Tracy Hazzard explains when to build a real prototype versus a simple sample. Hire designers and engineers when your market, capabilities, or liability needs exceed your skills. Use 3D printing and membership resources to prototype fast and cheap.
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, it's Tracy Hazzard again. And I'm with Product Launch Hazards. And this is product prototype it. And I'm going to use a really general term. Prototyping really involves a whole host of things that you might do. Design, development, engineering, it might even be early quoting. So kind of factory finding, factory sourcing, sampling and iterations is definitely a part of this. So thinking about that is why do you need to make a sample of your idea? Why do you need to make a prototype? And when you're going through the process of proving it and planning it and pricing it and all of those things that we just were talking about, sometimes you need to finally get to a physical product, right? You need to finally get something you can hold in your hand, something you can show to others, something you can show to your investors. But also you need to prove out all of the ideas you have and make sure they physically can work, make sure they can be made, make sure they can be cost effectively made. So sometimes you have to make a sample to find that out. And so that's kind of really where we're going here. So if you are in a private label versus an original product, in private label, you don't really need a designer or an engineer. You're going to just make maybe a minor change, maybe you're going to change a color, maybe you're going to, you know, ask for a different material. But you can pretty much work with a factory to do that directly. There's not a lot of changes in things. So this process, you would consider it sampling, not really prototyping. Okay? Prototyping involves a lot of unknowns, things you've never made before, alternative ways to make it that, that you haven't, that are not in the traditional manufacturing process. So we have clients who makes backpacks. And so just making a new sample of a backpack in a different material or adding a different clip on it, those things are not prototyping, those things are sampling. Because you could still sign off on that final sample and go into production immediately. There's nothing new created. So I want you to kind of think about that in terms of this. So we're talking about anything here that requires original product, invention, innovation, or other things that require actual prototyping creation by someone else than the final manufacturer. Sometimes, though, we do use the manufacturer to do our prototyping for us. It depends on the materials. Metal stamping. If we're going to cut something out of metal, you might as well use the manufacturer to do that, and you'll usually get a better price on them doing that. Typically, prototyping, you do have to pay for sampling with private labeling and other things. As long as you've done business with the factory before, you don't have to pay for sampling. So here. But how are you going to decide if you need a designer or an engineer involved? And I think that this is really the case of if you're not hitting your market targets, if you don't have core capabilities in that area, and or if doing the design and engineering is distracting you from building your business, then it's time to hire a consultant, hire a design firm, hire an engineer, and I'll talk about in a minute my hazard rules of hiring on how to decide which one you should choose and what you do it, and how to decide whether or not they're a worthwhile consultant for you as well. So those are some things though, thinking about making special features that you've never made before or you don't have core capability in. Get a designer or an engineer and to help you with those things. We also specialize in design for manufacturing. So in other words, we want to make sure we get something designed so it can be manufactured at the right point, at the right price point, and get it designed so that it will be highly efficient through the manufacturer's process, whatever that might be, whatever their core competence is. We want to make sure that we're designing with that in mind and with all of our years of experience and all the factories we have access to, this is really critically important. We found in the process of speeding up the time to market, a lot of iterations happen and a lot of changes in product revisions and time lost in getting to market happens because it wasn't designed well to begin with. High costs are designed in or engineered in from the get go. And so we jumped that and really designed straight for getting the best manufacturing. And it doesn't mean we compromise in innovative or inventive features. We just sometimes have to recognize that maybe the market we thought wasn't the market price we thought isn't possible. And we need to go back and rethink that and see if we can accept the higher commanded price. So thinking about that also, if you have high sourcing and development time. So if there's a lot of things to manage in terms of the development process, lots of different sourcing. So in other words, maybe you have multiple components that you're assembling together into one or bundling various features together into a new product. Anything that has batteries nowadays, high liability requires any kind of special testing and or compliance labeling. Those are things that you really ought to get a consultant in to help you at least with the sourcing and development side, if not on the design and engineering side of things. You really need to make sure that you're not putting your business and your brand at risk with all of those items. So that's another time at which you might want a consultant. So let's talk about those hazard rules of hiring. So we say that you should hire someone product category experience. We've seen this go so, so wrong for us. So back in our tea tools days of stylus pens, which is the story I told you at the very end our introduction, we had pens that exploded. We went with an injection molding factory that was down, you know, a couple of miles away from us. And so we thought, oh, we can have oversight over them and all of that. And they have small injection molding machines. They're willing to do smaller runs for us. They're going to make the tool and they're going to do all of this. And they handled a part of the tooling engineering. And at the end of the day though, they didn't make pens. And so when we went to pull our first run and we distributed them out to all of our customers, we started to get returns and complaints back because the pens would pop apart that they would actually start to unscrew as you were writing. And then eventually the top would fly off. And we were like, what's going on here? Well, it turns out that they didn't engineer the threads properly. So as you were writing, it was actually causing the threads to unscrew. They should have gone the opposite direction. And so this is a case of they were rookie to the product category. And at the end it cost us a lot of lost time and having to re engineer that tooling, redo that, and refunding all those customers and replacing their product. So it was very costly and a lot of time lost. So if you have a critical speed to market or time, then you really need to have somebody who already is in your product category experience. And this is especially important if there's any liability or any electronics associated with your product. The other thing is that you should visit the factories you should visit multiple times, you should build relationships with that your consultants should visit you. Like these are all things that you should have FaceTime, whether it's via Skype and other things. But you shouldn't be an email relationship with any of these people that you hire and then you want to trust but verify. So let's say you hire a factory and you get them making these things or you hire a design engineer and they engineer a circuit board for you. We always have a double check on that. We've seen it go wrong at the mass market retail level with batteries that were leaking out. You've seen products that are exploding all over the market today and the retailer has this bigger responsibility to do that. But you as the importer and or the brand have the face of that and you have a higher responsibility to make sure that is so you trust them to do it right. But then you verify any of those results and you do outside testing and or quality control, hire that, spend the money on it and then make sure that you actually do due diligence, meaning that you call the references, check them, ask them who, if they say they've made these products, check with the other brands, really call around and do some background checks on them. So the last thing I just want to point out to you is that in the group, in our membership site, Product Launch Hazards, there are some inexpensive, fast ways to make samples or ideas or prototyping. A lot of that revolves around our 3D print prototyping and our 3D print podcast that we have WTFFF, which stands for what? The Fused Filament Fabrication, which is a geeky term for 3D printing. And you don't have to listen to the podcast, but we have put up into the resources area many different relevant and basic podcasts that might be useful to you to understand the 3D print prototype process. So we really want to present that out to you because it's one of the best and fastest way to make prototypes today. And there are tons of service bureaus and resources everywhere. So we have a whole section on that on the membership group. So please check that out. And if you have any questions at any time, there's a Q and A there as well.
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