This week I watched the movie Battleship for the first time. It's your typical save the planet from an alien attack plot, but surprisingly I found myself strangely intrigued by the movie. Maybe it's because its the classic fable of David vs Goliath. One lone Navy Destroyer and a few highly determined men are able to defeat hundreds of aliens with advanced weapons. It's a make you feel good movie, and I definitely need to surround myself with feel good influences right now.
This is how my husband and I feel. The small guy fighting everyday against the odds to make our product a success. Its seems like every day we get slapped down. But the few small wins we have had keep us grasping to our belief that we can do this. I guess time will tell.
So I last left off with a non-functioning ugly prototype. We examined it over and over for a week before deciding that it was good enough to find a manufacture and figure out how much it would cost to make this thing for real. And so the search began. My husband stayed up long nights for a week searching for plastics manufactures, ones that we thought we could afford. He found three, and so began the interview process.... us interviewing them. After speaking with all 3 over the phone, he decided he couldn't make a decision with out visiting their plants. After all, quality control is everything.
One after another he flew out for a visit of the plant. And one after another he came home disappointed. We were both frustrated and almost ready to give up. I decided to do one more search, just for the heck of it, and found a manufacturer about 30 mins from where we live. It was almost too good to be true. My husband visited them the following week and called as he was walking out of their office... We found our manufacture. Of course, him being such a great partner, insisted I tour the plant as well before we entered into a deal. So there I was in my tube top, shorts, and wedge sandals walking a plastics manufacturing plant on my next day off. Oh, and lets not forget the hard hat that is mandatory when on the plant floor. While I didn't understand any of the technical information that was being discussed about plastics injection molds, I did understand the time and money investment it would take to do business with them. But when we discussed several products they manufacture that I use in my everyday life, I knew we found the right place. They had great quality standards, and stand behind what they manufacture.
We still had a major problem.... we found a manufacture with out having a final product to make. So we sat down with our account manger and discussed our prototype, what we liked and didn't like about it. But no worries because they have an in house engineer team that can work with us..WHAT?? So the $8,000 we spent on a private engineer company was a complete waste. We were real happy when we figured that one out. After several attempts at functionality and numerous changes, each one coasting money, we decided to have them start from scratch and redesign the Moisturizing Mate into a functioning form. The end result was the same guts of the unit, but the exterior was completely redesigned into the form the final product is today. We loved it instantly. It still looked like a paint roller, but had more of the shape of a woman's curves. And once again, we knew we made the right decision on a manufacturer.
And one of the best things about our manufacture is that they have plants in the US and over seas. And I would love to put Made in the USA on our package. And thus brings us to the next stage in this crazy process... every detail of product design, before another prototype is made.
Stay tuned.....
No comments:
Post a Comment