The Ins and Outs of Product Tooling

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.

Hello and welcome to Product Launch Hazards. I'm Tom Hazard, your expert for today and today I'm going to talk on a subject, take a deep dive into tooling. When it comes to a product you're going to manufacture or purchase and you need to tool for it. And really I'm going to call this the ins and outs of product tooling. And so let me just define that straight out. Anytime you're going to purchase a product being manufactured in any factory, it doesn't matter if it's in the US or wherever else around the world that the factory may be located. If you're going to use certain manufacturing processes that are not just fabricating off the shelf material. If you're going to be molding material, stamping material, somehow manipulating material that requires a custom mold, or it's commonly referred to as a tool, any kind of fixture or mechanical device that is going to be used to manipulate material and manufacture your custom part, it's commonly referred to as tooling. But tooling takes many different forms depending on the material and the manufacturing process. So I'm going to go through a bunch of that today. You may, if you've already done business in Asia especially, they may refer to it in different ways. A mold fee or sometimes it could be a die or a plate if it's printing. Basically we're talking about any kind of one time expense or charge that you're going to get when you go to manufacture product, that it's a one time charge to create the necessary. Keep wanting to say tools, but I hate defining the word. Using the word that doesn't make sense. Anytime you're going to need to make something special in terms of the manufacturing or equipment involved in order to make your special or custom parts is referred to as generically as a tool or tooling in general. So tooling takes many different forms and it really depends on material and manufacturing process. But before I get into all the different kinds of tools that you might be required to make to create your product, I want to talk about things that don't require tooling. Just to compare that so you understand it. Let's say you're going to be making a piece of furniture, okay? And let's say it's a table. You're going to be importing a bedside table or maybe an end table for a living room, a series of tables. And these tables are made of primarily wood, wood material. A lot of the time when you make a product like that, where the product is manufactured, by taking a stock material, a certain species of wood and cutting it, you're going to cut out of larger logs or pieces of pre cut wood, you're going to be cutting out smaller pieces, you're going to be cutting different shapes out of it, and you're going to be assembling parts together in a factory and maybe putting a stain and a finish on it, producing a final product. A lot of times that will not require any special tools. And the only exception to that might be if you had a certain kind of an edge shape to the edge of the table that the factory has never made before and they have to make a special knife for their machines to cut. And by knife I mean like, think of it like a drill bit or. But it's not just drilling holes, but they have a different cutting blade that they will need in order to cut the shape on the edge of that table that you want, then that would actually, if you're going to make a custom shaped blade, that'd be considered a tool. And you might have a one time tooling charge to create that blade in the shape that you want. So they can make your part the way you want it. But furniture is one of those kind of products that's been made for thousands of years, honestly in one way or another. And earlier in the beginning with just hand tools and then obviously in the last 120 years with machine tools, you know, electric tools coming in to be in manufacturing, they there's even more that it's done, a lot more. But you still need special cutting shapes and things. And so if you're making like a piece of furniture or a furniture accessory, you might not need any tooling. I think that's also similar with if you were manufacturing any goods out of textiles. If you're just buying off the shelf fabrics and cutting them and making clothing out of them, or making blankets or beach towels or something. I mean, as long as the fabric pattern or print is available and all you're doing is cutting and sewing, that's fabrication. A material wouldn't require any tooling. You might require some tooling. If you're going to print a unique pattern on a fabric and you might need a silk screen to be made, which it might be considered a tooling. And they might charge you a fee to create that if it's custom to you. Or they might not. They're not very expensive to make. Same thing with weaving. If you're going to do woven fabrics, generally all the machines that weave fabrics in custom patterns, you generally don't have a lot of special fixtures or tooling needed to do that. They might create a computer program that's going to weave a fabric in the right pattern, but generally you wouldn't have any tooling charges. So anyway, there are certain things you may manufacture that don't require any special tools. But let's talk about some of the ones where you would. And I'm going to start breaking this first down by materials and then get into some different applications for some of those materials and talk about the different kinds of tooling that you might have and some of the terms you might hear if you're going to manufacture or request quotations for things to be manufactured for you. So let's start with plastics. I think plastics are probably the most obvious and common material that may require you to create some custom molds or tools of