Launching Your Product Successfully With Tracy Leigh Hazzard - Part 1 From The Invention Stories Podcast With Robert Bear

Today, we're in such a fast world. If you don't get your product to market, you missed your timing that is more essential than getting it right.

Welcome to the Invention Stories Podcast where we share stories of inventors who turn their idea into a product. Please visit our website@www. InventionStories.com. and now from the Invention Stories Podcast World Headquarters studios in Morro Bay, California is our host, Robert Baer.

Welcome to the commercial free Invention Stories podcast. I'm your host, Robert Baer, and thank you for joining us. You're listening to episode 75, our interview with Tracy Lee Hazard, part one. And before we get into Tracy's story, I'm inviting you to visit inventionstories.com where where you can read the show notes from each podcast. We also post invention stories that are submitted to us. Our most recent story comes From Michelle Johnson, Ph.D. the inventor of Luxurity Panties by Luxurity Ventures, LLC. To learn her story, please visit us at www. InventionStories.com. tracey Lee Hazzard is the owner of 37 patents. She, along with her husband Tom have brought over 267 products to the market with a combined sales $2 billion. While the typical invention success rate is commonly quoted by Experts at between 1 and 4%, Tracy's success rate is 86%. Tracy Hazard is an E columnist, podcast host, speaker, brand strategist, and product launch expert in every sense of the word. I am a fan who subscribes to our Product Launch Hazards podcast and when someone tells me they are new to inventing and ask my advice, I I tell them that in addition to subscribing and listening to every Invention Stories Podcast episode that they subscribe and listen to the Product Launch Hazards podcast as well. I recommend before they spend a single penny to listen to our top 10 product launch hazards and the 7P process to launching your products episodes. This is our 75th episode and I am truly honored to have Tracy Hazzard on the line from Irvine, California. So let's get started. Welcome to the podcast, Tracy. It's a pleasure having you with us today and I have just shared with our listeners that you do an amazing amount of things and you do them all really, really well. So I'd like to start off by asking you about time management. How have you mastered it? And like, so how do you know.

What to do when you know that's such a good question. Because it is really the key to being a successful entrepreneur. Successful inventor at the end of the day is deciding where to put your focus because where you Put that focus is the only thing that's going to get accomplished. And so one of the things that I do is I'm a big list maker. And so I keep my list because I want to take some of the stuff out of my head because I don't want it to be crowded. So I have a list that is sort of a. I'm going to call it the idea list, right? And we all have them and they distract us and they become our shiny objects or our squirrels, depending on who you talk to, right. And so I like to keep that list. So I have a journal and I just write that in there all the time so that my ideas come out of my head and onto the list. Now they're still in my head because that's how way my brain works. It's like a vault. Like everything I ever thought of is still in there, but I don't have to actively be thinking on it. It's now down. I'm going to get to it. I'm going to look it over. And about once a week I review that list and move something up and say, you know, that idea is really good. I've sat on it all week and you know what, we could do something with that. Let me move it into active. And so that's what I do. And so I have a list of today's to dos and tomorrow's projects. And you know, we kind of balance it from there. What we do so often is just get distracted by all of the noise in our head. And for me, that is everything needs validating, everything needs some research done to it needs some of those things before it should really move into. Let me take action on this. Doesn't mean I won't take a small action step. But I'm not going to just drop everything and move over and do this great new idea. Because if I do that, I derail what I'm working on. I derail my business. And so that's the primary thing that I do. The second thing that I do is I have partners, right? I have my husband as my partner. I have somebody to bounce ideas off of and validate them. And like, am I really thinking of something that could be useful? And that's a really good place to go. Now I don't suggest you do it with your mom and your, your family, your brothers and sisters, because they, they love you and they don't know whether or not you should do something. They'll either tell you yes, because they love you and everything you do is golden, or they'll tell you no because everything you do, they're worried about. And so they tell you no even when they shouldn't. So I prefer to have somebody you can bounce ideas off of, who's in the know in the industry, knows what you're capable of, that kind of thing. So whether that's a mentor or a coach or your partner that you just know isn't going to just say those things to you, just isn't going to say, oh, Tracy, that's just wonderful. You want them to be critical.

