The 7-P Process to Launching Your Product

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 Hazard, 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, product launch hazards, we wanted to talk with you today about something that's kind of foundational and fundamental in the process that we do things. And it's also going to explain a little bit about why we have the experts the way that we do and why we talk about this. The right resources being done in the right order with the right things. We usually say that the opposite way. The right things in the right order with the right resources. But because you're on the site, you're starting with the resources. Right. You're meeting them first. So we want to make sure that you start to put that into context. There is a right order to doing things, because if we're not doing them in the right order, then it means that we don't have the right information. So we have a higher opportunity for failure. I hate to say opportunity, but a higher likelihood of failure, right?

Yeah, definitely. You do things in the wrong order and that can be the critical mistake. That is why your project fails.

Yeah, it has nothing to do with how passionate you are or how great your product is, but just simply by not having a critical piece of information that should have come before it creates this fatal flaw. And so that's really what we want to avoid. And after doing this, you know, in the last decade, we did this 250 times. So we certainly know that this works and this is the order which we do things. But I have also done a lot of research and a lot of study of other people's product development process. And big, big companies like when I worked for Herman Miller, this is their process, although they don't talk about it like this. But it's the way that everything gets set up. It's the way that things are gated, which you may have heard of that term if you studied product development process in any way, shape or form. Gating is a common term, and gating prevents you from going on to the next stage because you didn't have the right pieces of information. And so when you're moving really quickly, you kind of gloss over that and you forget that. But by doing it this way, what we've discovered is that we can keep moving quickly and we've put things in the order at which they're most likely to succeed. We're most likely to not have to redo things because we were missing a piece of information and luckily we caught it or it's not likely to slip through the cracks because we missed that piece of information. And then of course that's a cost factor too because if you're not redoing things then you're not having that added cost and that added time. And as far as we're concerned, time to market is money, so time to market is lost revenue. So it costs you. And so those are some things that we want to consider. So we're going to talk about what we call our 7P process.

P as in Paul. Every one of these starts with the.

Letter P. That's right. And actually we've discovered that there's lots of people have different names for them, but they're actually pretty similar to this process. They just may not all use P's. We talk about this one all the time and you've already heard this one before. I guarantee you, if you've heard me speak anywhere. But our number one is Pruvit.

Pruvit is so critical because you know what, I'm sure all you are very passionate about the product that you want to bring to market and you should be. If you're not passionate about it, then you shouldn't do it. But just because you're passionate about it and you believe there is a big market for it, it really does not matter what you believe. I've seen many, many people over many years say, oh, I know there's a market for this. I'm confident and well, I'm glad you're confident. But sometimes that confidence can have you blow a whole lot of money on something that if you had just spent some time proving there was a market that as Tracy often says, that the dogs will eat the dog food when you put it out there, you would be able to save yourself a lot of time, a lot of headache and more importantly a lot of money and not risk your financial future on something that is unproven. So you need to prove it.

And think about it this way. You're proving a hypothesis, right? That's just a scientific process. Our 7P process is set up in that way to be a scientific process. And it is just one of those things where it is absolutely easy to make sure that you are sort of self fulfilling prophecy. Right? You're making it. So what we're really looking for here is for you to say I'm going to be open to the information of what I gather along the way. I'm going to prove my hypothesis is correct because I really believe in this. But I'm not going to close my mind off to refining it to make it better, make it saleable, make it right, maybe find out that the idea I had isn't right for this market, but it might be right for this market over here. So we want you to look at it from that perspective. It is not about disproving your product idea, it's about refining it and proving that it will work in the way that you intended it to, into really having an impact on society or consumer product, goods, whatever it is that your intention is for. So don't look at this as a negative part of it, but doing this first, as Tom was pointing out, is the most critical pathway to being successful later because it informs a whole lot of things that you then have to do to make it work. It gives you a lot of feedback as to who your market is. It gives you a lot of feedback as to what your price needs to be, what the key features are, what the most saleable thing about it, what its biggest opportunity is, what its biggest differentiator is, which is likely to be the patentable feature. So, like all of these things will lead to being a better product for you in the end. And. And our end goal is of course, launching and being very successful. So that's the first thing. The other thing I want to say before we go on is that that little chart that I showed you, which you could barely see on the camera, do not worry because it is in the resource library for you to download and print for yourself. It's absolutely just there. Go to the resource library in the member area and you'll be able to scroll down and it says the 7P process. You should be able to find it fairly simply.