some kind to make your product. Then the most common process that you would hear about tooling being involved with plastics is injection molding. Injection mold machines are huge machines. Well, they can be small also, but more commonly are huge machines the size of cars or minivans, or even a small bus, if it's a big enough one. And you end up making a mold and putting it into this machine so it will actually, it squirts molten plastic, liquid heated liquid plastic, in at a certain pressure very quickly into your mold, fills all the negative spaces in there, and then it cools. Then they open the mold and remove your good part. And to create that mold, it can be very expensive, depending on the size of the part. They make injection molds for parts as small as less than the size of a penny in your hand, and probably even smaller than that all the way up to huge parts. You could mold an entire huge bumper for a car. And not that any of you are going to be manufacturing cars, but another example, parts of furniture that are plastic and molded, or might be. Let's say you're making a cooler you're going to sell for at the beach, or maybe you're going to make some other plastic set of little glasses, like for martinis and a pitcher that would be for poolside use or beach use. Right. You'd mold those out of plastic and you'd have to create an actual mold and those molds can run from. I would. Well, here's the thing about molds. If you have very small parts, typically when you make a mold, you would not just mold one at a time. You would make what they call a multi cavity mold. And a cavity being a negative space. And you would make a dozen or two dozen or even four dozen of a small part at one time. And then other molds would be so big, something that's as big as I showed in one of my past office hours, a base for a chair, that type of tool, you would just make one at a time because it's a really huge mold and it would be practical to make more than one at a time. So tooling costs can be deceptive. You might think, oh, if I just want a mold to make one? Well, that mold shouldn't be very expensive. Maybe it should just be a couple hundred dollars. Well, generally the cost of running parts of such a small size on a injection molding machine, setting it up and all that, and the amount they charge per hour of time for running the parts, generally it's not financially viable to mold one part at a time. So you have a multi cavity tool to make it practical and efficient to mold a dozen or two dozen parts at a time. And so then the tool becomes more expensive to make. So generally we see tooling prices in China being anywhere from on the low end, maybe one or $2,000, and on the high end, 10 to $15,000. Those would be pretty expensive mold, even by China standards. But in the United States you would pay probably easily four to six times that cost for a comparable mold made in the US Mostly just because of US labor rates being entirely different in Asia. So injection molds are a wonderful thing because you can engineer or design a part to be exactly what you need or want it to be functionally or aesthetically to be your unique look. And then that's going to be something that's going to be very hard for a competitor to go directly head to head against you on Amazon or on the shelf at retail. So injection molds is one type of tool and very expensive, but also can be very worth it and very efficient and help bring your. It's a one time cost can help bring your cost of manufacturing each part or each product down significantly if you tool for it as opposed to. And mold it as opposed to making that part another way. Another kind of plastic mold tooling would be a vacuum form. A vacuum form is where it's sort of. I would think of it as a one Sided mold instead of an injection mold is like, think of it like a clamshell. You're going to bring two pieces together and have a negative space. You're going to mold something inside it and pull it apart to bring out the part. A vacuum form, kind of one sided. You'd have think of it as a mold, but it's a form, a positive form of what you want to make. And then it's on a table, it's all heated up and has little holes in it to suck air down. They're going to put a piece of plastic, stretch it over it, heat it up above with a heating element, bring it down, press it down over that form, that vacuum form tool. And then like an air hockey table in reverse that has all those holes in us that's blowing air up. It's going to suck air down through the mold and pull that plastic sheet down to the top of it and mold you a piece of plastic apart that way. There are some actual end products using vacuum forming to be made, but it's most commonly used in the packaging industry. If you've noticed anything you would buy at retail, especially hanging at the checkout at Target or Staples or even the grocery store, a lot of times a product will have a cardboard backer and then on the front of that it will have a plastic, what they call a blister pack. It's very thin, clear plastic that's molded with a vacuum form process. They create that positive form that's going to be of a size big enough that the product would fit inside the packaging. And then when they actually package the product, they usually have the vacuum form down, put the product in it, and then put the cardboard card on it and it's glued to the plastic. And then all of us have to use scissors or rip the thing apart to get the packaging open to get the part we need. But in any case, a vacuum form tool would be used to make that kind of product. And even in that case, that tool would probably have dozens that positive form to make one in one big sheet. Whatever the sheet size of the raw plastic is, they're going to form over it because you want to be very efficient