No, I'm with you on that. You want people to be honest even if the truth hurts. Now, I'd like to tell you, Traci, that I'm actually a Southern California native. And that's why I have sort of a laid back speaking tone.

I'm a New Yorker, so can't you tell?

You know, I probably wouldn't have guessed that you were a New Yorker, but I was thinking that maybe you weren't native to California just to guess. But anyway, you're in Irvine, is that right?

I am, yeah. I am in Irvine and I am in. And I've lived in California most of my life. But somehow, deep down inside, I'm a New Yorker at heart. I'm really from Connecticut.

Yeah, you seem like you have an anti chilled out personality. Like if you were a car, you'd be traveling in fifth gear going about 75 miles an hour. Not frantically fast, but efficient. But anyway, I'd like to start off by asking you a little bit about your background. What were you like as a child? Were you creative or imaginative? What kind of kid were you?

So I was a bookworm. So believe it or not, I was a bookworm. But most people don't because I'm so obviously verbal. I talk fast, I think fast, but I was a reader and I was a researcher and I absorbed a lot of information. And part of that is I actually, most people don't know this. I grew up in South Africa for a couple of years at the height of apartheid. My father was on a project there and we had no television. There weren't a lot of kids in our neighborhood who were our age because we were on the job site. And so I had nothing but my dad's books. And he was an English lit major originally, then became an engineer, but he was an English lit major. So he had Shakespeare and he had all kinds of books like that. And what I did was I read all of them. Now I can't guarantee I understood them because I was like 8, 9 years old, but I did read them. And so that kind of reading process has become a significant part of what I do every single day, whether I'm writing an article or designing something or advising clients, is take a deep research approach to things, a deep reading approach. You know, luckily, technology has made it a little bit easier to be faster at things, you know, so it's not just reading it. You know, it's videos and podcasts and all kinds of media consumption. But it has helped me be very, very informed, and I think that was shaped at that early age as a child.

That's smart, because I think a lot of us are just always looking for shortcuts, and sometimes we miss the picture because we're trying to do things too quickly. And having a deep research approach is the best way. But I'd like to ask you, did you think about inventing or did you know any inventors growing up or having your family members? Inventors?

No, not really. So I never even thought about being an inventor until I met my husband. And he has a history of family who were big patent holders in the oil industry on one side of his family, and on the other side, they were more of what you would call character and advertising inventors, creatives. And his great grandfather invented Elsie the cow and Elmer the Bull, which you see on Elmer's Glue. And Elsie used to be all over our milk products and stuff like that. And so Bord. And so he was an advertising exec for Borden. And so Tom brought that into my life is like, this idea that while having a patent is a cool thing, and I was like, whatever. I was artistic and creative. My mom's a fine artist, so had a lot of that in my back pocket. But I just never thought of that as, wow, something I want to do. And so it wasn't until he came into my life and we started designing and working together that there became a priority, like, wow, that's something we should do. We should patent this.

And I'd ask you about that, but I saw that you did a podcast episode on working with your spouse. Looks like it works for you. But I'm not sure everybody should be working with their spouses. I.

I know, I know. You know, people, like. It's like they. They watch us like, oh, my gosh, that is the craziest thing. I could never work with my spouse. And so, yes, so we finally had to do a podcast episode on it.

Smart. Smart. Okay, so I see you attended Rhode Island School of design from 1988 to 1992. So somehow you made it from South Africa to Rhode Island.

From California, actually. So back to California after South Africa. And so that's why I say I've lived in California most of my life. But, yeah, I did. You know, risd, that's what they call it. RISD was quite a departure. I thought I was going to go to journalism school because of the writing and the reading. And I had a teacher that encouraged me to go to art school. They said, look, you're great at this writing and you're great at analysis and research, but you're not. You don't have the graphic skills. Go get trained in that because then you could write magazines. The opportunities will come for you because you'll be more well rounded. And I was like, oh, wow, I never thought of it. And I applied to art school.

You know, when I think of people who grew up and they read a lot, they tend to be a little bit more introverted in what's wrong. But that doesn't seem to be the case with you. You seem to be quite the extrovert. Would that be accurate?

