Want Product Launch Success? Meet Your Product Launch Protection Experts Tom Hazzard & Tracy Hazzard

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, everyone, and welcome to the premiere episode of Product Launch Hazards.

Hey, everyone. Welcome.

This has been like, I don't know, a couple of years in the making.

A long time coming. I'll tell you, it's been a long time.

It really, really has. I mean, we've done these sort of. I'm going to call them client calls and coaching episodes and things like that, and we've mixed them into some of our other podcasts, but we've never made it its own thing, and it's finally its own thing. So, anyway, today we want to introduce ourselves in case you're new to us, and we also want to introduce what Product Launch Hazards is going to be all about.

Sounds great. Well, introduce yourself. Tracy, you started.

Oh, I thought I was going to introduce you.

Oh, we're going to do it the other way. All right. Why not introduce me?

So across from me on the desk, although side by side here on this video, is my partner and my husband, Tom Hazard. And Tom and I met in college, Rhode Island School of Design.

Yeah, I can tell that story back when.

Maybe, maybe not. Anyway, Tom's an industrial designer, and if you don't know what that is, I'm going to make him dive into it in a minute. And we've been practicing designers on and off together for over 26 years. Wow, 26 years. And so we have lots of stories and things, and that's kind of why we wanted to start this podcast, because we have so much history of things to talk about and things that we've done wrong and things that our clients have done wrong. But being an industrial designer has made you extremely inventive and creative, and it's helped us launch tons of products. And in the last eight years, we did 250, I think, right?

Yeah, 258, I think at least 50.

Yeah.

It might be more products at retail in one way or another. Yes.

Yeah. And they do about $2 billion at mass market, retail, e commerce combined. And so that's billion with a B, in case I said that kind of mumbled there. And which sounds crazy because we're a really small firm. Right. We're really. It's really just us. And you know, extended team. And so we're going to talk a little bit about that too today. But I really just wanted people to meet you because I'm on stage a lot more than you are, so they don't get to meet you as often. And usually you're with me, if we can. And you're wearing the cool 3D printed tie. And hopefully we'll talk about some 3D printing things, although not too geeky, I promise, while we're on the show. But talk about it in related to product design and development and launching products, market testing, things like that. So, Tom, you have some really cool things. How many patents?

I think we're either co or independent inventors on 37 or 38 patents at this point. And we have more pending. It's just sort of a natural side effect, if you will, of being in product development. It just inherently when you're creating new products, you end up coming up with new things and at times they're patentable. And it doesn't always make sense to patent every little thing you come up with, but a lot of times it does. It depends on really your business strategy.

Well, that is planned for a future episode because that could take. I mean, we could talk about that for hours. I know you can. And so we're definitely talking about invention and patenting and trademarks and copyrights and all of those things because there are hot topics in the product launching world and in valuations to companies. So yeah, that's definitely something we want to go in. But you've also been sourcing in China for a really long time, or developing in China, I would say, because that's more of what, what you do. How long has that been that you've been doing that?

I think I first went to China in 1998. I think I remember that because you.

Could only make like one phone call. That was like all we could afford.

Because it was so expensive.

Oh my God.

Cell phones were still in their infancy. They were not smartphones, Internet.

Cell phones were like still stuck in our car at that moment, I think.

Well, no, we had like the Motorola flip phone and stuff like that. You had any. I remember I had this Nokia one that I thought was really cool because it. Like the one from the Matrix where the thing slid down when you answered it or whatever. But it was just a phone.

Let's just really date ourselves now.

But it was just a phone. Well, this was in the days of the Palm Pilot, the Palm Economy. Right. And that was the big market at the time. And actually that's what the business was related to that we were actually manufacturing and developing our own product at the time, and I went to China to source manufacturing of it.

Well, you know what, we're going to tell that story today. So, yeah, I think that's kind of the consummate introductory story to, like, what can go wrong? What does go wrong when you're trying to launch a business and a product? So I think we start with that story in a little bit.

Okay. But I think, you know, I want to make sure everybody who is watching this video understands what industrial design is.

Yes, please.

Because industrial design is not always that well understood. And I think design is a very overused term in general in business because there's a lot of different kinds of design. I mean, there's graphic design and package design and even a lot of engineers call what they do design. And to an extent it is. But industrial design, as it was taught to me and as I've practiced in my career, it's a wonderful discipline. It's about designing everything that you see about a consumer product, the outside of it. It can also be involving the user interface, human factors, how people interact with a product or an object.

But when we say user interface, we mean how someone interact with it.

Not the software, not the UI or ux. Yeah, yeah, no, no. We're talking about how someone physically interfaces with a product and uses it, whether it's a hand tool or a kitchen appliance, the interior to a car.

Some people call that ergonomics in certain industries. So, like when we do furniture, there's a lot more ergonomics involved in that sort of description of how someone interfaces with a product.

So really, the other way I like to talk about it is, you know, you have a few split seconds, whether it's walking down an aisle at retail, in a store like a Target, or, you know, whether it's a nicer store, you know, in a mall or, you know, wherever you might be, you have a few split seconds or scrolling through.

Your feed on Amazon.