and get the best yield of that plastic material, have very little waste. So you're going to make a form that has multiples and multiples. They'll form it and then they'll cut it apart into the individual size pieces they need and assemble them into packaging. So that vacuum form tooling can also be thousands of dollars depending on what you're Doing, whether it's overseas or domestic. But in order to get your product or your packaging to be exactly what you want it, that's what it takes to do it. Let's talk about extrusions. Plastic extrusions give you an example of some things that are made of extruded plastic. Straws. Most common thing, drinking straws are made of plastic extrusions. A lot of moldings you would see, you might notice if you're in like your Home Depot or Lowe's, they make a lot of plastic extrusions that are used for, like, door weather stripping and things like that. We have a product we designed recently for a client that actually is a game for kids that has a lot of parts that are made with extrusions. So think of extrusions as you're going to have a tool that's called a die. So an extrusion machine, again, will melt plastic. There are also some that do metal. We'll talk about that in a few minutes. But you have plastic that's melted, so it's liquid. And then they have sort of a screw system that pushes. It creates pressure and pushes the plastic straight through a die linearly in a straight line. And whatever shape you create, it's going to come out that way. If you've ever been in Home Depot or Lowe's in the plumbing department and you see pv, PVC pipe, that's plastic pipe or ABS pipe, the black version of material they have, their PVC is usually white, although they have some gray and other colors too. They make those pipes through extruding them, pushing that plastic through a dye that looks like a donut, and it's liquid enough that it'll get pushed through the dye, but they get the temperature just right. So when it comes out of the dye, then it still keeps its form as it's cooling and it doesn't change shape. I mentioned straws and I mentioned pipe. It doesn't just have to be round shapes. I mean, it can be any shape you want. There are lots of different. The interesting thing is you can make any shape you want as long as you know it's. Whatever it is, is a linear shape. There are other things you can do with extrusions in a secondary operation to cut holes in them or machine parts out of them if you want. But anyway, extrusion is a good process if the forms and geometries you create will meet your needs. But one limitation of. Well, actually, one good thing of extrusions is that the dies are not very expensive to make you can just pay a couple hundred dollars to several hundred dollars, Maybe a thousand dollars at most. For a plastic extrusion die. They're pretty limited in terms of how expensive they will be. Because they're less complicated, really, is what it comes down to. Another plastic molding process I want to mention to you. That is, it's a great process. If you've got a product that the properties of the process will meet your needs is rotational molding. The way that works is, again, you have sort of a clamshell mold, right? Two halves of a mold come together, but it's a different kind of process. The mold's made of aluminum. Most other plastic molds would be made of steel of one kind or another. These molds are made of aluminum. Because aluminum has a very great conductive properties. Meaning for heat to be evenly heated across the whole tool. And to heat up quickly, you'd make it out of aluminum. But the way rotational molds work is you actually don't heat up plastic so that it's liquid. And then push it into a mold. In this case, you take the mold when it's apart and it's two halves. And you put powdered plastic in each side. Or I guess just in one side. The right amount of powdered plastic for. And they do testing to figure out how much is the exact right amount to put in. So they put it in, they close up the mold. And then the mold goes into a frame that's kind of like a gyroscope. And it gets turned constantly in all three axes in the air, up in the air, in a big room that is an oven. And usually when you're manufacturing a lot of parts this way, you'd have eight or 12 molds that you've made. That you've put plastic in. And they're spinning around almost like an amusement park ride, really is what they're doing. Like, you ever go on one called the spider or something like that at amusement park? Similar to that. They're spinning around in this oven of a room. That heat transfers to the aluminum. And then as it rotates, that powdered plastic ends up sticking to the heated side walls of the mold. And however much plastic you put in there Dictates how thick the wall thickness is. And you make a molded part. And this is one way that a lot of products that you know and probably have in your home and use all the time are made like, let's say, typical plastic garbage cans are made this way. There are some that may be injection molded. But most of them by and large are made through rotational molding. And it's actually kind of neat because for a garbage can, they'll mold the bottom of a garbage can and the lid all in one mold. They take it out of the mold and they just cut. They design it so they cut the lid off of the can part and then they cut it in such a way that the lid fits on the can. And it's very efficient because you have very little waste in that process. You're really just putting the amount of plastic into each mold that you need to. Other products that are made that way are the outsides of a lot of coolers that you might buy to take to the beach or camping and things like that. So rotational molding is a neat process. The tools themselves are not as expensive. They use