The opposite, yeah. I know it is an unusual characteristics. And like I said, it came out of necessity where I had no neighborhood, I had nobody there to interact with. So books became my playmates. And so, yes, I am a complete extrovert, an enthusiastic extrovert on top of it all, which makes me a good host. Yeah, right.

There you go.

It just happens to be that it's a strong skill set underneath it of being a thinker and a reader and all of those things.

I agree with you that being an extrovert who enjoys deep research are good traits of a lot of things, including a podcast host. It says from 1992 to 1995, you worked as a contract fabrics and woven automotive designer at Milliken and Company, where you accomplished seven successful market introductions. And then it looks like you went back to school at Wharton.

So. Yeah, yeah, I didn't really go back to school. It was like they paid for it. It was like almost like what you call executive education. And so that's where I got my first taste of product development as a process and thinking about it as a system rather than as just like, oh, something that gets done along the way and it's all about the idea or all about the design. It became, wow, there's a whole ecosystem around product development that involves marketing and costing and all of these things. That's what they exposed me to. And I thought, there's really something exciting here that we can make better products. If we know this stuff ahead of time. And so where they'd been like over in Milliken, whether I was designing contract fabrics for offices or designing automotive fabrics, those fabrics weren't coming out for 10 years. How did I even know what the economy was going to be like, who wants to buy what? Like, who? All of those things were always going through my head like it seemed counterproductive to be designing for that. And so it started to get me thinking on how can we speed up the design process or the development process of these products so we don't have to go 10 years before they're ready. We could just do them two years before they might be ready. So. But being able to think in a process oriented way instead of a product oriented way really opened up my mind and the possibilities of what I could do.

And thinking in a process oriented way instead of a product oriented way sounds good, especially the way that you've described it. But how did your employers reacted when you made these suggestions? I know that every employer is different, but I can't imagine too many are open minded to such a radical change.

So Milliken was one of those kind of companies where first off, they're amazing company and a lot of the inventions and chemicals and textiles and materials that we have today, we have them to thank for it. They're a huge organization. So, no, I didn't quite have my position because I was also like straight out of College. I was 21 years old when I went to work for them. So no, they weren't going to listen to some 20 at that time. I think I was 23 by the time I did Wharton, but they weren't going to listen to me there. However, I happen to work in a very small, isolated division of their company up in Grand Rapids, Michigan. So they had relocated me up there and I was working with companies like Herman Miller and Steelcase and, you know, famous contract furniture manufacturers like that. And while I was there, you know, they were very innovative and they were forward thinking and they had not enough knowledge and not enough in house designers. So they were very receptive to it. And so eventually I switched and worked for Herman Miller and I ran an entire division on color, materials and finishes there. And they didn't care how it got done. So I had a lot of leeway at a very young age to build a process.

Yeah, I was wondering how you wound up at Herman Miller. It looks like you were there from 1995 to 1997. Why did you leave?

I know people ask.

Well, I mean, especially if you're running your own division and all, I would think it would be the dream job of designers like Herman Miller. Pretty cool.

Yeah. Herman Miller is like one of the best companies. I think they've been on the list for over 15 years or something like that, of the best companies to work for. And people always ask, why did I leave? And I left because there wasn't growth opportunity for what I wanted to do. There was great opportunity there, but it wasn't what I wanted to do. And Tom, at that time had been just really wanting to strike out on his own and be an entrepreneur and do all those things. And I'd never heard the word entrepreneur before at that point. So I was like, business owner. You want us to own a business, Right. And so it was just one of those things where the opportunity to run a business, even though it was ours, that had been where I wanted to go. And that was never going to happen at Herman Miller. And so I thought, you know what? This is where I want to be. This is what I want to do. Let me see if you want to invent this thing. And at that time, it was a stylus pen for handheld computers. You want to invent this thing, and we're going to run a company on it. I'm going to run the company. Because he didn't have that mind. He had a very design, engineering, you know, that type of mind. Didn't have the personality to go get investors. I said, I'll do that, and then we can try out this partnership together and see if it works. And so that was our first foray working together.

