Manufacturing
your invention
By
Arik Bannister
If you are planning to
manufacture and sell your invention on your own, this is where your
prototype and design plans will be really useful.
Manufacturing can be
simplified when you have a working prototype of your invention. To
start out, contact a manufacturer who is familiar with new product
development. That way, you will have the benefit of designers and
developers who can identify and fix design flaws. They may even offer a
more effective design solution for your product.
You can contact the
Thomas Register at
1-800-699-9822 or check out their website (www.thomasnet.com) to find
thousands of manufacturers for everything you can possibly imagine.
If you are going to
have your manufacturing outsourced, that is, manufactured by a foreign
company, make sure you research the company very well. Look them up
online, research them at the library, find out everything you can about
them. Foreign sourcing is a big undertaking, and should not be taken
lightly.
However, if you have a
solid CAD design, a competent manufacturer can produce your product with
little trouble. A CAD design will also make it easier to divide your
plans among multiple manufacturers, to avoid giving the entire design to
one manufacturer if you choose to do that.
You can visit
alibaba.com or made-in-china.com for lists of foreign manufacturers for
your particular product.
When discussing your
product with manufacturers, always ask if they are open to reducing or
waiving up-front production costs for a percentage of future profits, or
perhaps some other deal that they may have in mind. Sometimes a
manufacturer, seeing the potential in a new product, is willing to
produce the product on more creative terms for a guarantee of future
business, or a percentage of sales (sort of like royalties).
Be careful, however,
with deals like this. Be sure to put a ceiling on the duration of this
deal, otherwise, you can end up locking yourself into a lifetime
partnership.
The deal should just be
financially worth the manufacturer’s effort. For instance, I may offer
fifty percent of future sales up until production costs are covered, and
then ten percent of sales for a year after, with a guarantee of the
manufacturer remaining my exclusive provider for the next year. There
are literally trillions of ways to put deals together; it’s all in how
you negotiate it.
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