Avoid These Top 10 Product Launch Hazards

Protect your brand, product or invention from the hazards of consumer product launching and go from idea to product to big brand. With guidance from retail product design and development experts Tracy and Tom Hazzard. Get the insider secrets to put the right things in the right order with the right resources so you can out design, outsource and out profit your way to retail success.

Hey there, product launchers, it's Tracy Hazard. And today we're really going to dive deep into the biggest product launch hazards. My top 10 product launch hazards. And this is of course, hazards with 1Z, not 2. And these are the dangers. I mean, these are the potholes, the landmines, whatever you want to call them. These are the problems that most people face and they go into it not realizing that these are the things that you don't know about launching a product. I really want to mention this because we think that we're experts in this. A lot of these things are rookie errors, but these are not things because you're a rookie in business or you're a rookie entrepreneur. I've seen people do this who have been 20 plus years in business and still make these mistakes. Big brands make these mistakes. And it has to do with when you're tapping into an area of something you just don't have expertise in. And so you go in with all these unknowns and you think, oh, well, for instance, I've got capability over here in accounting and finance, so I understand these numbers and everything. I should be good. But reading a bill of materials, looking at the cost basis, pricing and all of those things, what you don't know are the unknown factors that might affect them later. These are the traps and the stuff that falls in, many of you will fall into. And so if I can raise awareness to them and show you what they might be and illuminate them, then maybe you won't fall victim to them. And it is a shame that Tom and I see so many inventors, entrepreneurs, Amazon sellers, fall into these problem areas, into these big hazards, and we'd love to prevent that. So that's part of why we're here. We are going to dive into the 10 biggest product launch hazards. And a lot of these things may seem really small, not that big a deal, but what I've seen is that they cause gigantic problems at the end. So they might cause you a lot of money and redos, they might cause you a huge delay in time. And that has two factors to it. One, you burn money all along the way when you're not launched. And so you have revenue Loss, but also the delay to market can cause to your entire business, your entire brand. Because speed to market matters and someone beats you to market. So I just want to raise awareness of that. These things may seem tiny, but be really aware because I've seen them go so wrong. So let's go on to the very first one. Too many niches, mind the gap, right? So we're always looking for the big opportunity in retail. So we might be looking for organic Amazon keywords and how we can tap into those and how we can find an opportunity within a market that we already know while we find product failures. Right. And we're always looking for the opportunity gap there. But the problem with too many niches is that there are many, many companies who think that if they diversify really fast, if they have a really broad line and they get into all different categories and products, they'll be fine because it just means more business, more sales. But what we've seen is that too many niches, too many different customer focuses. So when you're not in the same customer area type. So while you might be parents, and so that might be your focus that you're really focusing on parents, you can go from baby all the way to, I would say, toddlerhood through lower preschool ages without much differentiation. But when you hit into teenagers, you actually have a very different profile of parent. So we're not that harried, kind of like, oh my gosh, I haven't gotten enough sleep, the baby was keeping me up, or I've been having trouble potty training my child. You can see that those areas and those commonalities of things have a lot of emotional baggage that come along with this in this frazzled and frenzied sense. And we're more likely to just revert and buy things we trust. Right. That is a very big characteristic of that market niche. Right. But you get into teenagers and you're starting to think they're going to be leaving home, they're going to be going off to college, you're rushing around sports and activities and they're starting to drive, your focus is really a little more inward. And so the profile of those parents have a very different emotional connection to things. And so when you're thinking about marketing and running ads and designing products for them and, and bringing that to market, they actually have two very different profiles, even though they're both parents. So you really want to be very careful and really focus on characteristics that are similar rather than demographics that are similar. And so that's why I say When I talk about too many niches. So if you spread yourself thin and you're doing products all over the place, pet owners and parents and grandparents, it's just all over the place. Women and men and women, those that are single and millennials. And while you want to have a broad brush of customers, when you're spreading yourself thin and having to learn product categories and market categories and understand the dynamic there and making sure your products are fitting, you can really go wrong and spread yourself way too thin in which you do nothing. Well, that is one of the big things that I see happen again and again. And it also does confuse people about your brand. So if you I see this a lot from the Amazon seller crowd who come out of the wholesaling world or the white label world or whatever you want to call that, and moving into private