I was going to get to that. Right. Whether you're online scrolling through, you know, a bunch of products, you have a split second to capture a consumer's attention. And it's an industrial designer's job, although an industrial designer has many jobs to do many, many tasks that are very important in any development of a product. One of the most important is to make an emotional connection with that consumer, to make them want to buy the product by what they see and to.

Communicate maybe its features, its benefits, or why someone should buy that in that emotional connection, since it's a lot of burden in a few seconds.

Right? So an industrial designer.

Split second.

An industrial designer does not specialize in any particular kind of product category. I mean, there are some that. But industrial designers design everything from little widgets you would find in the checkout aisle at the grocery store to consumer electronics, to furniture, to cars, any kind of transportation, interior, exterior and, you know, any type of product, pet products, juvenile products, toys, you know, bicycles and, you know, scooters and all sorts of different things. I mean, there's really no limit. It's a profession that specializes in how to visually create a design and how to manufacture it. It really involves a great cross section of disciplines from, you know, manufacturing constraints to marketing concerns to business concerns. And industrial designers. In my career, I've been everywhere from the executive boardroom, that's a serious strategic, you know, planning meeting, all the way to, you know, in the marketing meetings, how are we going to get attention and reach the right consumer? What is the right consumer for this product? All the way to the factory floor and logistics. And, you know, you get involved in.

Everything because all of that matters in the cost. And so when one of the things that we really practice in industrial design, product design specifically, is making sure that we are costing for saleability. And so when you try to create all those features and everything, that's a really important factor. We're going to have a whole episode on that. We're also going to do an episode coming up on the difference between styling and design, because that's kind of an important distinction because most people call themselves designers, but they're actually not. They don't have that depth of knowledge about manufacturing costs and things like that and so really want to differentiate that. But one of the things that you and I talk about all the time, it's one of the core things on my talks that I give on stage is really about the idea that design is essential. That if you do it right, it is essential to the sales process of something. It is not a nice to have to have it be pretty. It is not about that because it's. It is essential to the sales and big companies like Herman Miller and Apple and Nike and all of those understand that clearly and have a significant percentage of their budget, particularly for design, research, design, advanced design, design for manufacturing, value added design, like all of those things are a part of their process. So that's what you're competing against and you can afford not to have design in the process. So we want to be able to bring that to you in little bits and pieces, but it also has a lot of risk to it. Right? And that's what product launch hazard is really all about, is we want to help to reduce the risk, the things that you don't know and along the lines because. Particularly because we've been in the boardroom, as you put it, all the way to the manufacturing floor, sometimes even helping.

In the warehouse or even helping sell the products to buyers at major retailers. I mean, we've. We've experienced every aspect, having a market cradle to grave of the lifecycle of a product, right?

In that we see lots of things go wrong. And. And so we want to make you aware of those. We want to point them out. We also want to point out great experts that are our solutions. Like when we don't know an answer, these are the people we go to. We want to introduce you to them along the way here. And that's part of what our. Our product launch hazards comprehensive sort of group is going to be all about.

So, you know, there's a little glimpse into industrial design and there's many deeper dives we can take into that, especially on the manufacturing side, you know, and like, costs are designed in.

Design is not just about making something pretty. It's about getting the product made the way it needs to be made at the right price to be successful, whatever that is. But let's talk a little bit about you, Tracy.

Oh, you want to talk about me?

I do. Your design career, you started as a textile designer. But, you know, we knew each other from day one, even before you.

Started to get educated as a textile designer, which is fabrics for those of you that may not know.

But. But eventually, actually pretty early in our careers, you came on board and we started working together. And really you became a product designer as much as me, maybe focusing in different areas. Tracy is an expert in colors, materials, and finishes, which is a really critical aspect and area of product design. So. And, but today, I mean, maybe I do more of the engineering, CAD drawing, you know, some of that aspect of product design. But there's so much of product design that is. It happens, you know, in and around before and after that, and that are Tracy's areas of expertise. So, Tracy, why don't you share a little bit about your background and history and what it is that you come to the table with your expertise?

So, yeah, I started in textiles, but it got frustrating really quickly for me because it's not just a surface wrap, and that's really where how they wanted you to treat it. For me, at the end of the day, I couldn't. I mean, it's such for when it's on a piece of furniture, right? It. It becomes the furniture. It's the reason people buy it. So if I didn't understand who was. Who was buying this furniture, who was selling it, how it was going to be sold, what cost it needed to hit, if I didn't understand those bigger picture items, then I couldn't do a good job of designing the materials. And so it wasn't just something that was going to be applied after the fact. And so for me, that's how I got more intimately involved with industrial and product design and sort of gotten to the process of it. And it always also frustrated me that industrial design coursework and in the school programs, watch out that they love to model in gray. Everything is like gray or white. And it just. It drove me crazy. I was like, at the end of the day, like, I get it that you want to check out pure form or pure function and those kinds of things, but the reality is, is that color, context, materials, textures, changes the game. And so if you set your design based on a gray model, that is not what's reality in an environment and how it's going to be sold and how someone's going to interact with it. And so for me, it always was frustrating that that was part of the process. And so my sort of ongoing goal was always to try to like, integrate it into the process, which is how we started working together more and more, because we started working earlier and earlier in the process instead of waiting for a design to be done and then I'd apply materials to it.