Yeah, that's definitely one you want to get and probably print out in large format if you can, and stick it up on your bulletin board or have it handy until you learn it and know it backwards and forwards. It's a handy reference.

Right. And we're going to be doing, as we move forward in this, you're going to have little breakouts of each one of these. We have a whole thing planned for Pruvit and priceit and all these things that are coming. But I just want to touch on a little bit things. Is that the real thing that you're assessing here and Pruvit is that you have a right fit product? It's not whether or not it's a good product or a bad product. It's that it's a right fit. You have a certain market in front of you. If you're going to sell on Amazon, it's an Amazon market, right? It's the marketplace in which there are big significant amount of women on the platform right there shopping there. So you want to make sure that it's a right fit for that market. And if it's not, is there a different market that you should be going after or finding that's worth it? That's also another thing, is you want to make sure it's a big rich market, right? You want to make sure that there is a large, it's not too small a niche for you. There's a for the investment that you'll have to take to get this off the ground. That's why we call it right fit. And then we're going to go on to the next one. Our second one is you want to take it away.

Tu second one is to price it. This is really critical because there are many different ways you can price a product and the price can, you know, you may have found out as you're proving it that okay, there's a market for it, but the market may not pay the price you hoped they would or thought they would. Or maybe you sold way too many of them and you've underpriced the product. It can happen either way. But with PriceIt, there are two major factors or major ways that you can price your product. You can price it based on, hey, it's costing me X to manufacture it or to buy it from the manufacturer or distributor and then I've got to ship it in and that's going to cost me this. And then, you know, you add up all your costs in terms of getting it to the point of sale, whether that's Amazon's warehouse or on the shelf somewhere. And then the retailer or the marketplace needs to make X margin, take all your costs and then add your margin on top of it and that's your price. Now that is a cost based pricing, right?

So market basis versus cost basis, which means that you Amazon sellers on our platform or you e Commerce sellers, the formulas that you guys use to decide if this is of interest, a market for you, organic keywords, number of searches, like all of those things are already giving you a price sensitivity. So you guys have an advantage. The inventors, they don't start with that. They start with their idea and then figure out how to make it and what it should cost. So they're at a greater disadvantage maybe because it's never been done before and so they don't have something to base it on. But most often Tom and I find that the inventors, it's not that they have something so original that it's never been done before, it's that they actually just don't have experience in, in any of those materials, products or manufacturing area. And that actually probably is some kind of comparable product out there that if we looked at it, we could say, hey, if we combine this one and this one, they cost this in the marketplace if we were to source them. So we can be fairly sure that it's going to cost a factor of that and get a pretty good estimate going. And we do that. So we look at it from both perspectives whenever we're working on a project because cost is important, because if your features can't be built into it and still achieve the market price you want to, then you can't do it. So we have to know both at the same time and work both directions because we also want to make sure we're building in enough margin for where you want to go. And profit is important and margin is important if you want to hit on the shelf. So we'd like to preserve those kinds of margins.

In general, I'm more of a fan of market based pricing because I think that's probably applicable to more of you on this platform than not. We'll see. Time will tell. But because the reality is a product is only going to be a successful product if people will pay what you're asking to buy the product and you're making a good margin. So to me, I prefer to establish and determine what that retail price needs to be and then work back for the margin that I want to make. And then all the different costs associated to then you could get down to the amount of money that you can afford to pay for this item to be manufactured.

Yeah, we get a lot of people who come to us to help them with design for manufacturing. Dfm, it's a very common term actually Dom and I prefer it to be DFM design for market. Because we realize that there are a couple of things that are different about it is that first off, manufacturing, there are a hundred different ways sometimes to make a product, right? Different material choices, there's so many different factors. So we could choose something different if we knew the market price that we needed to achieve. And so we prefer to start there, look at that and say what can we do that is going to make a difference for this market that is going to make them want to buy it. And how can we design that in. So it's the critical advantage in manufacturing, it's the critical advantage in marketing. And let's design to that. And that way we don't get caught up in bells and whistles that actually mean nothing to a marketplace. And that can happen if you go from a cost basis to a market basis. Like, you're like, oh, let's add this feature and let's add that feature. And the next thing you know, yours priced so far out and you don't know what to take away anymore. And so we like to do it the other direction. And that way you get what is minimal design, but you get maximum value for it. And that's what we call it, a maximum valuable product instead of a minimum viable product. You've heard those MVP terms before. So let's move on to step three. And so our 3P is planet Tom. And I cannot say it enough. Hope is not a plan.