label or original product, a lot of you come from this like you'll just try anything that you've found in various gaps and that's great for it when you were doing it. But as you've moved into this new private label, it confuses your existing brand and you're a little too afraid to let it go. So my suggestion is that maybe you get somebody to manage it over here and make sure that those ones that are just sort of like on autopilot, they're just constant reorders. And because you already have good reviews and you don't have to completely let them go, but let someone else manage them and then continually and only focus on your core brand. And if you can separate your niches and your categories into separate sites and separate things, and this is where it gets cumbersome to actually have that occur. But I've seen big brands have the same problem, so I'm not going to characterize that as a Amazon seller issue. I've seen big retail brands with the same problem because they want to sell all over the store, but when their brand had built trust. So this is a really classic case of a company called Ace Bayou, who we worked with and they made beanbags and they had been known for that. And when they started to expand into other product categories that were non juvenile, the brand, I mean, just didn't work. And so they would give it a new name and then the buyers wouldn't recognize them and wouldn't know who they were. And none of that trust that they had built in their category translated. And so it really wasn't the best fit for them. And so staying in more juvenile products actually was a great fit for them and translated into Bigger sales, faster. And so they eventually broke it off. But it took a lot of market education on the fact that they were the same brand and the same company. And so that's really where I don't want you to fall into here with the too many niches. So now that goes into too much inventory. Now this is a classic problem and I mean if you saw the Prosper video, you know the story of striped shirt and this is classic. It happens very often in certain categories, but especially in apparel because you have a big size, you have size ranges, color ranges, and so it ends up with a mix of inventory that ends up really large and we're talking tens of thousands of units. And whenever there's a product that has too much inventory, that has a really high minimum order quantity, an moq, and whenever I see that, that's a red flag for me because very typically they haven't done a good job of doing the product market fit. So until you know your product is going to sell, until you are absolutely certain that you've really tested, it isn't just your friends and family who tell you they love it, you should absolutely not dive into too much inventory because you are going to encumber that inventory is going to take up so much of your capital that you are not going to be able to market effectively to move that much inventory. So when you're taking marketing dollars and using it on inventory, it's a drain, it's a liability and you're not building an asset in its place. So this is a red flag area. And really it's not a great for a startup position when you're starting a new brand or starting a new product line. So this one is should be pretty self explanatory because I think you have to pause right when someone says to you I want you to spend $20,000 on inventory, you should pause, right? I mean that seems like way too much. But at the same time, I know a lot of you get really nervous about the idea of having too little inventory, like am I going to run out? But all I can say is that I've never seen that as being a problem that wasn't able to be overcome with air freighting in a few 3D printing some if you needed it, having a backup plan, a factory, being willing to rush a job if necessary. So it might cost you a little bit more to get that inventory in. But having too little inventory is rarely a problem unless you were already selling it and you just did some bad planning on your parts. So it's definitely not a startup and product launch problem. So this is a very big area. And the amount that you spend on inventory must be matched by an equal amount in marketing. And I would say if you can 3x that in marketing, you're going to do much better. So anyway, that's the second one. The third one is over patenting. And this isn't, I mean by any means a knock at any of my fabulous IP attorneys on this platform or anyone that has patents or anything like this. But what I see is that you're patenting too much too fast. And that's really the case. It's like I believe we are firm believers in patents. Those are actually some of our patents on the wall right there. And it is just the case of that these patents are valuable, but they're only valuable if you know that you have a product that people want to buy if you know that it can be commercialized. And so when we look at this, we always say what's the least amount of money we can spend in getting protection? But patenting later, after we have a little sense, a better sense of whether or not the market is interested. The other side of that we see is a lot of people. It isn't just deciding between do I file a full utility patent or do I file a provisional. Of course you may already know by now that I am a big proponent of provisionals, but it is a factor of do I really need to go international? And really I see that happen too often is that people have filed their international patents and they aren't even selling yet. So how do you even know if the US wants to buy it if that's the country that you're in and let alone if the UK or Australia or Japan wants to buy it. So if you have no sense of whether or not you're going to be able to sell in those countries and you have no confidence yet and clear cut sales in the country you're first selling into, then it is too soon to be spending those dollars on a