Well, we recognized the advantage, the strategic advantage of. Well, first of all, there are many. But I mean, of first of all, two heads are better than one. More perspectives you can get on a product. And I'm not saying you want to design something by committee. I don't advocate that at all. But we all have our preconceptions. We all have blinders to a certain extent and others involved in the process to critique, to offer their perspective. Usually, in my experience, makes a product better, especially when it comes to color, material and finishes. It is true. A lot of very young industrial designers really avoid color decisions and choices and don't consider them from the beginning. It becomes an afterthought. That's kind of a rookie error, although we've seen some, you know, actually more experienced designers still do that, but I think it's more of a rookie error, but still something that needs to be Considered really from the very beginning. I mean, you've got like that cliche, you got to begin with the end in mind, right? And it involves the market, who's going to buy it, all these things, and how many consumer products do I buy all the time? Do I buy everything? I don't. So how do I know everything about what a consumer wants to buy? We need more perspectives involved in the process. So the two of us combined, I think it made for better products.

And gender bias is a big problem, right? We talk about this all the time. We practice something we call gender blend design. It does not mean, like it's no gender. Like that having no gender, having. Being gender neutral is a negative. It means it's got no design to it. It's got no appeal to either gender. Or for most part, gender neutral is by default actually male. And so when you have that and you have a market that's 86% controlled by women, actually probably even closer to.

90 in the US consumer retail, for sure. Influenced or controlled by. I would agree with that.

These are not my statistics. They are statistics from just. And they keep growing every year. They're getting bigger and bigger. And there's just a new research study that shows how big the influence is at ret. And yet at retail, in product design, it's incredibly low. There are fewer and fewer women involved in the process. And when you get through that, when you go to Asia, you'll see that there are no women product designers, There are no women engineers. There might be women factory owners, which we love that. That's a great perspective. But there are no women beyond the sales process. And so you don't really get into that influence when. When you're just shopping in Asia, which is the majority of what retail is today, it's just shopped. We call it sourced. But I think that's a kind of a mistake. It's actually just shop from a catalog and maybe you change the color, you know, and that's about it. Maybe you change a feature, you know, it's. It's. That's what we call styled, right? And so when you're not designing with the core consumer with no perspective on what they want, then you don't have as much synergy. And it doesn't last as long in the market. It doesn't thrive. And big companies know that. Big companies have design staffs that are much more balanced. They work really hard to create that. We were just talking to GE the other day because we've spoke at south by Southwest. We did a Live podcast from the stage there. And GE was telling us that that their entire 3D print, their additive manufacturing department is about 50% women, which is very impressive. Yeah, yeah. And so when you have that, you've really brought in. And that's not even an industry that I would say, like, I mean, yes, women, you know, fly on planes and are in industry and all of those things, but it's not like consumer product with such an extreme control. It's a 50. It's much more of a 50, 50 influence and purchase kind of control. But, wow, that is incredible because they see how important it is.

Well, you know, I think that's maybe sort of the biggest tip that if I were watching this video as a new member and is really just to realize that. But there are so few and like you said, I mean, we've been going, wow, 98. It's actually almost 20 years, holy mackerel. That I've been going to China. We've been going to China a lot. And we have never witnessed a woman involved in product development or design in any Chinese factory. And so that's a big tip and takeaway. I mean, if you've been importing products from China, maybe already as a private labeler or even just as, you know, to resell other people's products, to realize if you're shopping for products over there and you're trying to sell products mostly to a female consumer market, that no women were involved in the engineering or design of those products, that to me should, you know, set up, start setting off some alarm bells that, you know, maybe in certain product categories it's not a big deal and it won't make a difference to your sales, but I think in the vast majority of markets, it will make a big difference. You know, you need to have a female perspective if you're going to develop and sell a product that's intended to be bought by women.

Yeah, absolutely. You know, I also want to just touch on that. I write an ink column. It's in the innovation section. It's called By Design and it's specifically about product design. But I touch on lots of broad areas, like bringing products to market, marketing, influencer marketing, just all kinds of broad areas. Because more of the problems and more of the issues come from not getting enough customers, not getting synergy between the market and product fit, which is one of the. I mean, we're going to deep dive into that here. Market research, ways to do market research and ways to do that successfully. We're definitely going to dive into that over the course of our podcasts, our series here, you know, we really just want to deep dive into all of these little topics and areas because there are ways at which you can learn that. So on the blog posts, on the product launch hazards.com website in the public area, even if you're not a member, all of the Ink column, every single one of my articles is there. And there's also like 40 or something from Has Design that we've written over the years. Has Design is the name of our design consulting business. Has like the last name. And so they're there as well. So there's lots of deeper dives into the little topic areas. And then of course, there will be blogs from every single one of these posts there too. So you're gonna. You're gonna have lots of content that you can consume there and really get some deeper information.