Hope is not a strategy.

It's not a strategy, it's not a plan. This is not the way to go through and develop a product because there are too many cost factors, there's too many hidden landmines, there's a lot of hazards. We talked about that before, right? So we have to avoid all of those. And the planning process is a significant part of that. And why do we wait to plan it and don't do that first? That's a question. I get all the time when I'm out there, and it's a valid question. But the reality is it's. Until we've proven it and we've priced it and maybe gone back and forth and tested that price by proving it again. Right? Because you could do that. We don't know if we're going to go forward. So why waste the time on planning ahead of time? Now that we've defined some of those unknowns now, it makes it easier to plan with more accuracy. And so that's why we put the planet there. Now, the planet is a flexible plan. I don't know how to say it. It's not written in stone, because we don't know lots of things right now at this stage, we've got an idea. We think it's pretty good. We think we've dialed in the right kind of price. Maybe we've made a small prototype or made some kind of prototype, but we haven't gone into serious design mode yet. And so we don't know minimum Runs, we can guess at it. We maybe say, oh, for this typical plastic part, yeah, you're going to need to make a minimum of a couple thousand pieces. That's pretty typical in this marketplace. So we do have some basis for our estimate. It's not a guess, but it's not dialed in because there might be nuances. We might have to make a whole new tool. The minimum run might be 10,000. These things are going to get refined and redefined in the plan, but at least we know going forward and we have a goal now. Here's where a critical factor happens. Do not underestimate your timing. If you are trying to make a season, a holiday season, a selling season, a summer season, do not underestimate that because you will miss it. And then when you miss it, you're a whole year out.

Yeah, this is the most critical, I think, critical part of planet. A lot of people don't lay out that critical path timeline of what it's going to take to, oh, I can get that product manufactured in 30 days. Well, maybe you can, but then you've got a whole lot of logistics. Getting it to the port, getting on a vessel schedule, getting over, if it's in Asia, and then getting on a vessel over the ocean to the US Port, depending on that port, then you've got days getting it off the ship and into a warehouse and out of the warehouse.

Those are known days. Right. The amount of time it takes to tool, the amount of time it might take to refine that tool and get it right and get the best part off of it. You know, those things are undefined timelines. For instance, we're at mid April, when we're recording this right now, a client came to us and said they wanted to launch something in the holiday and they'd have to really have everything in their Amazon shop by November 1st.

Oh, at the very latest.

Yeah, at the very latest. Yeah, but they're okay with that. Then November 1st, we looked at that and we said, well, most products, we'd have to say, no, it's not possible. This product is small, it's likely to be easy to air freight. We, we can probably make a small run because of the material choices that are there. The tooling takes about half the time of certain plastic toolings. So like we just looked at all of that. We said the factors are in their favor for this to be, yes, at the outside, it's aggressive and we need to be on schedule and on time for everything that we do and on top of everything. But it's doable. And normally we would be just really hesitant about it because we're a little more conservative because we know how many things do go wrong and if it went wrong, then they'd be out a whole nother season and we don't want that to happen for them. That's a significant investment. We want them to be able to capitalize on the holiday season. So, you know, we would have turned away the project, actually. I mean, it's just. That's the way we work on it. We would have said, why don't you come back to us late summer when you're ready and you can hit the spring launch for this. That's just the kind of information that you must have when you put this plan in place. So this is a great time to utilize the product launch hazards platform and get feedback and information on your plan. Do I have enough time in my plan for this? When's the optimum time to do this step? When's the optimum time to get someone in to make sure I've got my distribution line or my shipping and my duties and all of that information? When's the optimum time for that? And make sure you've got that plugged into your plan. We can't emphasize this one enough, so sorry to like go on and on about it, but it's so critically important to you being profitable and successful and meet the timeline. Because if you were to just miss it and hit January, you would have a third, if not maybe a quarter of the sales you would have had if you had been on time two months earlier. So the question is, should I do it now?

Well, and really it points to the typical thing, which is time is money, right? I mean, the biggest cost a lot of companies face is the cost of carrying inventory or the cost of waiting for sales to occur if they miss those windows. So you gear up and ship product in for that third, fourth quarter, fourth quarter, I guess in this case, and you miss it. Now you're going to sit on that inventory for how long and that ends up being a big cost. And so anyway, it's.