Yeah, I can see that. And I admire anyone who has a good job at a company they respect, but still has the courage to make the change. Let me ask you, do you and your husband Tom, have that sort of yin and yang thing working? Do you know what I mean?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. You know, I mean, that's. I think the best part about what we do is we have a shorthand between us. So there's a high level of trust. We've been working together 27 years now, and so there's a high level of trust between us that really accelerates the process. So when I do have an idea, he's jumping in of like, do I trust this idea? No, there's already trust built in. It's a. Let's evaluate the idea at its core. Let's think about this, and let's see what perspective I can add to it. Because his perspective is so valuable, how can I make it more cost Effective. How can I make this run through a factory if that's what we need to do? You know, he thinks on those levels of things, the how to gets put in place. So I always joke that my job is to go out there and go get frustrated with something that's in the marketplace, identify the opportunity, and then go, here, Tom, I'm challenging you because this is unacceptable. Go fix this. And he comes up with something. And so we actually call that process intentional invention. Because I am saying, here's the opportunity. Go find a solution or go make one. And he does every single time. That's how brilliant his brain is.

So you get to go out in the world and see what sort of gets stuck in your craw and your husband Tom finds a solution. So, yeah, I guess that's the yin and yang I was looking for. That'll work. What happens when you differ on an idea or concept, you know, strategy or problem?

Right.

Do you have, like, a system or process to solve it? Do you know what I mean?

Yeah, yeah. So do we fight? Everyone wants to know that. And yes, absolutely we do. We have very heated discussions over things, because I'm passionate about things. But, you know, what we do is that because we have such high level of trust and respect for each other, that if I say, this isn't ready yet, this isn't good enough yet, or if he says, yeah, I don't know how we're going to make this idea work, I don't think we can make this in any kind of reasonable cost or something like that. We believe each other, but we don't give up. That's the one thing that we don't do. We respect each other enough to say, okay, I see your viewpoint and I get that. Let me go back to the drawing board, or let me go back to my research and see if I can think about this in a different way, because I trust you so much. If you're saying this, then the market's going to say that too, or the manufacturer is going to say that too. Let me go back and think this through and refine it. And that's one of the ways that our ideas don't. Sometimes they get tabled. Don't get me wrong, we both will go, yep, can't solve this problem right now. Let's table this. We'll come back to it. But for the most part, that's how we refine an idea and get it faster and accelerate it through to something that is workable.

No, I wasn't asking. If you two ever fight.

No, no.

But people do, just like we do.

It seems like one of the challenges is always to keep the emotion out of decision making. And I can imagine that's hard to do. We know that inventors have passion, and I'm guessing that you can have a feeling that something is the right thing to do or a good decision to make. But I just wanted to clarify, how do you keep decision making more logical and less emotional?

Yeah, I mean, don't get me wrong. Passion and emotion are actually a really critical part to being great business and being great inventors. Right. I mean, they don't give up. Right. That's why we hear, like, Sarah Blakely invent Spanx and goes around and meets with, I don't know, something like 80 banks and investors, and none of them say yes, and yet she doesn't give up. So that resilience is an extremely important part at being able to move forward and go. But we don't treat that as stubbornness. Right? Resilience is not the same thing as stubbornness. Resilience is being able to say, okay, I get your viewpoint, and now I'm going to prove you wrong. And here's how I'm going to show it to you. I hear what you're saying, but I now need to take that as input and criticism. And I'm going to show you, because I didn't clearly articulate it right before, because I still believe in this. And so when we treat it with that, then there isn't the emotion of, I'm right, you're wrong. There's an emotion of, I hear you, and I'm going to show you why I think this is right. Not because I want to show you, but because I want to show you that I think there's possibility here. And so when we just remove the emotion of being husband and wife from that, we're in the emotion of being passionate about our business or our clients or our products, and that we both respect. So at the end of the day, it ends with respect. The argument doesn't continue like, it just doesn't. Like, you know, but there's always a point because I'm really loud, I'm really passionate. And so there's always a point at which it does get like that. But that's okay because we never treated it as a personal affront.

That's good, because some people have to be right, and those people are hard to work with.

