Working Prototype or Appearance Model?

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. This is the office hours. I'm your expert today. Tom Hazard, industrial designer, product development expert, have a lot of general experience in designing, developing and manufacturing hard good products of all kinds. And today the subject I want to talk about has to do with really getting samples and prototypes of new products created. And I actually want to start with a few definitions first to sort of clear up some things I'm going to talk about. And so I don't confuse you. Many of you, especially if you're already selling on Amazon or elsewhere, maybe in your own website, have ordered a sample of a product from a vendor or a factory, maybe a trading company. And a sample is the first thing I want to define. A sample is actually a sample meaning an actual product, that is a production product, usually a production product that is just one either free or sometimes you might have to pay for it. But you want to get one from your factory or your trading company, your vendor, and check it out. You want to see if it has quality. You want to see if you think it's worth the price they want to charge you. Does it do exactly what the factory or the vendor says it's going to do? Does it meet the specifications? So you need a sample in order to check that out. I mean, you're not going to buy product sight unseen, you know, large quantities, either less than container load, air freight or actually container load of a product and put it into Amazon or in your own warehouse and sell it to people without checking it out. So a sample is just that is a sample of a product, but an actual product that you would be reselling or incorporating into your product. If your product is made of multiple other products or components, maybe you're bundling something together. So you want a sample. A sample is just that, it's an actual production unit, but usually one or two or some very small quantity. And then if you are developing your own product or modifying an existing product, making something instead of, you know, instead of just buying something and putting your label on it, your brand on it, you are going to make it a little special either. Like what we would call make something instead of me too being, you know, commodity, you're buying Something anybody can buy, putting your name on it. You're making something either me special, which is maybe a unique color, or, you know, some other slight variation that is an order that you are placing that's a little unique, a little different flavor, or if you're going to be actually. Well, and let's talk about that first. If you're gonna make something me special that's maybe just a different color, some variation on that, I would still call that a sample because it's probably an actual product just in a little bit different flavor. Maybe it's printed with your logo on it. And like I said, a unique color or unique finish of some kind, I would still call a sample. But then when you get into prototypes is when you're making something that's unique to you, something that we would call me only or an original product, it still could start have its basis, I guess, in an existing product, but you're really making a significant variation. You're probably going to tool for something whether that's an injection mold or some other kind of mold of thermoform for plastic. Maybe there's a metal stamping involved or special printing dies. I mean, there's all sorts of things that you might need to tool for. And that's where prototypes come into play. If you're making something completely original that's never existed before, or at least a portion of a product that's never existed before, I think that's a great thing to do to obviously grow your brand and not have to compete on price near as much as you would have to. If you're just buying something off the shelf at a factory and then putting it in your own package or maybe maybe putting your logo on it because, you know, obviously you have an opportunity to make more margin because it's not going to be this race to the bottom of competing on price with other people. Once your listing gets some traction, once your product starts to, you know, get some sales, other people say, hey, that's working. I'm going to do it too. Well, it's not going to be as easy for them to do it. If you've had to tool for something and truly manufacture something unique. So when you are developing a product like that, something original, something me only or certain, maybe certain kinds of me special, you actually may need to make an actual working, functioning sample to be able to use either for photography ahead of time of sales. Maybe you're gonna get this product put into big box retail. Maybe you're going beyond.com and you've got an opportunity to place it at Target or Walmart or maybe Costco or something like that. And you may need to show the buyer of that retail, established retail chain, you know, because there are obviously people at those chains different, you know, brick and mortar resellers that are actually going to have to buy it from you to put it on their shelves. And you've got to show them, hey, you've got a great product, but you want to be able to get that order, convince them that it's the right product without having to spend a lot of tooling dollars and without going into production to make an actual product before you have the. So how are you going to do that? Usually it involves making a prototype of some kind. So that's really a prototype. So to really specifically define that a prototype is usually a one off manufactured product, but it's usually handmade or may use multiple different manufacturing processes to create it that are not the same as the production processes that will be used when you're actually manufacturing