And this is a really good time for you if you've got multiple projects or multiple products going through for you to evaluate which one has the best likelihood for success for the timing that you want. And that's when you start to look at that plan and phase your product launches, start thinking about which one can wait till spring, which one can wait till next summer, and be looking at all of those things in this planning process. So definitely don't miss this. And a good plan takes into consideration that sales channel cycle and understanding it. So if you're in an on the shelf cycle, if you're going to present to retailers, please talk to Tim Bush on our platform here because he is the expert at when buyers are buying, because there is certain buying seasons for various products, when their planograms open, when they take in new vendors, and it's a whole lot earlier than you think it is. It might be sometimes 18 months earlier than you then it. And so if you think you're going to get in the shelf by end of year, it's not going to happen in most cases just because you might be off their buying cycle.

That's a really good point, Tracy. It's a whole different aspect of planet. It just depends on which market you're going for. But you're right, sometimes buyers will have only a three or four day period where they're going to make their buying decisions. They'll have all these vendors in which first of all you have to be invited or you have to pitch them to get included in that type of a buying. It's almost like a mini trade show within their own company really where you ship in your product, they get to review it, they look at the pricing and if you're not invited to participate in that, you're going to be beating your head against a wall for a long, long time before you're going to be able to even begin to think of selling to them. So just make sure you know your market and what you're dealing with and how hard it is. But again, that comes down to planning and getting the advice of a good expert who knows what those cycles are.

Yeah, and sometimes they change like, you know, especially at the beginning of a year, they'll sometimes look at their overall plan and they'll redo their budgets and they'll redo their cycles and they'll redo their plans. And so that's where you want an insider who can get in and just find out that information and validate it. Is it different this year? That's critically important and that is a significant part of it. Let's move on to the step that everybody loves. This is the product fun step. Right. Number four is to prototype it, design, develop it, do all of those fun, fun things that most people really like. And this is where we iterate, this.

Is where we dial in really all the specific details of what that final product is in every single way. I mean, from the function of the product to the look and feel of the product, the materials, the colors, the packaging. You've got to get this all completely defined and have no unknowns, nothing left to chance or afterthoughts.

Right. And Tom, you know, already has done an office hour on prototyping and some of the different methods that we use and that are available to do this is really where we're talking about also the refinement of it. I don't want anyone to think that we waited this long to design things. Design happens all along the way because all of this information is in fact transforming design. So like for us, this is refining the product, it's refining what we want. But when we hit this stage, we have enough information to do final prototypes, to do functional prototypes, to do anything that requires investment in cost. So like, if you have to pay for something, this is the time we wait to pay for it because we've gotten enough information along the way. We might have done some drawings ahead of time, maybe some 3D print models, because we happen to have a 3D printer here. We certainly have probably done renderings to do some side by side comparisons and get some market feedback, but we've probably not dialed in the full prototype with all the things that we've learned in the product and the features until this stage. And the other thing that we do at this stage, which is what we call development. So it's designing, but development is also refining what is going to be the criteria for how this is made, what is going to be the quotation specification, what might be the quality requirements. We have the critical factors, like all of those things we outline because we want to be really, really clear when we go to our manufacturer to get the quotations and the information, what we are expecting.

Sometimes prior to this stage, you might have had two different kinds of samples. We talked about this before. You might have had more of an appearance sample that looks the way you want it to in production and had then a functional prototype that doesn't look like it will, but actually works. So this is the time where you got to bring those things together and make either one final sample that you can absolutely confirm this is what it's supposed to be. Sometimes that can be done prior to manufacturing, sometimes it's the very first piece manufactured after things are tooled. It sort of depends on the product and the materials and the situation.