And anyway, I want to tell the story. I want to tell the story of our experience in 1998 when we started our own business, because I think this is a really good perspective to understand. Like, this is the setup for us to why we. Well, we did it the hard way. You'll hear that. We did everything the hard way. And when you do it the hard way, it opens your eyes to all those pitfalls, all those problems, all those product launch hazards that can happen, the hazards with onesie and, you know, and how these things can go about and really where the problems are. And so as we. We changed our model of business very early on because of that information. So I kind of want to set that up so that everyone can understand our perspective. And I was at. We were at Traffic and Conversion. It's a big marketing, digital marketing trade show. And Daymond John was speaking on the stage. And for those of you who don't know Daymond John, he's a shark at Shark Tank. And he was speaking of it and he was saying, you know, I get this question all the time that I have this huge library of information of things that I learned along the way. But, you know, until somebody asks me the question, I don't really know that I know this. And we actively know that we know this because it's become a critical factor in how we do things differently. Because we can see why are we able to do 250 products in 10 years or less, in less than 10 years, launch them, and have them be, you know, extremely successful? I mean, I think we have almost nine out of 10 successes there. And the consumer retail market has seven out of 10 failures. So we look at that and we go, well, it's because of these things. And so that's one of the reasons we started the show, to share that. So let's start with how we did everything wrong. 1998, out came the Palm Pilot. Or 1997, actually. Right?

I don't. Yeah, seven or six Palm Pilot.

And I asked for one for Christmas, which is in my. Actually maybe my birthday, right? My birthday is like five days before Christmas. So like, I asked for this. Actually, it's not five days.

It doesn't matter. It's in December.

I was like, wow, I can't even do my own math.

Anyway, that's why I'm the.

Yeah, this is it. So the Palm Pilot comes out and I saw this, you know, advertisement for it in a magazine. I don't even remember what magazine it was now, but I saw it and I. And I handed it to him and I go, I want one of those. And for anyone who knows us, that is like a forbidden thing to give a, you know, device, an electronic thing.

An appliance, anything like that as a birthday gift to your wife. In my world, never been a good move.

Yeah, it should be something personal, maybe something shiny. Like, those are good things, right? And so anyway, that, you know, that we were looking at that and I. And he was like, are you sure? And I was like, yes. Because instantly I saw time saving and convenience and I saw the potential of what it could do right then and there. And so I wanted to explore it. You want to take it from there?

Well, sure. So I bought a Palm palette. It was the first model they came up with. I think it was US Robotics at the time. And over several years they got bought up by three com. And then it became Palm. But in the beginning it was US Robotics. And so he gave it to her, and so she loved the device.

I opened up the box, right? I opened up the box, set up the device. There was a catalog that came in it. And in the catalog were cases and accessories. Because the pilot was really, I mean, US Robotics was really smart. They started the very first developer marketplace. So they started the third party developer kind of model. You know, like we have app developers today and things like that. And so they started that back then and that was really smart. So they had like launched with them already planned. There had been companies who were developing cases and all of these things. And they were working with Cross Pen, who was in the catalog, who created a stylus pen. And you can see my. My air quotes stylus pen. If you're on video, you can see that. And so I was like, well, that makes sense, because who wants to go from a pen to a stylus and, like, have to, like, you know, juggle both things in your hand? That doesn't make sense. I want one of those. So we bought us both one, right, because your mom then gave you a pilot.

I then got one, and we each got one. And it. You know, the marketing for this thing was very vague. The implication was it was both an ink pen for writing and a stylus for writing on the pilot.

Because they called it a stylus pen.

Right.

And nobody knew at that time what that really meant.

So we spent some money on these things. These are cross pens. I don't know. We probably spent 50 bucks each at the time and not cheap on these pens. And we get them. And all it was was a cross pen with a dumm refill in it. That was a plastic stylus point. There was no ink. It was just a fancy stylus, little nicer than the plastic one it comes with.

So the consumer advocate that I am, I sent the thing back with a nasty note, because that's what you did back then. There were no online reviews sent back a nasty note saying, this is false advertising. You don't know what your people are talking about. This is not what I want. And so that's what I did. You kept yours for a little while, though.

I kept it and used it.

And because it was a little bigger, because the stylus was small.

That's it. The little stylus was so thin, and for my hands, it was, you know, hard to work with. So I liked it was a bigger instrument. But Tracy. I really saw how frustrated Tracy was with this, and I saw this as a design problem to solve.

So, yeah, I think you were on a train, right?

I was. I was on a train. We lived in Rhode island at the time, and I was on a train back to Rhode island from New York City. And I had been thinking for weeks, if not months, there's gotta be a better way. There's gotta be a way. I mean, yeah, there was the old Bic pen that we had had in elementary school that had four colors, and you could click a different one and get a. And it's like, okay, you could put a stylus in there. That's one way you could do it. And they did, and somebody did, and it wasn't very elegant, and it's an ugly pen anyway. And then eventually I just. And this is sort of the artistic part of the process, the creative part. I sketch in a sketchbook. All the time. And I kept sketching different ideas for how to do it and eventually came up with a sketch, showed it to Tracy and the light bulb went off in her head. And this was the beginning of a company, became a whole new company of ours for about five years to, you know, we designed and developed our own. So I've got one in my hand. So this stylus tip you can see is kind of like a fountain pen, but that's the plastic tip that you use to use on a touch screen. And then you click the ink pen beyond it, just like a nor. I mean it's a normal pen, normal click style pen, but you just click the ink beyond it or click it back. When you're gonna write on the screen, you're gonna write on paper, you do that. How simple. And you know, it's elegant, beautiful. This was our nicer model. We designed and we built an entire company product with a lot of employees in the US and originally it was domestically manufactured.