less metal. And injection molds have like all sorts of what they call gates and sprues and air vent holes and things in order to work properly. Rotational molds don't need that. So they're much simpler. But the downside is in order to manufacture them efficiently, you have to make multiple tools. Like I was telling you about the amusement park ride and having a bunch of these on there at one time. So injection mold tooling, even in the United, I'm sorry, rotational mold tooling, even the United States can be maybe only two or three thousand dollars for each mold. Maybe complex ones would be up to four or five. And that can be, especially in the US, much cheaper than injection molding. And of course in China it would reduce those costs by a factor of probably four plus less expensive. But you got to make multiples of them to be manufacturing efficiently and get a good piece part cost for high volume throughput. So pros and cons, really, I would choose what type of plastic manufacturing process I want to use and what kind of tooling I would need based on the properties of the product to get the best product out of it. And then that's pretty much going to dictate the process you would use or the processes that are available to choose from and then how much your tooling would be. So let's move on to metal. There's a lot of different metal manufacturing processes that also require tools. Some of them are similar to plastics, but some are different. First one, let's take stamping. Metal stamping is going to be anything you want to make that can be made out of a piece of sheet metal, whether it's steel or aluminum or brass, copper. Any metal material that's made into a sheet can be formed into a Part and stamping will do a combination of forming parts from a 2D flat sheet into a three dimensional part. And it also will allow you to cut holes at the same time in them and even form other things like maybe a fold over the edge of the sheet material so it's not sharp or fold a bend into it to make it stronger. And the most common parts that are made using stamping that you would see in the world are your car body parts like fenders, the hood of your car that you lift up to look at the engine, the trunk lid. All those metal parts are stamped and formed through a process like that. And the stamping dies for forming metal depends on the size of the part really and exactly what's being done. They can be anywhere from very inexpensive to quite expensive. From hundreds of dollars to many thousands of dollars. It just dep on the size of your part. And again, the kind of product you want to make would dictate the type of material you need to use and the process you would choose. So let's see. Castings, metal castings. There are lots of things that are made of cast metal. And when you cast metal, you're heating it up to a liquid form and pouring it into a mold that can survive that heat. And you just keep pouring it due to gravity into there usually. Although there are some metal parts that are die cast where you actually almost. It's almost like an injection mold at that point where you have a made of a metal that will be able to take much higher temperatures than the metal you're going to heat up and mold into it. And then they almost like injecting the liquid metal into the mold and forming a part. And little toys, a lot of toys like little toy cars and things used to be made. And I think a lot of those parts still today are made of die cast metal to make like the frame of like a matchbox car or something that then you snap on other plastic parts to to make the whole car. And even other things like remote control cars and things sometimes have them in there. So castings can be made from aluminum pewter. Let's see. Brass. A lot of brass castings are made especially for, let's say decorative giftware items can be made of cast aluminum or cast brass. And then functional parts like if you go through like your Lowe's or Home Depot and you look at all the cabinet hardware that's there for the handles that you can buy, you have a lot of die cast metal parts there. And some of it's brass, some of it's zinc, lots of different metals. So molds for those things to make castings, again, it's tooling and various costs. But you can. We talked about prototypes and samples in a previous office hour and you can certainly make prototypes and samples of things like this for a one off sense to approve the design and even sometimes the function of a part. But to go and make large volume production, you got a tool for it. You got to make, you know, some molds or casting, you know, fixtures to be able to really produce them cheaply and in high volume. Let's see then, one type of tooling that probably everybody who is watching this, who has either already imported a product or had a product manufactured for them, or is considering doing it, you'll all run across this is when it comes to packaging, you are probably going to have to create some, what I would still call tooling fixtures in order to make your product in enough volume and be able to make the unit price lower. And because almost every packaging is going to need to be printed in some form, that's the most common thing, especially retail packaging on the shelf. In stores it can be a little different. On Amazon you can get away with a brown box and minimal printing, if any. But at retail, you know, it's an unassisted sale environment and people are walking down the aisle looking at the product that's on the shelves. And pretty much that packaging does the sales job for you. So very often you need a full color printed lithograph type printing and you have to do color separations because they print usually cmyk, cyan, magenta, yellow and black. And you have to make printing plates to create those prints. And