So this is the point at which we do what we call pre sourcing. This is where we've sort of selected some factories that we think would be the most likely for us to work with We've gotten quality samples back from them that have nothing to do with the product we're making. They just might be in the right materials or the right genre so we can check their quality. We send somebody in to audit them. So, like all of this is happening under it, because sometimes we might have to make that prototype with them because we can't do it ourselves because of the combination between materials and technology and processing and whatever it might be, we need to work with them to do that. And so this is the stage at which we are involving manufacturing. But it just might not be our final selected source because we're not at final quotation. And then very often this is also where we're dialing in the information that we have. We said, we think it's going to cost this. We believe it's this. Because we're using this much material, it should take this long to make. This is a time to validate that and allow those manufacturers to create a final quotation based on making a sample. And they prefer that because it means that they're much more aware of anything that they couldn't tell just by looking at it as they start to try to make it. And not every product can be made like that, but if they can, this is a preferred time to do it because you will get a better quotation that holds, the price holds. And so that's why we do that at that time. We also dial in packaging requirements. Not the final design of the packaging, not the exterior of it, but requirements to how to safely transport something, make sure that it doesn't break in process, make sure the way it's laid out in the box makes it easy to assemble and logical to the user. Like, those are things that we also do at this stage of it, because that's an important part in your quotation as well. How big does your box end up? Is a final, very important piece of information, and yet one that people skip too much too often. Right? They just don't have that detail. It means that you can't dial in all the costs that you need to make a final decision if this is good to go because you won't know the landing cost. That's one of the places at which we make sure to at least do that. Rough. From there, we also determine whether or not something's ready for the fifth step. Protect it.

This is one that people often get way, way out of order on. They usually think, oh, I've got this idea and I really believe in it. Oh, I'm going to go spend all the money, and go and patent it right away. And they do that as step one, before they've proven there's a market for it, before they've priced it out. I see people spending tens of thousands of dollars on intellectual property, attorney costs and government fees and things like that. By the time they really then start on their project and get to the stage that we're telling you this is the right time to do it. Now, they often find, oh my gosh, there's all this other stuff that we came up with along the way that should be added in the applications or be covered in the Intellig intellectual property protection. And then you end up redoing things, doing it over again, spending more money, and it ends up being a much bigger extension.

Right. There's a whole bunch of things. Now, I want to be really careful here. If you must disclose something in the prove it stage, we highly recommend filing a provisional, because a provisional is very inexpensive. So if you did something wrong, you can just trash it and start a new provisional at this next stage. Right. So it's okay to do that early on if you want, but do not be filing full patents until you've gotten through this development process, because your features might have changed. In the prove it and price it phase, in this prototype phase, lots of new things and new opportunities for patentable features might come up as well. New ways to make something that you didn't imagine. So this is why we wait to do that. And this is especially the time to wait to file design patents. Do not file design patents before this stage because design patents don't hold up very well. We learned this on office chairs, for instance. So we would patent the front design, the back design, the base design. Like you have to break it all up to file a big design patent on the whole thing would mean that if somebody did 10% difference anywhere on the product, including the back, it all of a sudden invalidated the design patent. And that was proven in court.

So, yeah, and that 10% number is. I just want to make sure that's not a hard and fast rule rule. That's just, I would say, an educated estimate based on our experience. I mean, I've seen it even be much less than 10% of a difference between a patented product and one that was actually a legitimate copy. But they left the detail out and it went the distance in court. And guess what? The patent holder lost because they had done this design patent, disclosing the entire product. I mean, everything from think of it from head to toe of this product they had everything in the drawing. And there was one little change somewhere, it was less than 10%. And that court, well, in imagine in favor of the infringer, the one who had copied, which I personally didn't agree with that from a design perspective, but from a legal perspective, I mean, the court ruled.

Right. And my point here is that if you've prototyped it and you made 10% changes to what your original that you filed, because you filed too early, you've made changes in the manufacturing process and how you have to make it, and it creates a visual difference. Now all of a sudden you're not even covered under your own patent that you filed. So earlier is not the time for design patents. And possibly waiting as long as you can on utility patents is smart because of the high cost of them, but also because new things might come up that you could add, added claims and other things, as Tom pointed out before. And so that's why we wait on here. Now, again, just want to reiterate, provisionals could happen anywhere through the process whenever you need the protection, and that's the critical factor there. And sometimes you need it before you talk to a factory. So make sure to do that at the right time. And we have a couple of attorneys on the platform, Jason Webb, Rich Goldstein, there's lots of people you can talk to about that. So please make sure that you're consulting them on your timing for things. Anyway, that was step number five, which we call protect it. We don't really call it patented protect it because there's also copyrights and trademarks.

Yeah, that's the.