Yeah. So I mean we did the typical thing that you would do, right. I mean this is the model that lots of inventors and product launchers, people who come up with an idea, this is the model that they follow. Right. You sketch it out, you make a prototype, you say that it has potential. You go get some investors. In this case, we got your mom. So we got our family investor, right? We, so we brought in our family investors to help pay for the tooling in the first run. And we just started this business to now back then we didn't have Amazon, we didn't have WordPress. We had to build our own website from scratch.

Everything, our own shopping carts even. That was dicey.

There was no Alibaba, so we couldn't even figure out how to go to Asia at that point. I mean we didn't. The Internet was, you know, rough. I mean there were no email programs, there's no infusionsoft. We had to like do everything manually. Like it was just not as easy back then. We had CompuServe and AOL and, and just even having your own email was like a new thing. To have your own email server and your own thing, that was kind of a new thing at that time. So it was really hard and we had to, we had to build. I stayed up all night to build a database to do have customer to just take orders and be able to follow the customer service. There were no customer service or follow up programs. Call centers were there. Yes. But we would have to go hire a whole company and then monitor them and so we, you know, there was just so much to. To reinvent and do at that time. And so we did all of those things. And in the process, we, of course, filed patents. Like, that was the first thing we did. We spent quite a bit of money on it.

This is extraordinarily patentable as a utility patent. And then there were design patents as well.

And of course, we filed trademarks. We called it T Tools, the Tea Tools, Throttle, if you guys.

Throttle was the name of the first pen, the plastic version. This is the nice metal version. But, yeah, and it was a killer trademark, Right?

And then we did what everyone wants to do, right? We want to get access. We wanted to be in that cat catalog that shipped with the box. And we worked so hard to try to get in that catalog. And we went, I don't know, tons.

Of times in Silicon Valley. US robotics at first, then 3Com and Palm. I mean, I'd been out multiple times, and everybody loved the product. And we were puzzled why they weren't interested in putting it in their catalog.

Yeah, we had this wonderful grassroots organic campaign. We had things go wrong. Like, our first tool had errors in it. And we'll tell that story another time. The pens fell apart. We had to reship them. The cloth customers, like, I mean, there were a whole bunch of things that happened along the way, but we had this fabulous grassroots early adopters who just were our biggest proponents. And we loved them and we worked. You know, we were happy with that, but we wanted to grow faster, and being in the catalog would have meant that. And so the day that we moved into the offices that nor we were about to move into the offices, like the painting had just been done, and I walked in, got our first set of mail out of the mailbox because we just had this office because we were expanding into printing names onto the logos, onto the side of the pen, because we were doing more and more pharmaceutical business. FedEx Ground was one of our clients, and we were doing more things like that. So we had developed a whole printing room, and we had so many employees that we really needed the space. So we had moved out of our house, our third floor of our house. Just like many, many people. And so I walk into there, and it smells like pain. And I'm so excited. And the colors are really cool, and the office furniture is new, and, like, everything's so great. And I open up my mail and I get the catalog. Because once you are a customer, right, you receive the catalog every quarter. And I open up the catalog, and right on the Inside of it, there's this stylus pen that looks exactly like ours, and it was not ours. I was so devastated, I just wanted to cry. I went home, told Tom, showed him a bit. I literally went to bed and cried. I just didn't know what to do. And I thought, we're gonna lose our business. We're gonna lose this. I mean, they're gonna.

And it had become a significant business at this point because these commercial sales of pens done in custom logos, giving away at trade shows, all these things, it had become a big business.

Yeah, I think we were doing like a million dollars in sales, or pretty close to that. Yeah, pretty close to that. Maybe 800, right around that time frame. And we were like. We had just gotten the office action that we were going. Our patent was going to issue. So we knew it was going to issue. We didn't have the paperwork yet, but.

We didn't have the number yet.

So here we are, we have a patent, and we, like, thought that was the be all and end all and, you know, and we get this and we're next infringed upon. Right. So we were devastated. I don't know. I mean, I cried.

I've always been a little more optimistic than you.

I think you were just.

But no, I was mad, certainly, because we had shown our. I mean, the original. There was a prototype that I physically made. And this is before 3D printing really was available. I made a physical model the hard way and flew out to California and showed the people at US Robotics, and they said, wow, I've never seen anything like, this is brilliant. So I knew they hadn't come up with it on their own, but we knew that whether it was intentionally knocking us off or it just happened within a big company, and no one really was being careful about it. One way or another, they had knocked us off. They were infringing on our patents, and we tried to work it out with them, but eventually we had to.

And it was a little different than that, too, because they had a third party who was making that and who had designed that, and that was ideo, which, if you don't know, they are the largest industrial design firm in the world.

Agency.