there's some cost to them. It can be in the US anywhere from 500 to maybe $1,000 or more. In China, probably a little less than that. Not as dramatically less as you might hope. But pretty much everybody needs to do some kind of tooling for packaging. And then we talked about blister packs earlier with plastics. There may be other kind of packaging tooling you need to do. So tooling is really a fact of life in the world of product development and product purchasing products in the product industry, if you're going to make a consumer product, you're probably going to have to at some point create a tool to manufacture a part or to make the right packaging that meets your needs. And a lot of choices you can make with different materials. The number of cavities that you make, you can start small with fewer cavities, a little bit more per part. Getting off of those tools, and then as you can afford it, as you have higher volume needs, you can create a new tool that has more cavities. And usually that will cut down your part cost and eventually your product cost quite a bit. I have a few questions that were sent in regarding this, and I want to address a couple of those. And one of the most. And this, actually, I'm glad this question was asked because this is one of the most common questions we get, especially people that are new to tooling or the need to have to order tooling. Well, I will ask. This one is, can I get a factory to absorb the tooling cost or the tooling fees? And it's a good question to ask, but it's also, I would say, a tricky question to answer. And so barely with me here. You certainly can a lot of time get a factory to not charge you up front for the tooling. I mean, typically the way it would work is when you place a purchase order. The first thing you'll have to pay for is any tooling, because before they can manufacture your custom part, they got to make the mold. So usually you pay 50% down on the mold and then 50% to complete the purchase of the mold when they give you the first part to review off of it before they go to manufacturing. But one way or another, you're definitely going to pay for that entire tool prior to manufacturing. Okay. Unless you negotiate something else and the factory absorbs that cost, essentially they pay for the tooling. But here's where it sort of gets tricky. Even if they say, oh no, we're paying for the tooling, guess what? You're paying for the tooling. They may not charge you that upfront amount for it, but believe me, they have increased your product cost or your part cost by a significant amount. Usually not pennies, usually dollars to then get so that they're having you pay for the tool just over time, you're not paying it all up front. Maybe you're going to order 1000 pieces at a time. Maybe the tooling cost is going to be. The tooling cost is maybe $5,000. Well, so they figure you're going to order at least 5,000 parts at some point. Maybe they increase your part cost by a dollar for each one. Now that might seem like, hey, that's a really good deal for you because you don't have to cough up the $5,000. And that's just an example. It could be 10 or 15 or $20,000. Whatever it is, I have some products we have developed for people that have had $75,000 worth of tools, multiple tools that had to be made to make the product. Well, you may think, well, that's great, I don't have to pay that tool up front. But if you're going to order more than 5,000 parts from this factory ever in the history from Part 5001 and beyond, you lose because you've agreed to this price and they're making a bigger profit going down the road. So you want to be very careful what that. That process is referred to as amortizing the tooling. Now, some factories may not tell you that's what they're doing and they just don't charge you any tooling. But the part cost is higher. I would always ask, hey, if I pay for the tooling up front, then what is my part cost? And you get real transparency into the cost of tools versus the actual cost of manufacturing. I would try to resist having the cost of manufacture jacked up for you permanently because you're negotiating a deal where you don't have to pay for a tool up front. So just be aware of that and whatever the costs are, believe me, no factory, us or foreign factory, is going to give you a deal that's in your best interest. If they're not making you pay for tooling, they're really burying the cost of that tooling in the part cost or the product cost that they're charging you for. So even if you do work out a arrangement where, hey, get the quote for the part cost separate from tooling and say, hey, I understand the tooling cost and the part cost, you might be able to negotiate, hey, can you increase the cost of the part for the first 5,000 units, 10,000 units, whatever it takes by a certain amount to pay for the tooling, and then once the tooling is covered, reduce the cost to the normal cost. Sometimes you can work things out like that. It's not very common, but it has happened. So that's called amortizing the tooling over. Well, amortizing is also more of a financial term and sometimes that's used by the bookkeepers on the back end when you've paid for tooling and you're. It's an investment over time. And amortizing it has also to do with a. Just how you financially account for it. So I'm not talking about from that perspective. Some of you financial people, I get it. Don't read into me and complain. I get it. But you definitely, you can spread the cost out of the tooling over a certain run of products if you want to. But again it's. Those are harder deals to negotiate. They're usually easier to negotiate when you've built a good long term relationship with a factory and you have some sales history and they believe you're going to be around for a