a large order of it. Because the costs of doing that are most often really prohibitive. You know, unless you have an order, unless you're confident something's going to sell and you're going to skip prototyping and you're going to go ahead and tool for it, way ahead of having an order if you've got the budget for that. And we've seen that some people do that, some of our clients have done that in the history of our careers. They're confident they can sell it and it's worth it to them to be showing the retail buyer an actual product. But you've got to invest a lot of money and time into that kind of product before you're going to have that sample to be able to try to sell. So most people don't do it, they create a prototype. Well, like I said, a one off model is one way you could describe it, but there are usually three types of prototypes. So first is a complete working prototype that looks exactly like the end product will look and functions exactly like the end product will function. It's usually the most expensive kind of prototype to make because there's a lot of things that if you haven't tooled for them, are going to cost a lot more just to make one of because they're either going to be machined by hand or some other way, you know, handcrafted or one off crafted. In some cases you'll use the same manufacturing techniques as you would when you are, you know, in production on something. But because you're making one, only one. It's a whole lot more expensive. So that's the first type, a complete, you know, functioning prototype that looks, feels and functions just like the real product would. Then there is what I would call an appearance model, an appearance prototype. And sometimes when, you know, I'm talking with my colleagues in China about these types of samples, they refer to that it's a prototype just for looking and not for function. And that's an accurate description and translates pretty well. So that would be a what I would call a model. I mean, it's a prototype, but it's an appearance prototype. Appearance model that absolutely is dimensionally correct, looks exactly right, feels right, but does not have all the functionality due to manufacturing constraints and the fact that you're not making this product in large quantities yet. And I'm going to give you an example of something like that in a minute. The third type would be what I would call a functional prototype. And this is something that is a prototype that's made that absolutely functions the way the actual product is intended to. But it doesn't look perfect. In fact, a lot of times it looks very, very crude or rough. That's usually needed in situations where you need to prove the concept to somebody that it works. And I'm going to caution you to really think carefully about making a functional prototype that does not look and feel like the actual product is going to feel, to make sure that you're carefully considering who the audience for that prototype is. Because a lot of times people that you might be making this for don't have quite the vision that you do of what this product will be in the long run, how it will look and feel. And sometimes a functional prototype looking so crude can make a bad first impression. And if you're using it, let's say, to convince investors to come on board to fund your company or your project if they can't see past something that is, in their minds, might be cobbled together. Even if it's not cobbled together, even if it's been engineered very carefully and precisely made, just the fact that it may be a little rough around the edges, isn't painted, isn't the color it would be, doesn't feel quite right, that can actually really distract people from the point of this functional prototype, which is to prove that the product will actually work. That, you know, it's one thing to see one that's pretty and looks right, and take a leap of faith that, you know it will work. That's. That's sort of one you Know this, the whole debate over do you have an appearance model or a functional prototype, it can be a tricky one because in both situations you run the risk of potentially making a bad impression. And you have to be careful to manage that expectation of either your potential investor or a retail store buyer. Now, let me give you some examples of this from our experience. And if you've done any research into Tracy and I and our design consulting history, you know that one of the things that we've done a lot of is design office, home, office chairs and actually commercial office chairs, seating. And those products are pretty high liability products to make. And like I'm sitting in one one now that your entire weight of your body is in it. So this is a product that has such significant safety issues and liability. In fact, office chairs are. Well, the last time I had checked the data, which maybe is a year or two ago, but it hasn't changed in decades. So I don't know that it's changed now. Chairs were the second highest liability product on the market, second only to ladders, which is pretty scary. I don't know if you've realized on a ladder you see all the warning labels on a ladder, a lot of the cost you're paying for a ladder is actually not the cost of material or manufacturing or even profit margin for the manufacturer, the retailer. It's actually liability insurance. Because so many people get hurt on ladders and sue the ladder companies thinking it's their fault, not user error. And chairs tend to be pretty high liability item also. So we've designed hundreds and hundreds of office chairs in our career, and we often would go and meet with retail buyers. The kind of chairs we've done the most of, although we've done a lot of different markets, but most of the market we would sell to retailers like Walmart, Target, Staples, Office Depot and Costco. In terms of Costco, I