Yeah, agency, still today. And they designed the Palm itself. At that time, that current model of it had been designed by them. And so they had all this insider information into how, you know, what the form factor was. And they designed their pen to kind of dock with it. And so it was just, you know, it was devastating. Here we were going up against an industrial design Giant and at that time the sort of tech giant and who was trying to go public. And actually at the end of the day, that's what ended up being our advantage. So when I woke up the next morning after crying all night and not really sleeping very well, and Tom was still pissed, I said, well, what are we going to do? Let's gather our team, let's gather our investors on the. Get them on the phone. And at that time we had 13. Not just Tom's mom, we had members to an LLC at that time, a whole nother story that changed our perspective on how we operate as well having investors is interested in. Interesting. And so we gathered them all together and we said, hey, what are we gonna do? We have only about $5,000 of cash flow. Like we only had $5,000 that we could use for anything because we had just gotten into the new office, so it had been quite.

And we had employees. I mean, there was no legal budget.

Yeah, there wasn't a budget to do anything. So we said, we have $5,000. What can we do with this $5,000 and make it go. And make it effective and make this, you know, make this say, you know, keep our business from going under. Like, we have to figure out a way to make that happen so that they don't take over all of our business. So what can we do? And so of course the lawyers wanted to file, you know, wanted to file.

Patent infringement lawsuit.

Patent infringement lawsuit. And it was our PR agent, Amy Ferguson at the time, who was really fantastic and said, well, let's try a little PR campaign. And our, our great graphic designer, Sixtan Abbott, he came up with this cool campaign that would be kind of grassroots that we, we could feed out to the community that we had built that would kind of start to. Because there was starting to be this sort of third party developer annoyance because it happens, right? ITunes starts to integrate apps that somebody developed in the App Store and starts to integrate it right into the os, the os. And all of a sudden you're out of business, right? Well, Palm was starting to do that. And we were just the most obvious because we had a patent. And because of that, when you start to integrate code and little bits of software and features, it's not as obvious. And so we were like, you know, the spokesperson for the David versus Goliath story and for third party developers being, you know, stolen from and that's. And so that's what the story that they played. We did in fact though, have to file a lawsuit in order to make.

It yeah, we filed a federal patent infringement lawsuit against Palm Computing, who is the company at the time we filed it, and ideo. And that got a lot of attention. That started to get editors at newspapers and magazines interested.

San Jose Mercury News News, San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Chronicle. Right. And then Fast Company, Small Business at.

That time, I think it was Fortune.

Fortune, small business, sorry. Yeah, Fortune Small Business at that time, which is now CNN Money. So they got bought out by them. But this was. They started writing these stories and it was this sort of David Goliath story. We, of course, we lived in Providence at the time. This was in Providence, Rhode Island. If we didn't mention that before, I don't think we did. You know, the local papers, of course, picked that up as well. And there was just these stories about, you know, hey, this is what's happening in the reality of this world and what's going on on. But it really was the cool graphic campaign. And the thing that lawyers tell you not to do, which is to, at that time was just to reveal your invention date and. And the timeline and all of this. We actually put a full timeline on our website of every time we met with them, every time we shared our model with them. The fact that there was on NDAs signed, what dates those were, when we invented it, we had a whole timeline on it. It was kind of like this, like, here's our story. We're laying out our court case because we knew we only had enough money to file it. We didn't have enough money to like take it to it. It was somewhat of a bluff. And then. But the fabulous thing that Six Ten did, which I always loved, is this little graphic which we'll put in the blog post, of course.

Do we still have.

I have a. I have a little clip of it. I use it in presentations all the time. And it says it had our pen, that one that you, Tom just showed you there, and their pen below it, which is a little bit smaller. And there was this. The graphic in there was said, do we detect a bit of pen envy? And people love that. It was funny. It was a viral campaign. It was like no social media, but it went viral. People were sharing it. People were laughing about it. They were sending it around in emails. They were, you know, commenting on our page.

Well, and of course, we had it in the traditional print media everywhere we could go. That's actually what we did incredibly well, using Amy Ferguson, our PR agent at the time. Time was to get the word out everywhere. And eventually what happened is it put so Much pressure on the executives at Palm Computing who had had more important things to deal with as they're trying to take that company public. They had different advisors and investors seeing these, you know, write ups in the San Francisco Chronicles, San Jose Mercury News, Fortune, small business like guys, this is going to hurt our stock price. And eventually, you know, there was a fortunate set of circumstances, but we also played it right and it brought Palm to the negotiating table to do most of the right thing, I would say to settle the lawsuit in our favor, but as maybe a subject for a whole nother episode at some point. Even when you win, you lose sometimes. So this is really all this gets to vast experience that we've had in so many aspects of business.

Yeah. When Tom says that what he's saying really is that there really was never any money. Like we barely recouped our legal expenses. We certainly didn't recoup, you know, decline sales for a period of time. And you know, and it wasn't energy. Yeah. It wasn't a windfall. I wish it was. And so I can't say that. But we did do a couple of things that, that I'm really glad we did it. Like I agree, I don't regret always asked. And this actual case study is taught at Harvard Business review in 26 countries around the world. Might even be more by now. And it's an IP and entrepreneurship course and the way that the, that is taught in three parts. Parts. In the second part, the course study is to choose what you would do.