And this is the time to do it because they. This is another thing that I discover with logos. So you design this cool logo and you think it's great and it looks great on your website, but you go to print it on your product and it doesn't work. Or the product only allows you to do a one color version of it. So you end up having to file your trademarks again or you try to brand register. This has happened trying to brand register at Amazon and they reject you because you're overlapping with someone, which is highly likely that you would have gotten rejected at the Patent and Trademark office too, for your trademark. So you might as well wait on that. And so make sure that you're in alignment and so wait till you're at this stage or be willing to do it again. That's something that you may have to do with a trademark. And so critically important to make sure that you add that protection at this layer though, because A trademark. As Jason pointed out when we did his interview in his first episode with all of you, Jason pointed out that a trademark is only good on goods that are actually produced. So it's only in use, it's a commerce mark. And so you want it to be on your product. If it doesn't work, being printed on your product or being engraved in your product or however it gets marked on there, then you need to redo that logo. That's a good time for you to wait to protect that as well. Now we get to six, which is also our fun one. Right. We're going to produce it. Yay.

Finally we're making it.

Yeah. And so I'm going to pull this back up and try and zoom in on that section here.

Yeah, you got it.

Got it right there.

Yeah, but a little. There you go. You could even be a slightly bit closer and raised slightly. There you go.

Is that good?

Yeah, that's pretty good.

So you see, there's a lot to that, right? There's manufacturing, there's packaging, there's qc, there's qa, there's shipping, there's MOQ to deal with, which is minimum order quantities. There's quality, there's customer service. You got to shoot your selling store up. You've got to, like, get your Amazon listings. Like, there's a whole ton of stuff you got to do at this stage. But it all starts with being ready to kick the PO off. And that's where I sit back and say, if you're not ready at the end of the protect it, to put your money down on it. If you're not ready to pay 50% down or a third down or whatever, you're able to negotiate on it. If you're not ready at that stage, you are not ready to be starting this production stage. Hold off, check your timing, make sure it's right. Don't wait too long, though. If you're trying to hit a holiday season or you're trying to get orders in before Chinese New Year, make sure you've got everything in. But all of a sudden you're going to need all this stuff. You're going to need a QC document, you're going to need a quality control specifications, you're going to need all of these things. And so you've got to make sure all of that is in line and your package is ready, your technical specifications are ready, you have all the information you need to issue a purchase order. And so it's a great time for you to go dial that in in the Resource library. We share with you our critical factors document, our specifications documents. Use them now. They're not right for every product. There's lots of stuff you could skip there. There might be stuff you need to add, especially if you have electrical products, okay? If you have batteries, if you have circuit boards, if you have any of those things, you should add a whole section of all kinds of testing and other things. This is the time to do testing, right? To do actual UL listing, if that's what's required. But actually physically test your product for point of destruction, like when it falls apart, use testing, whatever it might be, cycle testing, abrasion for fabric.

It can also be just testing to make sure that the product actually does what you asked that it would do or that you specified it would do. You talked about quality things, Traci. I think that's very true. And I think especially if you're doing something that does use battery or involves electrical engineering in any way, just because you provide requirements and you detail them outright, so you set the expectations up with the manufacturer from the get go for what you expect and need this product to do and be, then the manufacturer makes it. But how do you know that they did it right? It may actually work initially and perform the function that's intended. But how do you know that the circuit board has been manufactured properly? So the right amount of electrical current is being put into the rechargeable battery, but with the charging circuits that they've created on there, I mean, these are things that are beyond most of our ability to actually verify and control.

This is where you really need a resource. This is where you really need to consult an expert. So this happened, and I'm not going to disclose who it is, but this happened to someone that I was writing about and discovered. So they sent us a product for testing, we used it and it fell apart. And I thought, whoa, how did this happen? How did they let this go through? So I picked up the phone to call them because I'm not the kind of columnist who's just going to out them as having a bad product. I would never do that. So I picked up the phone to call them and say, hey, guys, what's going on here? Did you realize that you have a problem? And we sent them pictures of it and they were like shocked, they were so upset about it. And so as I started talking to them, I realized that their design intent, that what they were going for, the market opportunity, actually made it so that it deteriorated some of the good things that the standard products on the Market have the good practices. So they were trying to make something, I'm going to just say they were making it softer. And in the process of making it softer, they made it weaker, less durable, less durable. And so it was totally valid. The market wanted it softer. But the way that they went about it, because they didn't then keep the testing of that product because they had no product category experience, they didn't keep up the normal test standards and the factory didn't volunteer it because they were like following the customer was right, the customer keeps asking for softer. So we made it softer. And they don't volunteer that you should be doing these testing. You have to ask for these things. You need to get an expert involved. And so I said, oh well it's material. So did you abrasion test it? Did you color fast test it? Did you a tear test it? Did you tensile test? Did you do all any of these tests? And they went, what are those tests? I'm like those are the standard textile tests that every product should be considered or run through. And they went, we knew nothing about that. And so they weren't then what I call verification testing. And the factory wasn't used testing to begin with because it wasn't in the specifications. So now is the perfect time like at the start of this, before you get your place that purchase order right at the beginning of that to make sure that you've checked, marked off those that you've tested, your initial prototype. We always do that if we can physically or we'll test the first part off the tool, the first fully manufactured part. And so really make sure though you know what those tests that you're going to run it through are and what the requirement for pass it is.

