You can try and sell your stock to certain one-stops. I can't think of the european ones off hand, but I know "watts" for instance in USA, may take a box of 25-50 if they think they can sell it, and you wouldn't have to have an exclusive contract. As for the numbers, its all flucuating a great deal lately. I can't speak for house or dnb at the moment. But, it seems its really hard to sell techno these days. Most of the reliable harder techno names are having troubles pushing 800 copies at the moment.

If you're a new hard techno label or a new producer on a mediocre hard techno label, I wouldn't expect the release to do much more than 250-450 copies these days. For scrhanz hard type techno, I've heard it is doing decent. Those really horrible bootlegs do upwards of 5,000 copies I'm told. I don't get into that stuff at all so I don't know much about it, and can't confirm.

Minimal stuff can do fairly well lately. I know some labels who have just started and repressed their first couple releases. Selling about 600-700 each at least so far and its growing. Though a fairly reasonable minimal record should be able to do 1,500-2,000 and the obviously big shit like Border Community, Pokerflat, Luciano, etc. I'm sure does a lot better. Those numbers could be fairly inaccurate but I'd say its a good guess.

In the end like the say, good music sells and bad music doesn't. A name will still help the music sell as well (though maybe not as much as it used to).

My advice is unless you have a lot of money you don't mind losing, don't start a label. Focus on sending stuff elsewhere. Build up the profile, and then you'll have more security with your name when you do start a label.