And so they don't sue or not to sue.

Right. And what to do. And they don't hear what we did until the third part. And it's, it's a rare percentage, less than 10, I think, you know, maybe even less than 5 according to the professor who teaches it that actually choose the model. We do because it was such a risk. Right. It was so crazy. And that it would actually work. And it did work. And, and, and it's a little easier now to think about that because we have social media. Like it might work more often now than it would have then.

It might.

But it was really hard, it was really expensive, it was really time consuming and so we didn't recoup that. But what we did was we saved our company, we saved our intellectual property and we were young designers so we also saved our design value. And I think that design integrity really mattered to the two of us. And I think at the end of the day we wanted, we didn't want to start our careers with this Point that was like, you're not original. And so we've always been able to sit from that point of, hey, this is it. But we also have a whole different thing. Like there's, I think there's a dozen lessons that we learned, but just a few of them off the top of my head is that we use intellectual property. We use patents and trademarks and copyrights different than most people because we don't use it like we are intending to defend it someday because we know how hard that is. So while we might use it as an offensive strategy, we don't really think about it as our defensive strategy because we know that, that the bigger the pockets, the easier it is for them to do that. And so, you know, that's a difference we do there how to use the media. We really are being good with that our entire careers and we're even better at it now because I have an inside track so I know what the media is really like. So that's something we do. I think one of the other things that we do really well, Tom, because of what we learned there is we really learned that the importance of building your community first, that that community matters more than the product and your access to that community matters. And it's been the thing that we sought out first. So now we really search for that. That's one of the reasons we were early on Amazon and working with our clients to get them into Amazon and wanted that to happen. Because we saw the power of E commerce really early on. I mean, in 1998 I bought my first book on Amazon. So we've been customers all along. And seeing that power, especially with women and seeing it grow.

The reality is you're talking about market Tracy. And one of the most critical things is a product and market fit. You can have the best product in the world, but if you don't have access to the market that will want to buy it or can't create that market, doesn't matter how good your product is. Same thing. You could have this tremendous market and access to this great market. And if you've got the wrong product, that market isn't going to care. So product market fit is a big one, right?

And I like to also term it in terms of like this is one of the ways why we've worked so well in mass market retail. Mass market retail is a built in market, right? It's a channel, it's an access to a marketplace. It's like that Palm catalog, right? It's its own access, it's got its Own list, it's got its own people, and it's a whole lot easier and cheaper to tap into somebody else's, then build it yourself. And if you want to also build an original product, right, if you don't have an original product, maybe you want to build an original community, like a community focused around something. And so. But for us, we live in that original product world, so it's a whole lot faster, cheaper and easier to access someone else's marketplace and be successful within that. Find the fit. Find the market that's going to fit our original product. It's easier to go that direction. So that's kind of how we always work. And a lot of our brands and the companies that we work with already know their core marketplace, Right. Maybe they have their own Shopify shop and they're fabulous with direct response marketing and they can build that up and they're amazing with that. Or they just kill it on Amazon and they're just amazing with that. That helps us guide them in designing original product and making the product better to fit that marketplace and refine the fit so it does better than other products, it lasts longer than other products. And at the end of the day, that's what we're really all about here, is we want to really show you the right things in the right order with the right resources. Sometimes those are people, sometimes those are tools, sometimes those are just strategies and tactics. And then when you do that, you can really out design, out source, because that's also a critical part. Right. You have to have something unique there, outsource and then out profit. And out profit can have a bigger, broader term to it. Right. It might just be growing your market, it might be actually being more profitable, it might be out profiting your competition. But either way, what it's doing is creating a much more successful and more guaranteed successful, like upping your odds on that. Flipping the odds like we do. Yeah, yeah.

Reducing your risk, avoiding those, those common pitfalls and rookie errors and, you know, even not such rookie errors. I mean, there's so many.

Oh, we see big brands make huge mistakes.

Oh my gosh, the big brands do make big mistakes and it costs them tremendous amount of money. The only reason they survive is they have a whole lot more money and can survive.

They can absorb that.

And the, you know, younger companies and especially startups can't afford that. And you know, one of the things Tracy, I want to mention is, you know, this product, this was like the first, first, early five years of our career, right?

Yeah.

And there's Been so much more experience since then and we want to help share our experience with you and help you avoid those pitfalls. But it's not just us, there's a lot of other experts here at Product Launch Hazards in their areas of expertise that are here to help you do the same.