I know this may be sort of illuminating to a lot of you that well, you're just going to manufacture it. It's time to produce your product. Well, you guys are talking about testing and confirming things and compliance issues and all this. And I'll tell this is a huge part of producing something, setting up the expectations from the get go to be accurate to what you need it to be, what the retailer may require that it is. And then just want to touch back on the sort of the electrical engineering idea. You know, a lot of you may specify that you want a product that does involve batteries, electronics in some way, even if anything that plugs into a wall, okay, forget how electronic it is. But anything like that, that you just say, oh factory, I want it to do this and you let the factory engineer it, okay? That's fine. And you know what? We'll take a deeper dive into this subject in another office hour probably because this is the one we could spend an hour plus on to cover properly. But just one note here. Any manufacturer over in Asia who's going to make something electronic for you, you have every right to say, hey, where's the electrical circuit diagram, the wiring diagram, the printed circuit board diagram with all the different chips they're using identified all those chips, they're available chips are known and are certain kinds of chips that perform certain functions. So then you can have an independent company here in the US a trusted electrical engineering firm or proper engineering person.

What's a test lab?

Well, test labs also will test that it was manufactured properly. But I'm also talking about making sure that it was actually engineered properly by the factory before you get to the point of manufacturing it. You do need to test it once it's manufactured.

This is not something that big brands are exempt from. They make mistakes too. Tom knows this firsthand of products that were the whole thing was engineered wrong and batteries were leaking and possibly could catch fire on staples floor. Things can happen like this. This is not. Big brands aren't exempt from this problem too. Verifying things are made correctly, designed correctly engineered correctly is a critical part of this process and responsibility of you as the brand and the person that places the purchase order and is going to sell it.

And I know this probably is scaring the heck out of a lot of you right now.

Sorry.

You know what? That's okay. You have to take it all seriously. If you're going to sell products like this, you need to have the budget to be able to do it right. Because believe me, your budget will be completely blown and you'll be out of business in a hurry if you have an error on the sales side of things. After a product's already in distribution.

Right.

Gets completely recalled.

Well, and I think that it gets overblown in terms of this idea of the costs for this. You're going to spend tens of thousands of dollars making a run of product. Okay. And that's on the low end. I've seen people who have to make hundred thousand dollar runs depending on the products that they have to make. Having somebody do that 10% added cost for quality control, who knows what they're doing. Especially on your first run, which always has issues, is critical that is not too much to pay. That is a critical factor to making sure that you didn't waste your money. These are some things. So I just don't want you to be scared off by the cost or the time involved with it. It's not. It's just some verification check marks, making sure you've got your checklist. Make sure you've got your specifications outlined. And believe me, they'll flex. You'll learn things. You'll say, ah, we have this problem, we need to tighten our controls because we're seeing things that are outside of tolerances. Okay, great, good. You've learned something before. It got out into the marketplace and you got bad reviews. So this is a critical point, step six. But here's the one that has both the cost explosion and if you've done everything right up to this point, you could still really go wrong if you didn't plan this part as well. And that's promote it.

That's number seven.

Yep.

All along.