while, you've had some success with them and they want to keep doing business with you. Because the other reality that I see you can negotiate is that this is another very important in and out of tooling. Tools don't last forever. Tools have a life to them. An injection mold might be good for 100,000 cycles. Now if you have a 4 cavity tool, that would mean you'd get 400,000 parts out of the life of the tool. And that's a huge great run for any tool. So that's pretty good. But other tools might live for 30,000 pieces or 50,000 pieces. So make sure when you are ordering tooling and you're being quoted tooling to ask them how many parts is the expected life of this tool going to be? How many parts can I get off it? And then you can see what your total investment is and your cost of that tooling per part if you make that many parts over the long run. But I've also seen deals struck and this is more common where when you work with a new factory and you're buying a product, having a custom product made and you pay for tooling, you can negotiate that, hey, the first tool you're going to pay for, you as the vendor, the purchaser is going to have this part made for you. But then the factory for the future, when the tool wears out, they would buy any replacement tooling needed. So I've seen deals like that worked out and that can work in your favor or it also cannot. You might want to make sure you very specific about, well, when will a new tool be made after how many pieces? Because they may try to use that tool far beyond its realistic life expectancy. And the quality of the parts you get off that tool will not be as good toward the end of the tool's life as they were in the beginning. So make sure you set up rules and expectations, I guess is all I would say there. I had another question here of someone asking, hey, when I order samples, sometimes the factory wants to charge me a mold fee or some kind of a special fee regarding tooling. And the question is, is that common? Does that make sense? And I said, well, what I'd like to say is that does happen from time to time. I'VE had it happen where I was getting a sample of a product for our own business, not even for a client, getting a samp of a product from China with a custom stamped embossed logo. And they had no way that they could really sample it. And so I had to pay what they told me actually was something like a $300 mold fee, which would be tooling to be able to make it. And so the factory went and had that tool made, even to produce a sample for me before I had committed to buying any large quantity. And because it cost them money to do that, in order to make you the right sample for you to approve and check out the quality, the fit, the finish, the whole thing, sometimes you have to bite the bullet and pay for a tool. Now, this was a very light stamping die. It was stamping on a thin aluminum sheet, which is fairly flexible. It's not very harsh on tools. So $300 for as a mold fee for this stamping die was pretty reasonable, and we paid it. So it can happen. I think we should all expect, especially when we're new doing business with a certain vendor or certain factory, especially overseas, that we can't expect a factory to spend a lot of money on our behalf other than labor, like making samples and things. Generally. Sometimes you get samples made for free if all it is is labor and some material. Or they might charge you a nominal sample fee. That's pretty reasonable. But the tooling. I just think it's unrealistic for us to expect a factory to absorb that cost when you have no commitment to buy anything from them in the future. So it's really a bit of give and take meeting in the middle. I think often factories are not charging what their real cost of making a sample is. They're just trying to recoup some of their cost and have you meet them in the middle. Sometimes it's like, hey, you think you've got something here? We like the idea. We'll work it out and make you a sample, charge you nominal fee that at least covers some of our costs so that you each have a little bit of skin in the game. Seems pretty reasonable to me. So anyway, I think that probably just sprayed you all with the fire hose for tooling and probably told many of you a lot more than you ever needed to know or wanted to know. But I also want to make sure I'm giving you some good and comprehensive information regarding all the different kinds of tooling that are out there and where you might encounter some of that. And these office hours that we do on a regular basis are a forum where when a lot of you are attending live, you can ask any questions you want to. So if you have some questions from a vendor and you're wondering if you think they're being reasonable or you're worried that you're being taken advantage of, come into these office hours and raise that question. People that participate live are invited to ask questions. Now, today, I don't happen to have anybody live. I had a couple of questions that were emailed in that I addressed, and you can do that as well. If you can't participate live. But as a member, come participate in as many office hours as you can because I think you'll get a lot of valuable information that is well worth what you're paying for to be a member every month. And you can help get some of those questions answered for you right here live. And I'd be happy to do that. All right, so I'll be back next time with another great office hour. Figure out what that topic is. If you have a particular topic you'd like to hear, please write in and let us know and we'll make sure we address that topic as soon as we can. Upcoming. But until next time, this has been Tom, your expert on Product Launch Hazards. Thanks a lot. See you next time.

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