patent. That's really where I see that happening the other time is that when you patent too soon, but while you're still in the before you really develop that product market fit or assessed that product market fit through good market research that people tend to patent and not just do the provisional and when you go in that soon I see that then they have to repatent or file extensions or do things later because things change in the product development process. So anyway, just want to make you aware of that that a lot of Capital can get sucked here. And when it does it too soon, then it's not serving your business and it's not serving you well. And you're pulling capital away from things that are critical. And that's where the hazard, the landmine happens. Oh, too many secrets. So this is more of, you know, I guess it happens on both sides, inventors and Amazon sellers, where we're so secretive about our products and our ideas and what we want because we're so afraid of trolls coming in our category, or we're so afraid of factories stealing our designs or other people stealing our designs that we don't talk about it enough. And when we don't talk about it enough, what I find happens is that we don't get enough input. And if we're not getting enough input, then we're really not being made aware of where the holes are, where the problems are, where the critical factors are, where we might have an engineering problem, where we might have a production problem, where we might have quality issues, or we might have consumers who don't like it, and for very obvious reasons that weren't so obvious to us. So I'm not a fan of being too secretive. I'm a fan of being as secretive as you need, but still be able to seek input and information that is really, really critical here. And I know that upsets a lot of people, it upsets everyone when I talk about it at conferences and other things. But that collaboration is actually essential in the process of being able to make sure that we have a smooth, successful and fast launch. And I prefer to rely less on the secrets and more on my ability, my speed, my accuracy and my surety, my absolute certainty that I have the best product market fit. And so, you know, I consider it a confidence in my intellectual property and that my secret, whatever it might be, my special sauce is really special and valuable. But I also find that if you're afraid of big brands taking it over, they don't see it yet. They don't see it and still start selling. And by then you're way ahead of them. They don't see the value like you do. So being secretive doesn't serve you well in terms of getting you the information you need. And I really don't think the risk is as big as you think it is. So anyway, that's one of my additional ones. So I think that we get really caught up in this idea that we just need to be selling stuff. We need bigger products, we need more products. But I think we get really also caught up in that we don't really understand that really we don't have something special enough. And most of the cause of it is, I think, just not doing enough research. So very often I have someone who comes to me and they are so sure that they have something special and I'm so sure that it's not. And that's because I spend a tremendous amount of time researching what's in the marketplace, but very, very different, but they don't look. And so at the end of the day, they have a product that is me too. So going on Amazon, going through stores, going to specialty shops, going to trade shows, Googling things, right? Checking this out and really making sure that yours is special and not me too, is essential here. Because when you go in the market and you spend a lot of time and you've launched all this, and at the end of the day people go, oh, that's just like something I've seen before. You can't get offended about it because they're probably right. And it's probably because you didn't do enough research. And so that's where it really helps sometimes to get an outside view, because we get a little caught up in what we've done and we don't realize that our features aren't standing out. And so we look just the same as everybody else. We look like these cookie cutters, right? And so we really want to be careful there and make sure it's not just our view, but it's other people's views. This is a great time for more market research, for product market research, for checking the fit and making sure that they see what you see. If you really do believe that even though there are other products on the market, and that's not a bad thing, but that those products and your products really are separated by the key feature and the value that you add. Don't shop core source. So I get people all the time and I'm shocked at the size of the brands, $10 million brands who are shoppers, they go to Asia and they shop, shop at the fair, at the Canton Fair. And it just happened recently. So that's one of them that happens. If you're shopping and buying from there, that's what I'm talking about. But if you're actually just shopping and browsing like you're getting ideas and you're looking to meet new people and maybe meet some factories, and then you're going to go do what I call core sourcing, you're going to go directly to the core, directly to the source and you're going to check them out and you're going to build a relationship with them. That's the kind of shopping you should do, right? So when you're shopping, you're just going through and you're picking things. And what you don't understand is that a lot of these fairs and marketplaces and Alibaba and all of those kinds of places that you shop on are geared for that. They're geared to make you impulse shop. They're geared to make you walk away and go, oh, this is so exciting, and not check deeper and not understand that there might be layers, there might be lots of layers of sales margin and other things on