As you can also create intricate designs on a variety of several textiles and fabrics like cotton, denim, leather, etc. to give them a ‘wedding-ready’ look.
Moving on, you will find wine bottles, decoration items, wedding culinary products, wedding cake accessories, and more that you can customize with laser engraving.
The list doesn’t end here. You can sell personalized designer bridal shoes as today’s couples don’t prefer cookie-cutter ceremonies but want everything suited to their personalities.
Similarly, you can manufacture wooden engraved guest books for prestigious hotels looking for custom guest books with their hotel names (or taglines) engraved.
For 5-star hotels or high-end guest houses and weddings, an engraved photo book cover or a guest book can be a great option.
Marketing Material
At times, businesses look for etched cards on special occasions for their clients/customers to maintain a rapport with their clientele. You can cater to those businesses by laser-engraving greeting cards and selling them.
You can also design cards to announce clients’ special events and embellish cards with customers’ signatures and logos for special occasions for these businesses.
Doctors, insurance agents, real estate brokers, apartment managers, hairstylists, shopkeepers, etc., would want their clients to return to them. That is why they want to give away ‘things’ that can help them stay in their clients’ minds. You can target a niche or two like these and start custom engraving to help them make the best greeting cards for their clientele.
Glass Etching
Glass etching is the creation of beautifully intricate designs on glass window panes, mugs, shot glasses, steins, and wine glasses. Laser engraving can let you achieve a great glass-etched piece.
You can take it a step further by using the laser engraving machine and custom solid glass or crystal cubes with 3-D images inside them. Glass etching can help you target various industries like law-enforcement agencies where they need to etch identification codes or marks for security purposes.
Mats
As a laser engraving machine can transfer designs on almost any type of fabric or textile, you can engrave cute images or witty welcome messages or notes on welcome mats. You can also engrave on various other mats like dining mats, yoga mats, etc. and personalize them.
Coasters
Imagine sipping tea from a cup with a superbly designed coaster underneath! Coasters add ‘aesthetic’ value to the dining table. You can sell laser-engraved coasters to crockery retailers on a wholesale basis or sell them on your online retail store to engage customers looking for engraved coasters.
Cut-Outs
Why not turn your hobby of creating cutouts into your profession with laser engraving? Yes, you can do it. There are times when carpenters, interior designers, decorators, and crafters need to manufacture custom puzzles, chess boards, special images on wooden pieces, etc., for gifts. You can jump in right there to provide what they need by collaborating with such carpenters and interior designers.
Leather Apparel and Accessories
A little expensive yet worth trying (if you have enough capital reserve) laser engraving business plan is selling custom leather shoes. You can produce stunning designs on belts, bags, wallets, shoes, jackets, hoodies, and more and sell them in your own store or through other big retail giants.
Trophies
Engraved trophies are in high demand as several big organizations need them for various sports competitions. Crystal, metal, acrylic, and wooden trophies are some variants you can use your laser engraving machine on and personalize them for sports competitions.
Decoration Ornaments
The festive season is around the corner. You can manufacture Diwali and Christmas ornaments with laser-cut equipment. This business can help you earn a part-time seasonal income every year just before you want to roll out big marketing plans for Christmas.
Christmas ornaments like tree decorations or door wreaths are easy to create and also cost-effective. Similarly, Diwali ornaments and stuff like engraved ‘diyas’ and lamps can attract shoppers’ attention.
You can also sell engraved decoration items like cookie boxes, cards, etc. for the holiday season.
Bookmarks
If you are already in the stationery business and want to add something ‘interesting’ to it, laser engraving can help. Beautifully laser-engraved bookmarks made of wood or leather can hit the right chord with voracious readers and bibliophiles.
You can start selling them separately or give them away for free on a big order for expensive books or other stationery items.
Tombstone
According to Forbes, the US funeral industry accounts for about $20 Billion in annual economic activity. It might sound very unethical to seek a business opportunity in ‘demises,’ but there is one.
