Breaking down the price of a set of darts
A year ago this blog post would have been pretty easy, in 2026 not so much due to the ridiculous price rise of tungsten. I've written an in depth blog about the price of tungsten already so check that out if you haven't already. I'm updating the price regularly and it makes for painful reading.
Breaking down the price of set of darts
I'll try and detail as much as possible though for different brands it will of course vary. Scale always plays a part in every step of the process. Bigger companies may also be able to afford to stockpile tungsten during cheaper times or when they see the prices exploding (if they don't then they really messed up) so they can offset during harder times. For smaller brands like Loxley we don't have that luxury and are always paying live prices.
The tungsten itself
As I write this the price of tungsten is around $172 per kilo (January 22nd). For the sake of this article I'll use this base tungsten price as the price for a 90% tungsten billet (the 10% of nickel is much cheaper but there's cost in making this alloy into a billet so it's a fair guesstimate).
Let's look at a chunky torpedo dart as an example. The billet we are selecting is 7.15mm by 48.3mm. The weight of this billet is 33.25g and there's 3 billets in a set which gets us to as good as 100g.
So we are already at roughly $17.2 per set in tungsten which is €14.7 or £12.8 without adding any transport costs to the factory.
This example is not an efficient dart. A straight barrel dart is always cheaper as there's far less tungsten to shave off and lose. One of the most inefficient darts ever made is the Loxley Robin which requires a huge tungsten billet, the 24g Robin Pro Tour Edition dart needs a 48g billet of tungsten!
CNC machining
The cost of machining a dart is also pricey. A CNC machine costs hundreds of thousands to purchase and setup. It requires a specialist programmer / operator, requires upkeep, fresh oil and the specialty (diamond) drill bits need regular replacement.
Between production runs there is also downtime while the machine is reprogrammed and different billets are added to the feeder. This downtime part explains why a small production run is more expensive than a large production run as the necessary downtime is factored in as a cost.
The more complex or time intensive the dart and grip is, the longer it takes to machine and the higher the cost. If there's milling involved (fancy grip patterns, lateral cuts) the cost rises even more. So again a simple straight barrel with a simple round ring grip is the cheapest to machine.
The last piece is the factories margin. Nobody works for free. Bills and employees need to be paid and they need to make a profit. The higher the tungsten price the more they have to add on as well as they'll be working on percentages.
Using our torpedo example from above we are going to give it a simple grip, low volume production run and we're adding another £7 to the costs.
Coating, paint, electroplating, sandblasting and re-machining
If a dart has a coating or electroplating just inside the grooves it means there's 2 processes needed. The entire barrel gets coated and then the barrel goes back through the cnc machine to remove the outside layer to just leave the coating in the grooves. The more that gets done the more the costs rise. Costs can vary from 20p to quite a few quid depending on what gets done.
In our example let's add £0.50 for some paint.
Packaging, flights and stems
This is another cost that is highly dependent on volume. At low volumes we are looking at £2 plus for packaging, flights and stems. Minimum order quantities on flights and stems are high (1 roll of a single flight design is over 3,600 sets). For packaging the cost savings happen very quickly with scale. Designing a different packaging design for every dart is way more expensive than for example making a massive range that all use the same packaging but with a different sticker stuck on there.
For our example we'll add £2
Shipping costs
It can cost anywhere between £0.50 and £1.50 per set for shipping depending on who, what, where and when but we'll take a middle ground and add £1 for the example
Import duties
The tax man needs their piece of the pie and the customs desk also take a little bite. Importing to the Netherlands costs us 21% of the production costs, the customs desk fees I'll ignore for our example as it's negligible when based on a fair sized delivery.
The tax situation is also quite complicated as a business pays and collects taxes at various stages and it all gets worked out against each other quarterly. So for our example I'll leave tax for the final stage (retail sales) where it really does have an impact.
Price update
I'm carrying on this blog a few weeks later and the price of tungsten has gone up to 224.34 as of today (13 feb). It's gone way beyond a joke now. Loxley has some darts launching on Monday which we won't be putting back into production any time soon. We ordered them when the price of tungsten was about 90 dollars per kilo and wanted to put them into the market as proper darts at proper prices. We have been selling them to the shops this week as originally planned and priced because we want darts fans to have some good options. But if we were to put them back into production today the manufacturing cost would be about a third higher than we have been giving the shops them for. It is what it is I guess.
I'm going to try and rattle the rest of this blog out quickly before the prices change again but it feels a bit pointless at the moment.
Brand/Manufacturers margin
A darts brand like any other business has to make a good gross profit on everything so that we can pay the rent, salaries, electricity, insurance, internet, player sponsorships, advertising, the tax man, etc etc. We need to make more on top of that so the business can continue to grow because a flat lined company will eventually die.
Some of the bigger brands have their private equity mouths to feed or shareholders who want their piece of the pie. In a normal world a brand would be roughly doubling the cost price and listing that as the trade price to shops.
I think I was at £25.3 running total the other week but using todays prices we would be at about £29. Using the doubling theory that would be £58 a shop is paying for this quite simple set of darts. I don't think that doubling is realistic at these prices and certainly Loxley won't be doing that but we'll hold on to that and see where we end up.
Shop margin
Different brands give shops different margins. This varies from brand to brand and from shop to shop. In some industries a shop will want to double their cost price (traditionally American dart shops have had a doubling as standard) but in darts a normal shop will have much lower margins than that. Like I say this can vary from brand to brand and from big shop to small shop (some brands give big discounts to the biggest shops),
I've seen some awful margins being given and some good margins but we'll go with an average 35% markup for our example here.
£58 / 0.65 = pre VAT retail price, which we then have to increase by 20% (for the UK) and our end retail price will be:
£107.08
Summary
The obscene rise in the price of raw tungsten has made this blog impossible to get fully accurate. The old traditional numbers from just a year ago don't work any more. 107 quid for essentially a fairly simple dart is just completely unrealistic.
The fun thing for me at least is I have been forced to obsess over any and all possible alternatives and think out of the box. It has caused a lot of stress but I enjoy the hyper-focus. I did think about making cricket bats - I hand made the 2 bats I used last season and I've almost finished the one I'll be using this summer. It's sadly not a business model to incorporate into Loxley I don't think, but it's fun. My next challenge when I get the time is to make my own golf putter. I've got the design in mind but need the time.
Oh and of course I'm investigating anything and everything to do with darts of course. Maybe some more new points, maybe some Loxley dart boards at last. 3d printed tungsten darts were a nice idea but if you thought 2025 dart prices were high, the quotes I've had for 3d printed tungsten darts were something else entirely. USA, Canadian and European tungsten have also been restrictively expensive but my searches will not stop. I still have some interesting ongoing research projects... Wish me luck!