there because they're distributors and there's no different relationships through it and people that are just showing the products for another factory down the street and they don't really have all the information. So you may miss out on information, you may miss out on price. But the other part that I really think that you do miss out on is really a deep understanding of is this a core product for them, Are they going to keep carrying it? Or is this just an in out? Is it something that's going to be gone tomorrow? Because it's actually close out for them. And that's why they stuck it at the fair and at the show, because they just want to get rid of it as fast as possible. And so we don't believe in just doing that shopping level. We think you have to go to a source, you really need to check them out. And the bigger you get, the more critical this becomes, because the more critical your quality becomes because you have more money at risk, you have a bigger business at risk, your brand is bigger. And also because it's time to start shaving away those margin points because it's time for you to get as low as possible because you're going to start building a bigger overhead. So these are some key things to do. And reality is this also core sourcing and building a relationship directly with a factory helps you build a trust factor that goes back and forth between the two of you in which they believe that you're going to give them more business and in return they hold your product more securely and safely. And they don't go and falls off the truck and they sell it to someone else, or they don't violate your intellectual property in some other way, or they don't share your secrets and they're very careful with it because they value your business and they value you as a relationship and a person that they're going to grow with and a company they're going to grow with. So that's another reason why we like to do the core sourcing model. And it can get you into trouble. We've seen it so often where someone gets a product and it's going really well and they're so excited about it and they go to reorder and they say, okay, sure, we'll take your money, we'll take your order. And then delay after delay after delay after delay happens. And the reality is it's because various reasons, but the number one one we find out is that that was a product that they had made and had some inventory at one time, but now no longer have it. And for them to break into their manufacturing run to run it again for you and your reorder is probably too small for them. It's not a great value. And so they're not in a hurry and they don't work hard to make that happen on your timeline. And so it's on their timeline. And that can get to be a very, very big problem. And in the end, you might lose your reviews, lose your ranking. You might not be able to continue to have your relationships, your business that you're doing on the shelf either if you damage that with a big retailer. So from that perspective, that's why we're really a fan of making sure that you know that you're at the source, you've met them, you've talked to them, and you're getting to that core of where your products are made. Overstock costs. Oh my gosh. Well, some of the problems are when you find something, a lot of you will go into buying too much inventory, right? And so we have these overstock costs of where you just have way, way too much inventory. But what you don't consider in the process is. So I talk about too much inventory as problem, but these are you're not considering the cost of that inventory. So I have it happen a lot usually in like beauty brands, sometimes in kind of food products, things that have an expiration date, and especially high value things that have an expiration date. So beauty products are classic, so wonderful, but beautiful creams that do amazing things for reducing wrinkles and fine lines and under eye bags, which I might have because I just got off a plane a few hours ago. And so when that happens, they get really caught up because of great value. Like they don't want to discount their inventory to get it to move. And the reality is having that overstock, having way too much inventory is very Very costly. But getting up too close to the expiration date is very dangerous as well. And so I always like to think of all of my inventory, every product that we're carrying as having an expiration date because it forces you to think about that you planned in a certain cost factor, you planned in a certain level of inventory turns. Like am I going to turn one per store per week if you're in retail store, or am I going to turn 100 items a month on Amazon or 1000 items, whatever your turns might be your measurement of that. And if you're not achieving that, you have to think about all that excess inventory. So if you plan to sell, sell 100 on Amazon and you sold 80, now you've got 20 is costing you more money the next month than you planned because it's not moving out fast enough and getting to your next order fast enough. So you have to look at that as a cost factor. And those cost factors add up. Well, I guess we see them on our balance sheet, we don't see them on our profit and loss sheet. And that's really where you start seeing it. You don't see it in the day to day. It's maybe not on your cost of goods factor because just amount when I would get that revenue. But not getting that revenue means you have less money to market. You're not moving the product faster. And over time it has a negative effect to the point at which I find a lot of companies were like, how do they end up with 1% profitability? And a lot of it is because they overstocked on product thinking they were cutting their costs down by buying a bigger run. But in the end when they didn't move it, they weren't able to spend the money that they could have utilized in other places to make that inventory move faster, to