Custom Design Your Own Amazon Products Part 5


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Jared Haw speaks to us on how to custom design your own Amazon Products.

ePower Corp contract manufacturing company that specialises in customized products.

Focus on opening up moulds and product design rather than ‘sourcing’ which is where you find a factory that already has a mould open already.

How to Custom Design your own Amazon Products

  • A number of Sellers start with a sketch on paper to get the idea down
  • Reach out to a product designer and put it into CAD with materials and tolerances
  • Then a prototype is made in sheet metals or 3d printing
  • Next is opening or starting a new mould
  • This is the common view on the show of how to custom design your own amazon products

Engage Jared when?

  • Usually Jared gets involved when the product designer gets involved or they have a sample ready
  • Working with an industrial designer is great for Jared
  • Very educated with materials and tolerances
  • If a new product likes to be involved as early as possible

Starting out?

  • Starting out in custom design your own Amazon products but don’t have experience yet so where do you go?
  • Might start on Fiverr or Sketchup to begin
  • Most cost effective way to start is…
  • See a market that you’re interested in
  • Look at a product and make a minor tweak to it
  • This will be a low cost approach
  • Add a certain feature to an existing product

Opening a new mould

  • Starting with $5k is not a problem
  • Plastic and silicon is most expensive
  • Metals moulding cost is cheaper
  • and electronics is cheaper too
  • $5k is not a huge investment but a starter

Kickstarter

  • ePower has worked on Peak Design
  • Ansi-labs did the fidget cube and did 20 moulds for them all in all
  • Worked with many others on smaller scale too

Patents?

  • How do you deal with the process from the very beginning?
  • Targo design industrial designer
  • He does patents for basically nothing
  • Find an industrial designer who understands patents too – best way to do it
  • Don’t spend $10k on design and THEN find a patent problem

Don’t worry about the patent?

  • What if you’re not sure and in the middle ground on whether a patent stands or not
  • Fine line between customizing an existing product with a patent
  • Don’t go into competition with a company that owns a patent on the product
  • There is usually a way to change things around to make it different enough to work around the patent restrictions
  • Depending on which country but in US would take a few weeks to get patent pending and 11 months to get a full patent granted

Seller Launching in USA and then rollout to other markets

  • If you’re selling to America then check the patents in America and confirm you are clear
  • If you’re developing a product it pays dividends to look at all the marketplaces first
  • When planning to go World-wide it’s worth checking the US, UK and Germany as a minimum
  • Always do your due-diligence
  • Cost is about $1k through an Industrial Designer (who can cover the commercial aspects as well) who will check, write up the patent design and submit it

The Steps

  • They’ve done the industrial design stage
  • Covered the patents
  • Work up the Design with an Industrial Designer
  • Then they land with Jared

The Mould

  • Put your logo in the Mould so the factory can’t make other products
  • Even bigger brands have fakes they need to deal with in manufacturing
  • Everything needs a mould to keep products consistent
  • Different grades of moulds
  • A lower grade makes it cheaper but quality is poor and total output will be lower
  • Buy the raw material (carbon steel) for the mould from Japan as it’s the highest grade
  • Jared has his own tooling in the company to ensure everything is working as it should be
  • They can also pick-out certain features of the 3d model to spot problem with the Mould and Material being manufactured (i.e. Silicon material does not work well with point tips in moulding)

Protect the Mould

  • How to protect the mould you’ve made?
  • Everything stays in-house for Jared as they do it all in-house
  • Different payment terms – investment up front is 50% deposit and 50% after samples sent and seen by client
  • Build the price of the mould into the per-unit costs and work on the total number of units produced with the mould
  • Done some products and there’s a problem – the mould can be adjusted in testing before a full run

Summary

  • Have the idea and Eureka moment
  • Then to Industrial Designer
  • Then Design the product or Engineer the mechanical features
  • Prototype the product
  • Design around the functional feature
  • Then into more prototype
  • Then into Verification and check it
  • Maybe then go back to re-design and re-engineer
  • Then into Product document stage
  • Next is into the tooling
  • Write up the SOPs
  • Finalise the specifics
  • Open up the tooling
  • Then start the mass production
  • End to end could be 4 months from idea to product on your doorstep

Tips for Kickstarter

  • Day one is where you start with it
  • Have to promise goods by a certain date
  • 75% that are late are not successful
  • Don’t do their due-diligence or dealing with the wrong manufacturer
  • Talk to a few manufacturers and agents just to make sure everything is good and choose the best one
  • Comfortable with the prototype from your manufacturer
  • then you can start your Kickstarter

Contact

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