want to talk about them in particular because Costco has a higher quality standard than any other mass retailer that I've experienced. And there are industry standards for testing and that's a whole nother subject. And another office hours for a different day we'll take a deeper dive into. But when you think about it, you know, you have your whole body sitting in a chair and that has to be tested, that the chair is going to hold someone's weight. Costco requires a standard of testing that is 30% above the entire rest of the retail industry. That's just because they want to have higher quality products in their store. Fine. So when we go and show Them a new chair design. You know, chairs are made of a lot of injection molded plastic parts, among other things. It could also be aluminum casting, you know, a lot of different materials and it's very expensive to tool for those things. So generally we would make a prototype of a chair to show it to a retail buyer to say, yes, I would like to buy that and put that on my retail floor. And obviously you don't want to spend tens of thousands of dollars. In fact, actually one of the most successful chairs that we sold at Costco was a chair that was almost entirely injection molded, or I would say 90% of the parts on it were injection molded plastic of one kind or another. And the entire tooling cost for making that chair, all the tools in China was about US$75,000, which is actually not bad by US tooling costs. But in China tooling costs and I think in general as a business expense for a speculative product, $75,000 is a lot of money. So you don't really want a tool for that until you're sure that you've got an order. So we would go into Costco and bring usually two different kinds of samples. We would bring if it had a new function that had to be tested, someone needed to feel how comfortable it was to sit in. We would bring a functional sample that didn't look exactly beautiful. But more importantly, we'd bring an appearance model. And the trick, it always was a trick. And remember I said manage expectations. We would put these big caution tape, actually almost somewhat like my mic block here for product launch hazards, big yellow and black diagonal stripes on almost like a police caution tape around the chair saying do not sit, you know, on it, do not sit on the sample because it's an appearance prototype only. And usually that happened because of the base of the chair. You ever noticed that sort of five pointed plastic base that is on a chair. And we would create new ones, design and develop new ones. And so I've got a couple examples I'm actually going to show you here. First, I'm going to show you what would be a prototype of sorts for a base. And this isn't a very exciting design. The unique part of this base is it was a user assembled one. And all these points come apart for more efficient packaging in a box. But this is made out of solid ABS plastic. It's a proto, I would call it a prototype. It's not a functional prototype. It is more of an appearance 1. Even though this hasn't been painted yet, that's part of why I thought I would show it to you. This is actually machined out of solid abs. And then, you know, they glue different pieces of it together. You can see little seams here. Once you paint it, you wouldn't see it. So you could see how when you make a prototype of a part that's going to be injection molded plastic, you'd make it out of solid plastic. So you could show what it would look like when you're tooling for it. And then, you know, you could show it, but you wouldn't want someone to sit in a chair with this. I mean, we've made it so you could put casters in the bottom of it. We even made it with the right shape for that gas lift to go in the center of it. So you could set a chair on the floor and it'll stand up and it looks like the real thing. But if you let a buyer from Costco sit in it, it'll break, they'll fall to the floor and get hurt. And believe me, that does not help your sales effort. So you need to have another chair that maybe isn't pretty, doesn't look like it's going to, but actually functions properly. Maybe use a different production base that's not the right one. I mean, or we also did sometime make functional prototypes where we'd have a plastic shell that wasn't solid like this, and in here would be some negative space, some grooves, and we'd have a steel tube steel or a solid steel sort of spiderweb frame of a base that actually would support weight. So, you know, you talk about pros and cons of appearance prototypes and of, you know, functional prototypes, and really which one you develop, or maybe you develop multiples. It really is a judgment call, depending on your sit, really, ultimately a business decision. Hopefully you know your audience, you know, the buyer at the store or the investor you're going to be presenting to, and are they very visual people or are they very technical people? Are they kind of people that make decisions more on how they feel their emotions? Or is it more just straight numbers and hard facts? And the more you can determine some of those things, the more you can make that decision. I'm going to show you another base here. This is a production one that was another design that we created that at one point started out as an appearance model, then looked just like this, showed it to the buyer and they liked it. And then after that we tooled for it. And you can see that this is an actual injection molded. You can see all the different ribs and you know, all the different markings of an injection mold. But this injection mold is pretty expensive just for this type of a base for a chair. That kind of a tool would in China cost about US$10,000 because it's so big and the material it's going to be molding. And so, you know, it's a big bet to go and tool for something