advertise and make that happen. And so it cascaded into extra long time and the sales dragged out and it dragged down their business. And so this is a big warning area for me because it's unseen because it's not on your cost of goods analysis a lot of times and it's something that should be. So I wanted to bring that to your attention as well because this one can cost you your brand and it's like this slow death and we don't want that to happen. So going back to that cost basis we were talking about, right, you're checking out your cost of goods. Well, this is a really big problem for a lot of people is that they only look one direction on the Pricing right. They look at cost basis pricing versus market basis pricing. Those are the two ways, cost basis versus market basis. And when you look at cost basis as your starting point, and this is where I think is the problem is like when you start with cost basis points, when you're looking at I have this product and to make this product, it's going to cost me $2, and that means that I should sell it for $4 or $6 or whatever that might be that your margin factor is. And you think about that a lot of times. First off, you don't have all the numbers you need in analyzing that cost basis. So you're coming from a place that is missing program costs if you're going on the shelf or considerations of where you're selling it right now. But then what are you going to do when you go wholesale or something like that? So you haven't really looked at it from the cost basis in all of those factors, and you should. But also because a lot of times what we find is that they think, okay, well if it costs me this much and I sell it for double that or triple that, then that'll be fine. And you get into the market and you find out it's not competitive. And there may have been features and functions and, and things that were in there were adjusting that cost and making it a little too high that could have been taken out that will affect your profitability but would not have affected your ability to sell it. And so when I look at those things, that's what I really think about as I think going from cost basis only worries me. And so when I see a company that only does that, that they really look at that and that's how they price and gauge their market. It's no wonder to me that products aren't turning and products aren't selling. Now, companies that only come from the market basis pricing, especially when you're using Amazon tools like Jungle Scout and some of these other things, and you're using this sort of algorithm model of figuring out what your market price should be. Sometimes you're leaving money on the table. And so that's really where you want to play and go higher and see what happens a lot of times. And you're also sometimes leaving a lot of profit on the table. So that's why I recommend going both directions. Obviously we want to be competitively priced. We want want to eke it up if we can, but if we can't, then we want to at least be at market status so that we're competitive against everyone else on the marketplace. So at least it's apples to apples. And then we want to go from that cost and say, well, okay, if I'm at this cost at $2 and I'm going up to 4 and yet I can sell it for 6, wow, then I've got a little more margin, I've got more room, I've got more comfort level, I have room to play if I have to bring my price down. But I also have room to play for wholesalers and mass market retail and I've got the room that I need. So that's what we look at. Now if you have no choice, if there is no comparison, you don't know how to do it any other way, and you have to go from cost basis pricing, then my recommendation to you is do not do less than a 70% margin, meaning that you charge much, much more for your product than you probably thought you would want to. So you have to be reserving 70% of your sales price, right? 70% of what you're going to sell it for, for all of those other costs that you don't know, all of the marketing, all of the things. And you might even want it bigger than that because at the end of the day, you really, really must make a good margin on this product because you're going to have to educate the market if nothing else exists on it. So really be thinking about that and making sure that if you're going to use this, you've really factored in and given yourself a cushion. That's my lecture on pricing. We're going to do a whole episode on it and we'll talk about the difference between margins and doubling prices and things like that, because that's pretty typical. The other thing I want to talk about is time wasters. We have a lot of time wasters in the process. I hit on this all the time because it's a big factor for every single entrepreneur. They have things that they do that are wasting their time on their path to getting launched and it launching a whole brand, launching a company, launching a podcast, launching a membership site. Believe me, I lost a whole year of time with a lot of time wasters in that process. It happens to all of us. But I have identified a couple of time wasters that are significant and if you reduce these, you have a less likelihood for failure and you speed up your time to market. And if you speed up your time to market, that's better for everyone, right? You're going to achieve revenue faster. So the biggest time wasters I have are the things that we procrastinate about and the things that suck us in. So for me, I like numbers. I do. I'm a designer who likes numbers. So balance sheets and profitability and forecasting and all of those things are coming kind of suck me in. Right. They get me, like, to spend a lot of time on them and figure out and do projections and think about it and analyze whether or not it's worth it. And at the end of the day, it's not making me money and it is not really. It's a snapshot in time. So it's not really useful for