Yeah. We believe in input. We believe in criticism. And that's one of the things Rhode Island School of Design, because we both went there and that's how we met. Taught us that you have a critique every single week in every single class. So you have five critiques a week, people being critical about what you've put your heart and soul in, what you stayed up all night to create. And it desensitizes you to the process of taking that criticism. You now start to take it as input, and you're now going to translate that into greater success. So you don't treat it as, oh, my gosh, they hate me. It's not about that. Right. They're improving me is the way you turn it and look at it. And so that's one of the things I'm most grateful about my education.

Well, let me ask you about what you're doing today. I've been on some of your websites. I'm not sure how many you have, and they're full of really useful information for inventors. So I know you have the tracyleehazard.com website. Your middle name is pronounced Lee.

It is. It's. Yeah, it's Lee. It's spelled unusually. But, you know, that's just my sort of like, I don't know where else to send people who just want to know about me. You can go there. So it's not really a website, but has design. That's the one you're probably referring to, is like my bigger site that most people go to. Which one has design?

Oh, wow. Okay. I think I was on your product launch hazards.com website.

Yep. So that's our podcast for product people, Amazon sellers, inventors. We got a request from so many people that I can't do business with because I only take very few clients every year. And they said, well, but you have such deep knowledge or you have such great connections. Can you introduce us to some? And so that's how that podcast was born last year. It was out of a request from the community to serve them. And so it's a completely free service. Everything on the website is free. Like, it's just articles and interviews and videos and podcasts that talk about those failure points, the hazards of product launching. Right. So we use it as kind of a pun, but it helps you with all these things because it's. Because I've done so many things wrong, because my clients have done so many things wrong that we actually know the right way to do it, the right order of things to do the things that help us accelerate through the product launching process. Because today we're in such a fast world. If you don't get Your product to market. You've missed your timing. That is more essential than getting it right. To be honest with you, and believe me, I'm a perfectionist, I want it right. But getting it to market as fast as possible with as correct as possible. Right. And so in the right order, the right things, that's what we talk about all the time on product launch hazards.

I've been wanting to ask Tracy since this interview began, and I don't know what the actual number is, but the success rate for inventors or anyone bringing a product to the market is extremely low. I've read anywhere from 2 to 4% and even less actually make their initial investment back.

Yep.

And yet you have 37 patents bringing 267 products to the market that have generated over $2 billion in retail sales. Your success rate is 86%.

Right. I do want to clarify for your audience that I didn't make the $2 billion. My clients did so. So I made my percentage on the 2 billion. Because that's how design royalties work for those of us who are in that product design world. But being successful in this world, it simply is a process thing. And remember when we talked about Wharton and we talked about the process part of it, in the end, we developed this process that allows us to quickly reject our product ideas. Find out if there is a product market fit. Because in my research, when I started to write in this industry as an Ink columnist, I started to do some research and studied and understood that it's the product market fit, not the capitalization, not your team, you know, that falls apart. So is my product right for the market or do I have the right market for the product I want to sell? Because sometimes you already have a created market, right? You're selling into Costco, you know, or something like that. That might be your market already created. But is my product going to fit that market when that fit is wrong? You risk 56% of failures are caused by product market fit not being right. So if we can get that dialed in and get that right at the very beginning, we have a higher likelihood for success. So what we don't do, you know, those numbers reflect, is that we rejected a hundred products, a hundred ideas before we decide to patent it, before we move forward into it. So that's why our success rate goes up, because we already abandon it before we spend a lot of money before we go all in. And finding that product market fit and the ways to do that is really the essential difference. Because we do it at the beginning. We don't prototype. We don't do all of these things that inventors spend a lot of time and money and energy on over years at a time, right. To get to that point, we spend probably weeks getting to that point. And our ideal timeframe is three to five months. If we can get a product market fit answer in three to five months, then it's worth doing and worth going into. And my goal is also to spend under $20,000 to do that. And that's with a complicated product.

Before you give the thumbs up and move forward. Do you understand everything that needs to happen from A to Z and have a plan for each step of the way? Because I seem to meet a lot of inventors who have created a product and then they ask me who they can license it to. And I'm like thinking, you should have already had the answer to this question before you started. In fact, I am by no means an expert. I've never licensed a product.

