Running a company to develop new products attracts many inventors to my door who ask me to help them get their products to market. Here is a typical story of a product I was asked to review. There are several lessons to be learned.
A product arrived in the mail after many phone discussions with the inventor. When I opened the package I saw a beautiful carved aluminum bracket with a swivel hook on it. Along with the bracket there was a hand-drawn brochure, a packaging sample and a letter in which the author stated she would be very happy if I would arrange a manufacturing and distribution arrangement for this product and offered to share revenues.
The letter also detailed the work the woman had done herself and paid others to do to make this beautiful prototype – and it truly was a work of art. I knew right away it must have cost her a fortune to make and also would be very expensive to reproduce. She needed to buy tools, a carving machine, cast, a mold, have the aluminum poured, have it polished, drill it, make slots in it and also devise a very clever way to have the hook attach.
She had a mechanical engineer and people from a physics class help her. This was a very well done prototype but, in my opinion, an exercise in futility.
The first thing I thought of was that it would be too expensive to produce.
Next I thought that there already were similar products in the marketplace that worked, maybe not as pretty, but they do the job. Would this product infringe on someone else’s patent? There had been no patent search done or patent applied for.
Then if I applied this prototype to the ceiling with the device sent to me, I could see that it would pull away from the ceiling over time because it had only a single point of attachment.
There were just too many problems with no solutions offered and this happens in my business very often. People go to all the trouble and expense to have prototypes made without first establishing a market need, getting their patents applied for, figuring out how much the product will cost to have made and the right materials to use.
If I were to go to one of my connections with this prototype as is and say, “Here is the prototype. You manufacture and distribute this product and we’ll share revenues”, I would probably be laughed right back to my office.
There are too many variables that have to be planned out ahead of time. The advice I gave to this inventor was to look at her product with new eyes, not the eyes of the artist, but of the product developer. Do the work required to determine the final costs associated with manufacturing, distribution and packaging.
In the end, maybe the clever way of having the hook attach will be patentable, marketable and turn out to be profitable.
Article – Copyright 2000 Stanley I. Mason. Syndicated by ParadigmTSA