me. And I'm probably not the best person to be doing it. And that's really the key here, is if what's sucking you in isn't going to be the core thing that really everyone is buying, buying your product for or buying your services for, whatever that might be, that is your core thing, your value that you add to the world. My doing numbers is not making products more innovative. It's not helping you develop your brands. It's not helping you launch your products. Right. My doing that just isn't serving anyone. Well, someone else can do that. It's important information to my business, but it is not important that I do it. And so that's really where we get a little caught up. So I get that with a lot of engineers because they like to spend time tinkering on their prototypes. And I know you engineers out there, I know you're like, but I'm good at it. The reality is, if it's not serving you well and it's good enough the way it is, and you need to market test it, and you need to move on to the other things to build your brand that's sucking you in. You may leave that up to somebody else you trust. It also might be the thing that is just, again, something that you just feel like you can't let go of, right? And that's kind of the numbers for me as well. Like, I've been through quite a few accountants, I have to admit, because they didn't do it my way. And so that's really. The perfectionist in me was really like, hey, I'm not getting good numbers. And I can't trust this person to do it my way. So I'm going to take that back over and, hey, why would I spend the money on it? And that's really a problem because when you get into that, my time is valuable, your time is valuable, and you need to spend it on the things that are adding value to you the day in and day out of getting your product launched, getting your brand off the ground, and getting this going and into revenue as fast as possible. So that is the stuff you inside, right? The stuff you dive deep into. But the procrastination side, whole other thing, these are the things where typically you have a lot of unknowns, you need to learn stuff to do it. You might need to find somebody and you don't know who to trust, right? So you're procrastinating about it and it just doesn't get done. And so sometimes procrastination is a good thing. It's a sign that we're not ready. It's a good sign of us being sitting back and having to reevaluate. Do I want this badly enough? And so those are good indicators. But if you assess that and you're still procrastinating, I highly suggest you go out there and seek someone who's an expert in whatever it is you're procrastinating in. Because it may just be that it was because you didn't see the path, you didn't see how it could get done, how you could get through this. And because you didn't see it, you were afraid to even take one step. And so that's really where procrastination comes in. And of course your time wasting, I mean, procrastination, that's the nature of it, right? You're wasting time. But if you waste time and then you have to do it anyway and you didn't seek help or didn't seek guidance, didn't learn whatever it was you needed to learn to be able to do it, and you didn't make that happen, then you're highly likely to when you rush, make big errors. And that's how you fall into one of those product launch hazards, right? That's how you fall into a big hole. And so rushing does no one good, no one any good. You trust the wrong people, you follow the wrong model, you do the wrong things. So getting out of that procrastination and time sucking time wasters is the best thing that you can do for your brand and your product and your launch. There are so many things that we're unaware of. And one of the biggest areas that product launch hazards is here for is to help you figure out what you don't know, to help you find people who will give you good answers on when they've been there and done that and fallen into one of these hazards and holes. But another area that I Find brands all over the place, are aware, maybe cursory aware of things like human trafficking, labor trafficking, slave labor, child labor that's happening on your goods and products. And you're aware, but you think you can't do something about it. And that in and of itself is its own launch landmine, it is its own hazard. And I see this happen for a lot of people who make products in the us so it's a big, big problem. Here in California we have 95% labor non compliance, meaning that they're not paying full wages for the goods, they're not paying California wages, but they're not paying federal wages either for the goods that are being made. And so actually they're hot goods, they're stolen goods because you've stolen the labor to make them. And that happens in the garment industry in la, it happens in the construction industry all throughout the state. So it's happening all over the place. And big brands I've talked to, many of them have know it, they know what's going on. They don't know what it looks like though. They have an inkling of what it is. They pretty sure it's happening to them. But they get caught unaware. They get caught out of nowhere because. And a factory gets shut down by the Department of Labor or the city's attorney's office and these things happen and they're like, what happened? Now we don't have our goods, now we don't have a factory to make the next product or make the existing product. We're going to lose revenue instantly. Our brand's at stake because we got named in it for being part of this factory. Because that happens as well when they put in a report and they put out a press release every time they shut down a factory. So like these things happen and you've got your brand completely unaware. So it is important for you to see those signs all along the way and understand where they're happening. Put controls in place and really, really look at what's going on. My