I.

But if I were interested in licensing one, I would contact potential licensees and ask them what they're looking for. And when I started to hear a couple of answers that sounded similar, I'd.

Try to invent that right design into it.

And I don't have a fraction of the experience that you have. To me, that's just common sense.

Well, you know, there are ways still to get licensed today. There are ways. You're right. It absolutely starts with knowing exactly what they want. I had one client who accidentally tripped into something that's highly licensable. And so we're in accelerated talks now with the company to license this and sell it. But that I can tell you, in 27 years of doing, it happens less and less and less than it used to. And it's because everyone thinks, oh, I can do this, right? I don't need to license this. I can do it myself. We can invent, we can do our own products. We know better what our clients want. We know better what our shoppers care about. So we'll have our own brand. So we're in our own brand world. That's why licensing has dropped tremendously. But the real issue that I see most often with these inventors who come in with this idea is that they do not have an idea of how this works, how the world works. And the advice that they're getting from the invention community is driven by a lot of lawyers. And in the end of the day, the lawyers want to write a contract. And so they say that this is possible when it's really not. And that's where I come to and say, first off, you shouldn't be filing your full patents until you know you have a market. Because how do you know if you're going to sell worldwide? And why should you file an international PCT before you've even sold a piece if you don't know that Europe even wants what you have to sell, right? Why should you do that? Why should you waste your dollars and spend your money? There's file a provisional. Don't get me wrong, I'm a big provisional fan. But you shouldn't be going all in on patenting until you have a market sense. Is this going to work? Is this of interest? Do I have the right product market fit? Same thing with contracts, right? Do I have something that's licensable? It comes with that end discussion. Did you design it to be that way? Did you invent it for that purpose? Did you already have in your head what companies should buy this? And it shouldn't be like, well, of course Proctor and Gamble should buy this, because I'm amazing. My product idea is great. Procter and Gamble will never take your call. That was never going to happen. That's not how it works. Now, if you worked for Proctor and Gamble before and you go outside and you got an idea, they will hear you. So those that leave companies, those are the ones that are successful at getting licensing happening because the company understands that they have core knowledge of how they work already. They automatically assume the inventors don't know their consumers. And so if you don't know my consumer, why would I even let you in the door to talk to me? So we call that not invented here syndrome because not invented here is a big thing. Like those engineers, if they've got in house staff, they don't want to hear your idea either because they don't want to look bad.

So there's a lot of it that doesn't work for most people. And it's unfortunate, but it is because they do not have a place at which they can gather knowledge about how it actually works today. And it works differently today than it did a decade ago, than it did 20 years ago when I first started.

You've been listening to episode 75 of the Invention Stories podcast, our interview with Tracy Lee Hazard, Part one. And I want to thank Tracey for being our guest today. For more information, please visit hazdesigns.com that's H A Z Z D E S I g n s.com product lodge hazards or tracyleehazard.com thank you for listening to the Invention Stories podcast and for sharing it. It is our hope that by sharing the journey the inventor goes on. Since having the idea not only helps inspire others who have an idea for an invention, but gives them some advice on what to do and what to avoid. I recommend that you proceed with caution because there are some really terrible people and companies out there that are constant constantly ripping off the inventor. We invite you to check out InventionStories.com website and either tell us who you are using the guest book or click on the link to share your story like Michelle Jansen did. Michelle went on InventionStories.com clicked on the link to share your story. She answered the questions we offered to use as a guide and sent us her story. Luxurity panties are the first fully functional lingerie garment of any kind that simultaneous spontaneously support sexual expression and sexual health. Sexy, subtle, convenient and affordable luxurities have you covered when and where you need it most. Now, as you can imagine, there are lots of obstacles to overcome when bringing this type of invention to the market, and you can read all about them on inventionstories.com or on Michelle's website at iamluxury.com that's www.imluxury. that's L U X U R-I-T-Y.com I invite you to connect with me on LinkedIn and friend me on Facebook. My name is Robert Baer and I'm the host of the Invention Stories Podcast and the owner of InventionStories.com thank you very much for listening today and please tell a friend.