like that before you're even going to show it to a buyer to buy. So that's why we often create prototypes. And even, I'll tell you from our experience, even when we manage the expectations of the retail buyer and say, hey, this is an appearance model, please don't judge it by its functionality. It's really just there for you to see for the design. And no matter how many times we would say that, and even if, let's say you could sit in the chair, but let's say the arm of the chair were the prototypes. Everything else is production. Just the arms are unique and have been prototyped. You know, they look great, but they're not as strong as if it were made in production. Even though we would always tell the buyer, hey, when you get out of the chair, please get out of it carefully, because the arms are not actual strength, they're fragile. Can't tell you how many times buyers just either wouldn't remember or didn't care and they would get out of the chair, they put their hands down on those arms and push their body up by their arms instead of their legs lift, you know, pushing down on the arms. And when they push on them, they sort of push them out. And we've had them break prototype up type arms. And while on the one hand they will be understanding, oh, you're right, that's a prototype. I'm sorry, yes, it still can make a bad impression. So, you know, that's why I say, I caution you with appearance prototypes versus functional prototypes, if at all possible, as long as there's not a financial barrier to it, I would always make a prototype that both looks and functions properly like the real thing. Because, you know, you never know how that first impression is going to be. And someone may judge your product, your company, your quality based on something that is not an accurate representation of what you will sell in production or on the actual open market. It can hurt you. And then other times I've had it be where buyers are very understanding and they have no problem and they can, they have that vision, they can make that leap of faith. So again, different types of prototypes and samples for different purposes and they can Be expensive. I'm not going to sugarcoat that. But when you think of it as a marketing expense, a cost of doing business for your company, I used to say to our people, because we'd be making prototypes of consumer products every week of every month for years on end for our clients, on behalf of them. And the reality is, I would tell people, hey, we're in the sample making business. It takes making samples, making prototypes in order to get sales. And so the better you get at that and the more systems you put in place to do that, well, the better sales you're gonna get. I mean, because for a lot of people that you need to show this to, seeing is believing. And they, you know, seeing, touching, feeling, experiencing is really believing, even if you. It's not on the market yet. So prototypes and samples, a necessary step in product development, especially when you're creating me only or original product that ultimately I think will get you the most profit, the most longevity in the market. But you know, you got to put in some time and some money in order to do it right. Prototyping. I just want to make a couple other statements about prototyping. You can prototype things anywhere. I mean, there are a lot of times all over the United States, there are manufacturers, model shops you might call them, that have lots of different machines and can make just about anything out of any type of material. They can be very expensive. Material's expensive, the labor is expensive, and usually the machinery they're running it on is expensive. And so you can end up spending thousands and thousands, even tens of thousands of dollars making a prototype of something that's going to retail for $49, $99, you know, whatever it might be. The cost of a prototype has nothing to do whatsoever with the retail cost of what a product will be. It's really just about what does it take to make those samples. But the reality is it's usually a whole lot cheaper to make a prototype, the working and, you know, beautiful looking prototype than it would be to tool for all the production tooling necessary to make that same product. So it's worth doing. It serves a very good purpose. At the same time, anytime that I have the ability to make an actual functioning product, that's out of the real materials in the real process, I always do try to do that because I think that as long as you can afford the time and the money to do that, that best serves every situation. So, you know, I guess I'll probably stop there. Today there's a lot of deeper dives that we'll take in the future in different office hours regarding different subjects of the the product development process, prototyping, tooling. Lots of great subjects to dive into, but I actually have a couple of questions that were written in. You know, you have the ability as a member of product launch hazards to attend any of these office hours live. I know not everybody can do that given their schedules and their available replay on the membership site. But also you can write in questions ahead of time. If you see a subject area of, you know, of interest that you know you're not going to be able to attend live. You can write into us at and give us a question that we can answer during the office hours. And I actually have three questions that were mailed in and I want to share those with you. So the first one is, is there such a thing as prototype tooling? Good, good question. Actually, I guess somebody got a little confused when they heard this. It seemed sort of like it might have been an oxymoron. Prototype tooling, does that make sense? Well, it can. And actually we've experienced this and done it, you know, a good handful of times. Sometimes