dad was talking to me the other day because he's very aware of this happening in the construction industry. He came out of a very large engineering and construction company that built pipelines all over the world. The Alaska pipeline, the Saso pipeline in South Africa and these gigantic oil processing plants as well. And so he was saying that sometimes when they would go into a country that had really bad labor practices, that what they would do is they would put into their contracts that they personally would hand out the wages and so they would go down to the job site, in this case, not the factory floor, but to the job site. And they would personally hand out wages to people and they would personally make sure that they received it, that their timesheets were there, all of these things. But at the same time, did they then hand it over to a trafficker? Did they then hand it over to someone else? What happens in that process is you can't be in control of that. And that was very frustrating to my dad and their business and their company is that they could only insure so much. And so it makes people really frustrated and say, I can't do anything about this. But in today's world, you can get caught in what you don't know, that you didn't know, that you should have known. And you can also get caught by what you didn't at least make an attempt to make it right. And that's really why I was bringing that story is my father's company, they tried to do it the right way. They tried to make it right. They put their own people in production management positions. They did all of those things so that they could do the best for the people that were doing the work as possible, but also because they're spending the money anyway. Why do they want it going to some criminals? They want it going to the people who are really doing the work right. And so you want that same thing. You have a big brand that you're building and you have the desire to help the world improve it with your product innovations. You want to do that and you don't want to fall victim to this process that's happening right under your nose without at least doing investigations, audits, filling out compliance documents, putting into your contract requirements, really following best practices and things that are out there. But these land mines exist and they hurt big brands and small brands. But when they hurt the small brands, you guys go out of business. And that's really why I'm bringing this top 10 hazard out for you, just so that you can really see what have a sense of the things that you should know and you should ask. And I'm going to be doing more on this labor trafficking over time. It's part of a mission that I'm working on to try to resolve the problem for the industry as a whole, not just those that are shopping and doing this in China, because actually there are some good practices there. Because the model that Walmart has put in place, Target has put in place and some of these other companies, I mean, it's a model that isn't flawless Things still happen under there. It is a model for some practices and some audit practices that really do work at least give you red flags and give you a sense of something's not right here, but here. The biggest thing I want to make you aware of is that you have a gut. And you know when it's too little to be paying for a product. You know when something doesn't seem right with the factory owner and, or the production manager and, or the way things are happening, or when you visit the factory, you aren't seeing your product on the line, you know that something's going on. And so subcontracting and just that gut feeling that something's going wrong, please listen to it. It is your sense that this is not right and you put your brand at risk when you, you don't listen to that. So those were my top 10 hazards. I'm going to go back to the recap really quickly so that you have them and you can see them. And I really want you to pay attention to these. But they're not the only ones. These are just the biggest ones. The ones that tend to cost you your business, that tend to cost you your brand, cost you time delays, like really costly time delays or lots of redos and so. And redos, of course. Why spend money twice? I can't spend that idea. Right. So being aware of these will help you kind of raise the red flag. Now if you fall and you think any one of these things might be happening, like, hey, this company is telling me that I need to buy this much inventory. Does that sound right? Jump on an office or somebody's telling you that, oh, you can't. I'm absolutely the core source of this. And yeah, and. But you can't visit the factory when you come. There's no time for you red flag, right? Ask because there is someone on this platform, there is an expert who has been there and done that again and again and again. And when you say something doesn't seem right here, but I'd love it if you would confirm that or am I on the right track? That is the purpose here of product launch hazards, right? It's to prevent these product launch hazards with the single Z, the ones that get you into trouble. So utilize us. That's why we're here. That's why you have a membership. That's why you're in the group. So join us on these office hours to do that. So anyway, I hope this has helped you and I really look forward to hearing your questions and diving deeper into it. As you all explore this platform more and more and get into asking questions. Because the only way we can be more aware of these potential landmines, of these potential hazards that we're going to face in the product launching crisis, is to be there for each other. Right? And to help each other illuminate and make aware of things that went wrong before. So again, thanks for joining me and I look forward to talking with you again on my next Office Hours.

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