People want to create virtual legacies in this digital age for their departed near and dear ones. Be it the marble, caskets, or a granite canvas, you can ‘personalize’ them with laser engraving.
Getting a tombstone engraved in the memory of a departed one is everyone’s wish, and you can get that done for them.
Pet Accessories
The connection of a human with a dog is ages old. Similarly, there are many pet animals that humans often get attached to and treat them like their own family members. This is the reason why the pet memorial industry is blooming.
People seek self-designed memorials for their departed pets and want to fill the void with a tribute memorial. You can sell engraved cremation urns, jewelry, granite memorials, etc. to people and let them preserve the memories of their pets forever.
8 Reasons Why Laser Engraving is the Most Viable Engraving Method
1. Superfast Production
Laser marking and engraving are unbeatable when it comes to speed. A laser engraving machine has minimum moving parts and can engrave on almost any material. It is this super-fast production that several manufacturers and engraving business owners have embraced laser engraving technology across the globe.
Fast and mass production in less time helps you escalate ROI.
2. Contact Free
Before laser engraving, the dot peen process would be widely acceptable.
The dot peen process used a diamond or carbide stylus that would repeatedly strike on the product and create the mark. There was no ink or chemical involved. The downside of this method was that repeated mechanical or hitting pressures would sometimes damage the product. As a result, you couldn’t engrave fragile materials with this method. Even the harder materials would suffer damage at times – though minimal.
Since laser engraving technology came into the picture, there is hardly any material that you can’t mark or engrave on as it is entirely physical contact-free.
3. Accurate
The accuracy of laser engraving depends on the size of the laser beam hitting the material. In most cases, a laser beam is minuscule of just around .001 inches, and the error margin is merely ± 0.0005 inches. It implies that the result will be 500 dpi to 600 dpi. And with this great accuracy and fine details, photorealistic designs or images on any material’s surface become a cakewalk.
This fine detail makes incredibly small design, text, or graphics comprehensible, no matter how incredibly small the design, text, or graphic is.
4. Lasts Longer
With no ink or chemical compound needed, laser engraving either heats the surface for color effect or vaporizes certain areas minimally to make the design visible. As a result, there is no fading or deterioration of engraving as time passes due to no physical or chemical strain.
5. Versatile
Material and shape – laser engraving offers versatility (a wide range of options) for them both. Be it wood, plastic, metal, ceramic, concrete, stone, textile, paper, or any other material; a laser engraving machine can engrave it. All you need is a change in power settings.
When it comes to shapes and sizes, laser engraving excels again as you can engrave upon materials of almost any size or shape (flat, round, or curved) as it is 100% contact-free.
6. Budget Friendly
There are numerous laser engraving machine models out there that lie in the price range of $3000-$10000. A quality laser engraving machine needs minimal maintenance costs, and there is a very rare need for frequent replacement of parts.
7. Easy to Learn
A laser engraving machine earlier would be a bit tedious to operate. However, with an upgrade in technology, laser engravers no longer face problems in operating procedures and can quickly master laser engraving with manuals and detailed guidelines.
8. Environment Friendly
Concern for environment safety is on the rise. Everyone is on the hunt for sustainable and eco-friendly solutions. Laser engraving business is gaining traction as there is no involvement of ink or toxic chemicals. This makes it an eco-friendly technology.
Ready to Take the Plunge?
Laser Engraving has opened the door to umpteen business avenues based on laser engraving technology. If you too are eying on a relevant and competent business with high ROI, custom engraving business can be an excellent choice.
Again, you can take your customers’ experience to a higher level by letting customers ‘create’ the designs for themselves. How?
By setting up your online retail store and integrating an online product designer tool into it! Customers would love to unleash their creativity and turn their imaginations into reliability via a user-friendly product designer.
Eventually, your first-time customers will turn into your regular customers!
Excited to get your hands on a next-gen online product designer right away? Take a personalized demo to understand the product in-depth.
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