If you, as a client of a scene shop, specify a product that you know full well they will have to job out, you may want to consider a couple additional things... What is the information pathway from you to the person actually doing the work... How much time will you loose in phone calls having to go through X number of different companies... Where is the product actually coming from...
Let me give you an example... Client calls me, and wants a custom printed scrim... (a scrim is a special weave of fabric, like a fine fish net, sorta, but different, and special in may ways) Well that's no big deal, I call my supplier, and tell them, and then they call the one place in the world that actually seems to have a machine that does this. (its an airbrush system on a huge gantry system... very cool aparently...) They're in Sweden incidently...
Well said client wants a unit bigger than the printer can do in one shot, so they tell me about "invisable"seams... They sent me a sample, and damn, if it isn't virtually invisable.... (I found out today, they glue each string to its matching one by hand... talk about mind numbing...)
So we've been back and forth on several versions, all the time we were getting to and beyond the deadlines I had set, based on the deadlines the printer had set...Well we're past all the deadlines now... The client is still changeing the artwork, and the printer doesn't know if there is actually enough time to do the project now.... I can't even get an answer out of the printer, because, well it was 11:30pm in Sweden when I was going through this at 5:30 here... Why do clients think we live at our shops after normal business hours?
Finally I got them to wait untill the morning before freaking out any more, because it wasn't helping anyone...
Tommorow, we'll try again... never mind the fact that yet another day has slid by without them making any decisions....
The clock continues to unwind...