prototyping processes that are available are not really representative of either the true look and feel or function of a product. And in order to really accurately test it, you need to do it. And I'm going to use an example of injection molding. You have a very small injection molded part that you need to make that's either a functional part or an appearance part. And in order for this prototype to really function properly, you've got to make it out of the real material. You've got to mold it well. So why would you make a prototype tool and not just bite the bullet and make the big tool? Well, here's why. Not all tools are created equal. There's tooling that, you know, it's usually made of metal, usually a certain kind of steel alloy in order to injection mold plastic. But there are many, many different kinds of steel and many different costs of steel. So you can make an air quote here. Prototype tool out of a cheaper metal. It's a lot less expensive to make those first parts and be able to test them. The parts will be representative of what they will be in production, but the tool probably won't last very long in terms of the number of parts you can make off of it. So if you do that, that tool can cost you a lot less. The other thing is when you're especially making a very small part, we've done this a number of times. Like we've, you Know, making internal parts for other products that make them work better, more efficient, you know, especially functional things. I'm talking really small parts like you know, an inch tal or you know, 30 millimeters, you know, in cube or so. And in order to test it, really only need to make a very, very small injection mold tool where you would mold one at a time. That's a pretty small tool. And you know, the size, overall size of a tool and how many cavities are in it, meaning how many parts will it make at once can affect the cost of a tool and make it a lot less expensive. So you can make a prototype tool so you can actually injection mold apart in the real plastic and be able to test it, prove it out, show it, whatever you need to do. But it's that tool is not going to practical for production. The cost per part coming out of that mold of one cavity will be a lot more expensive because when they're running an injection mold machine, that machine has an amount of a cost of running it per hour per day and setting it up also to run. There are costs that when you're making thousands and thousands of a part, you know, are negligible. But when you're making, you know, a couple quite expensive, same thing with the tool. But it's very viable solution to make a prototype tool that would be lower quality metal. And there's other aspects to a tool. I'm not going to get too technical on you, but there's other reality, functional aspects of engineering that go into a tool that you can sort of shortcut and skip over in a prototype tool to get those first parts. Prove it out. And then when you're going to make the real tool for production, maybe you need 12 cavities so that every time that machine cycles you get 12 parts out of it or 24, you know, you have to evaluate that based on the volume you are going to need to produce. But you can make a prototype tool and there are a lot of good cases for why you might want to do that. So it's a good question. A little bit off topic of prototypes in general, but I still thought it was worth answering. Here's another question. Can you know if the price you're quoted for a sample or prototype is the real cost of it? Wow, that's actually a really interesting question. You know, I think this all comes down to communication and relationship with your vendor. I have experienced many, many times where you know, you have a product that you're going to buy fob China for $12 a unit and you need a sample made and the factory is going to charge you $500 for a sample. And it seems like, wow, that's a lot of money. Does that make sense? It may or it may not. It all depends on what it is that they need to do in order to provide you that sample, especially if it's a new product that hasn't existed before. So I would recommend you ask a lot of questions and you know, try to open up those lines of communications and just say, hey guys, I may be fine with spending $500, but I want to understand why. Give you a little example. I've had it happen where in order to make a sample, there's something custom with our unique logo or our client's unique logo on this product and the sample needs to have that. And the factory really didn't have a good way to make a one off sample of that logo. It was like a metal stamped and printed kind of embossed, you know, and we agreed to pay. I think in our case it was like $300 for the sample, something like that. And seemed like a lot, but we agreed to do it. And then later when we got the sample, the factory actually got the logo wrong. There was some English language spelling errors on the logo which surprised the heck out of us because we provided them the artwork exactly for what it needed to be. But for whatever reason, some words were spelled wrong. And when we asked them to redo it, they admitted that they used a sub supplier in order to make this stamped, embossed metal part with our logo and then printed on it. And in order to get them to make one, they had to order 250 of them. And this is why our cost was about $300 to get it made. So only after the fact, sort of in evaluating post mortem situation did we learn, oh well, unfortunately they made 250 now that are all spelled wrong because they didn't make one and have us review it. And then we said, hey, you spelled it wrong and then they make one more. They actually made a bunch of them and that was really unfortunate because they were all wasted, they had to be recycled. And you know, we always ask a lot of questions, especially you know, for