Right. And that's really, we're going to be exposing you to all of them. That's our goal in this sort of first 50 episodes is really to get through, introduce you to all the experts, introduce you to all of the these like pitfall topics, hazards that we might expose, good practices, good resources, good things that you should be looking for and sort of giving you a framework for that. And you know, I hate to call it a 101 series because it's not elemental. These are like deep dive insider things, but they are elemental to what we do and we're lucky that we really can identify them, we know them. And that's because these are the questions that come up again and again every time I give a speech somewhere. Every time we're in front of an inventor group or an E commerce group, Amazon Sellers group, I just did the Prosper show, you know, there's like a thousand people and the questions that they ask, same ones we deal with all the time. So these first 50 episodes are going to deep dive into that. But if you have questions, if you have things that are just burning, this is a reason to come. Join our membership group, the Product Launch Hazards. Right at this moment we, you know, we've opened it up. It used to only be clients, so now it's not, it's expanded beyond that and we want you to come in so you can ask questions of these people that you cannot afford to have on retainer. Right. I mean that's the idea is what we wanted to do is to create this like amazing group of experts where you could get answers to something like do I need a warning label for this at the start of it, not after you're almost ready to finish up your box design. Right. So you can ask early on, you know you're going to need it and you can find somebody who might be the right attorney for you or the right compliance people to help you run that you could decide is it should I patent? This is a patentable. These are things that you have burning questions on. You can ask those things earlier, find someone who can do a small consult with you and then when you're ready go and do them. They aren't people that you have to have full on consulting agreements with retainer agreements with and we want you to be able to access that and do it because when you don't ask the questions, that's when you fall into the pit.

You need to know what you don't know. You need to learn. And you know what in the matter, how seasoned you are an expert you in a certain area. There's always going to be one area at least of this entire world of, you know, creating a product, buying it, importing it, selling it, marketing it. There's going to be some area that you're not as strong in and you need help of experts. And like Tracy said, you don't have to hire all these employees and your company at great expense to get it. That's the idea of this membership site. You can pay a little bit every month. Month and get help with what you need and access to experts.

That's right. So there's going to be about a dozen experts including us. And so you'll have a dozen office hours. So that's what we're going to call these. Right. It's office hours. So the first part is us just talking about a topic. It might be the expert might be assigned the biggest question that we've been asked on the portal and or the biggest question they know they get every time they speak. And so we'll have them address those and kind of knock them out over the course of the the first few months. But reality is this, it's your participation that's going to really refine that. So if you have the burning questions, you got to show up live and ask them. You got to submit them into the group because we will also ask some that are emailed ahead of time.

Yeah. For those of you that can't be there live and are going to watch the replay, you may want your question to be asked so you make sure you get that question in and the.

Times and all of that is posted on the site. So you'll know when the live hours are. You'll know which experts you want to choose into. And we're going to be doing all these introductory episodes so you'll be able and those are be to going to be public. So you'll be able to meet every single one of those experts before you join the group if you would like. And so you'll be able to come in and already know who you want to listen to.

But then ongoing topics beyond those first, you said 50 or so, Tracy, is what it's going to be ongoing topics. Those podcasts and those office hours and videos they're only going to be for members only. So you get the introductory series to understand what it's about, to see what value you could get out of it. But then to continue to, to participate and, you know, be able to ask those questions and be able to even listen to the Product Launch Hazards podcast. Ongoing, you've got to be a member. It's going to be for members only.

Right. And so there's videos, there's podcasts, there's blogs. All of those will be in the private membership group. There's also document library, resource library, and some of these are the, the ones we use, the contracts we use with our factories, the sample forms we use to track samples or review them with our clients. Review them with bots. We've used these for decades, 20 years.

Of experience of documents, and not just ours, of other experts as well, that are there for you as a resource. And we always advocate you get your own attorney if it's a legal document. This is just for reference and to give you some ideas, suggestions along the way, help illuminate things to you that.

You might not know you need.

But then you always do want to get a seasoned expert of which we have available within Product Launch Hazards to help you. Least you can get very far along the way.

Right. And eventually we're working on the back end of a calculator for you that goes cost basis, market basis, so you can flip back and forth, but also shows you the difference between E commerce and on the shelf, because we get those questions all the time. Our good friend Tim Bush, who is an on the shelf expert who we participate in his podcast, he participates in ours all the time. He's going to be one of the experts who probably do more than one office hour. I know him a month just because there's going to be so many questions. So we've got lots of great experts like that coming in and we really look forward to sharing that with you. I hope that we sort of shared enough today about who we are, what we're going to be and what Product Launch Hazards is here for. And if you have any questions or comments, please go to the blog post for this episode@productlaunchhazards.com and of course, all membership information is there as well.

Yeah, you know, we could have gone on for hours and hours and hours. Right. There's so many live.

We have hours and hours to record.

That we will take. And you know, if there's a little bit here or there that you're interested in or something, you're like, oh, you didn't touch on that. You know what? We're going to get to it. It'll be within our Office hour series, our podcast. And you know, like we said, if there's a question and you want to hear more, especially, you know, as you become a member, then let us know and we'll be happy to address it in a future issue. And if we're not experts in it, we'll get someone who is.

That's right. If we don't have an expert in the group, we will find one for you that we trust.

Absolutely.

And we will vet them because that's really important to us as well.

But I think we're covering the majority of disciplines.

Yeah, right.

This whole vast world. So anyway, we look forward to this journey with you and helping you succeed with your business.

So thanks everyone for watching and listening. This has been Tracy and Tom on Product Launch Hazards.

Thank you for joining us on this episode of Product Launch Hazards. To get the most out of your membership, visit productlaunchhazards.com to join the expert Office Hours Live and ask us your burning questions. Check out the resource library for document templates and guides and get exclusive articles and shares each day. Don't forget, you can always book a private consult with any expert so you can out design, outsource and out profit your way to product launch success.