This whole cycle is a whole promotional plan process and it has to go right in line with that planet cycle that you were doing at step number three that you know you have to have your promotional plan, you have to have a team on it. And this is where we see people go so wrong. You are caught up in doing everything, wearing all the hats, right? And so you're doing all of it. You're doing the production, you're doing the prototype, you're doing all of these things yourselves. And when you don't have a resource team, the thing that falls off is perhaps the promotion or with Amazon sellers, it's all promotion and the product starts to fall off. And so like it's one or the other, there's always seems to be a balance tip. And so this is where I really want you to think about hiring into your weakness. This is where you find yourself a resource who is going to balance that out and take it so that you can spend the time on the thing that you're expert at. And if you're expert at promoting it is going to make a huge difference in the product. Just make sure your product isn't junk when you get it. So put somebody in who can help you with that. Spend some money there on a resource who knows what they're doing, it's worth it. And if you don't know how to promote it, if that's not your thing and you're all about the product, great, good for you. But get somebody in to make sure that promotional plan is sound. Make sure you are going to hit the ground running and you're going to maximize your promotion opportunity from the moment it hits the shelf or the warehouse shelf, and that you are going to maximize your opportunity for sales because it's seasonal for so many, so many companies. So you don't want to miss your season, you don't want to miss your opportunity, you don't want to miss every moment that that product is sitting in a warehouse or on a shelf is costing you money. So make sure that you've maximize that by doing both plans in tangent, parallel, in parallel, so that they do converge at some point.

Right?

They converge right at that. Step number seven, promote. Boy, my brain this morning. I need more coffee.

That's right. But the reality is we all have certain talents and abilities, usually focused in certain areas more than others. And like Tracy said, play to your strengths, higher to your weaknesses. Great, do that. But I think it's really important to have an overall plan to have some kind of a roadmap like the 7P process. So definitely make sure you go to our resources section and get that download that so you can make sure you're on top of it, all right?

And make sure that you're going to see where it's going to dovetail, where the promotion plan overlaps and there's downtime. Like, this is the thing, there's a lot of tooling happening. And during the tooling part, you're sitting back, you place your purchase order, you're monitoring it, you're checking your emails, you're checking with your resource and who's checking the factory, whoever that might be, you're checking in with them and getting updates. But that's the time where you're really working on the critical path, the final emails, the direct response marketing page, your Shopify shop, whatever it is that you're doing in your promotion, that's a time to do it in. And you've planned that so you have all your information gathered up to that point. So finding those dovetail points, when you have opportunity and openings to work on stuff and then know what you need to work on is critical as well. And so like one of those timing things that I always think is really interesting is like people don't realize how early they would benefit from having photographs. So a lot of times we for our clients take photographs and we set them up and we do that. We take first photographs, first set photographs over in Asia, right at the factory, after the first part comes off of it, rather than wait for it to be shipped here. And to do that, we use them as placeholders. We do sometimes have to go in and Photoshop them a little bit, make the quality a little better. But we go in and we Take care of that, because we want to do a lot of planning on our market materials and planning on what everything's going to look like. And then when we get that first product here, we might retake those photos. Very cost effective, but it keeps us running and doesn't make us lose ground and gives us an opportunity to also know, wow, if I just retook this photo, this angle, I'd have such a better photograph and it would show up better. So you learn some things as well in the process. So you can maximize the more costly photo shoot that you will do here in the US or wherever you're doing those photos for your product line. So these are some things that go through my mind as we do it. It's like the plan is so critically important. And so, again, anchored by step number three.

All right, well, I think we sprayed every with the fire hose enough for today. It can be a little overwhelming, but don't stress over it. At least there's a roadmap. Right. And you can go through step by step.

Yeah, let's just go through it one more time. Prove it, price it, plan it, prototype it, protect it, produce it and promote it. And if you do things in that order, you'll have all the right information you need. As you move forward, you'll have a higher likelihood for success, less opportunity for failure, and you'll be able to make sure that you can meet that timeline, that critical factor timeline of getting to market. You have a higher likelihood for meeting that as well, which means more profit, more opportunity for sales. All of those great things happen from following a process like this. So it's more than product development, it's product launch success.

Absolutely. All right, well, I'm sure some of you have questions. Write those down. Save them for future office hour session with either me or Tracy. And then also you can write those in. If you're unable to be live on an office hour session, you can communicate. How can people get those to us? Tracy?

Yeah, so you can email. There's a form straight on the membership area so that you can email them straight into us. Say that this is for office hour, whatever the date and time of the office hour, if you have a specific request, or say that this is for the next office hour with Tom. So you can just also say that as well. And you can, of course, join in on the next zoom call that we have. And you can type in your question, you can raise your hand, we can ask you on video. Like, there's a whole bunch of ways that you can participate so joining in live is the best way for you to get your very specific questions answered. So again, we hope that you'll join us for the next Office hours. This has been Tracy and Tom on Product Launch Hazards.

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