any product that we're going to prototype. We ask a lot of questions of the factory and try to get to all the details and make sure we know what's happening. But despite your best efforts, sometimes you can get surprised a little bit. And I guess with experience and asking a lot of the right questions and even those of US that have the best experience in the world, sometimes, you know, things will still surprise you. So you have to always approach it cautiously and ask a lot of questions. So sometimes you can know exactly what the price is and why things cost what they do to get a sample. Sometimes you cannot. Last question I have here is, should you have the factory make a prototype or an independent model shop make a prototype? That I think is the best question yet. And again, this is a business decision. It depends on your situation. I mean, if your product is protected in terms of intellectual property, you already have copyrights, trademarks or patents filed, then I see nothing wrong with having a factory, whether they're in the US or in another country making your prototype or model for you. The advantage of having a factory do it is they are going to be making it in production and understand all the issues regarding, you know, reality of manufacturing the product. So their samples probably going to be most accurate to reality for production. But there may be other situations where you have something really new and proprietary you're developing and you may not want to show it to a factory yet. Maybe you haven't filed for patents yet. Although I wouldn't recommend really. I would recommend being very careful in consulting an attorney. I'm not an attorney, but consulting an attorney before you go and have a third party make a prototype or sample for you on something that hasn't been filed for a patent or a copyright or anything, whatever, intellectual property protection might apply, but there are different business decisions and reasons why you might want to. And one of the best ones for not having a factory do it is keeping it confidential. Because it may be a lot easier for you to control and keep something quiet in a prototype facility than it is at a factory, which is maybe a lot more open to other people coming in and seeing what's going on, people you don't intend or want to see them. I mean, you'd be amazed. Factories get tours or give tours all the time for different potential vendors, customers, retailers, all sorts of things. So sometimes doing things openly in a factory can not be so great for keeping them confidential. But if you have a highly sensitive item, and maybe you haven't even filed for intellectual property yet, but you've got to start making something. That's where I might use not just one, but, but multiple independent model shops, prototype vendors, and give a piece of it to each of them and none of them know what the entire product is that's being put together, there are advantages and disadvantages to that too, because you gotta make sure everything is Engineered and designed properly and because they're gonna give you the exact part you asked them to make. And when you put them together, if something doesn't work, you got no one to blame but yourself because they don't see the entire picture of it and might have helped you solve a problem, but they can't because they're only doing a portion of it. But to protect it and keep it confidential, that's a very good strategy that often works. So I mean, should you use one or the other? I mean it's not a yes or no question. There's a lot of things that go into that decision. A lot of different factors. Usually business decisions more so than decisions related to the longevity of the product or the price point of the ultimate product at retail or whether someone's going to buy it. It's usually just business decisions. How important do you want to keep it confidential and do you not? And then there are costs also. I, I mean doing it close to you, maybe if you're a US company, doing it in the US might be an advantage because you could drive down to a local model shop and see how things are going. They can ask questions, you can answer, but it's going to be a lot more expensive. Other times, prototyping in Asia, it's so inexpensive, maybe you have to do two or three generations of a product before they get it right and you've still spent a third of the cost of what it would be in the US to do it. So a lot of pros and cons options to weigh. I'm not going to be able, you know, I don't know your particular situation for why you asked that question, but that's something we can always talk about in a one on one at some point if you're interested and certainly you can do that through the membership site. So I think with that I'm going to wrap up this office hours session. If you're watching this on the recording, I encourage you to check the schedule for upcoming office hours and if you're at all able to participate live, please do because I will take questions live and bring you on and let you answer them for other people to hear and, and you know, be happy to address some issues more specific to you. And you know, I hope you know, all you watching this on replay try to do that and come back. Hope you enjoy these office hours. Please give us feedback on them. We would appreciate that. We always want to make these better and more appropriate to you. So if you have different subjects you would like to hear in different areas or any questions, obviously write in and let us know and we'll be happy to address them and make this a little more focused to something that's going to be helping you move your business forward today. Alright, so thanks very much. This is Tom Hazard signing off for Office Hours today about prototypes and samples. Thanks so much. Bye.

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