Yeah, I win! Flashy lights. Everything these days has to have a flashy light. It's the Magpie in us all.
It's the shiney!!!
Kizzap,
Having an idea and taking to market - including conception, design, manufacture, advertising, production, sales, etc, is what I did to start my company 13 years ago, and what I've spent the following 13 years doing. I think I've gotten pretty good at it, but we're all always learning 
Having said that, people who are not sales types tend to be afraid of sales, or they don't know how to sell something. Luckily, there are lots of options out there. You can bootstrap your sales effort - aka, do it yourself. Or, there are likely dozens of partners who will happily help your sales effort for a percentage. By partners, I mean stores (online or physical), distributors, etc. There are also web forums that cater to pretty much every interest out there, and there are exhibitions and trade shows for every subject imaginable.
Your challenge is that you are new to the industry (I presume), and you don't know which of these methods are effective and which are not. Assuming you don't want to toss a metric buttload of cash into this and see what works, I would advise using the methods that are low cost, and focusing on those that work, and replacing those that do not with other attempts (some of which will work).
Luckily you have the intarwebz and Google is your friend. You should be able to identify the places where your customers are (be it hobby shops, forums, exhibitions, local clubs, etc), and then you can investigate selling through those channels.
One thing to keep in mind is that new businesses generally lack money, connections/trade-partners (like who the best supplier for widget X is), and such. You have to make up for your lack of experience and money with an extra helping of effort. As such, I would probably avoid trying to get someone else to handle fulfillment until you reach a level where you need that help. Otherwise, you're just giving up $$ (which all businesses need) in exchange for time, which presumably you have in infinite supply (as all business owners do) As for packaging, don't assume you would need to spend $$ on blister packaging... it all depends how your customers buy. If it's in store and they buy off a rack, then blisters are good. If they order your items by word of mouth references, boxes will work fine. There are also many companies that sell off-the-shelf (stock design) clamshell packages in countless shapes and sizes. Many discount online print outfits will print full color professional looking cards for $0.10 each or so... and now you have a very professional package for zero NRE/tooling costs.
I pretty much know the areas that I will really need to be going out and advertising, which will predominately be online forums, due to the fact that the hobby is being set back in Australia by a company who is doing itself no favours atm. That leaves my major client base I suspect to be in both the UK and the US, and possibly some other parts of Europe. Which sucks, because I will be facing the "Down Unda" tax in regards to postage quite severely.
Looking at Clamshell packaging: While it would be nice, I don't really expect to make/sell enough of these products to warrant going in that route yet. I took an extremely quick look via google and the first ballpark price I came across for something that I would use would be $0.40 per clamshell (this is without tooling costs, using their stock shape, and then I have to go look for the card backing to suit. If the business takes off, sure, I'll invest in that. As it stands, I plan on placing the boards into one of those shielded metal bags, then having that in between some card in a bubble padded envelope folded over so there is a double layer of bubbles and paper. The product should be sturdy in that, and it will only cost me a quarter of the price of the blister pack option.
Well done for trying. I also have directly sold my products to customers for over 20 years, my comments are.
Do it all yourself, don't have to buy 1000 of an item made especially for you.
Use personal selling, at shows, exhibitions and similar. I would guess you item is for children (
) so go to the country fairs to sell. Forget about selling through others, they will want to pay you 1/3 of the selling price.
Work out the cost of the item, parts and time to assemble, multiply by 3 to get an idea of selling price.
Sell locally to start.
When selling internationally keep the weight under 2kg, this seems to be an internationally agreed limit over which export documentation is needed. Under the 2kg most parcels will get in without any import duties.
Find a good, local, PCB supplier because the whole product is built on it, and it needs to be good. The PCB is the single most expensive item in a small product, and that is just double sided PTH.
Use pin in hole components. Yes, I know that is old hat but they are so much easier to position and solder. You cannot hand solder a device with pin spacings less than 0.050". Always use tin lead solder, the failure rate for the tin only stuff is unacceptable.
Accept that it will cost you so much money to develop and sell the product, and if it all goes then stop! Then try something else.
Record how long it takes to make a quantity of the item, say 20-50, doing all of one job before going on to the next. Things like encapsulating might take rather longer than anticipated and might need multiple molds.
Just my thoughts. Bob
The plan is to do it all myself. I am even currently hacking together a Re-flow oven out of an old toaster oven which I am cleaning up. I can already see where my bottleneck will be when it comes time to make the product, and that will be in the casting process, due to me trying to keep it cheap and will only have one mould (which will do a panel at a time). On the plus side though, If I am smart about it, I can have one panel done with the resin poured, and then start work on populating the next board, so that I don't have excessive downtime for the resin to cure.
Weight won't be an issue at all, unless someone decides that they want to buy the entire lot of my stock and have it sent in one shipment (which would be ok by me
)
I have found a Local PCB supplier, and am going to spend a little time researching more for a backup, for that "oh crap" moment.
Ironically, I am going pretty much 100% against your next bit of advice. Only SMD, with a QFN20 package device (with the requisite 0.5 mm pin pitch
), and using lead free solder for ROHS purposes. Less problems = more sales. This is the main reason I am going to re-flow the boards, to ensure that it will all work out fine.
I will be spending time practising the placement and re-flowing before I start trying to sell these things, and will hopefully be able to sell a fair amount off (possibly at a cheaper rate) to people who would want one. We'll see I guess.
With any Luck I will be able to get away with just needing a single mould.
Oh, and I don't really see the mini-wargaming group as "children" at all anymore, especially considering the rules, and the prices.
Cool! Did you time yourself making a production type prototype to estimate out how long it will take to make a batch? I worked on a product that needed to bake in an oven for a while to cure some epoxy. That ended up being the bottleneck of the whole production cycle. With a limited amount of molds and oven space you can only do so many at a time and you have no choice but wait till the previous batch is done before you can do the next one. That sucked,
My brother used to paint those little warhammer guys back in the day. There used to be a local big dungeon shop (warhammer figures, magic cards, DnD stuff, dice) where all the people into that would hang out and buy new stuff before it closed down. Are those still around? I wonder if you could go direct to those guys and sell out of the shops.
I fully know that the bottleneck I will have is the Resin cure time, which, going on the directions is quoted as 12 hours...so I should be able to use the mold every 24 hours, which will give me 85 of the product.
As to the prevalence of the independent/chain shops selling the 40k, yeah they are still around. Games Workshop (the big gaming retailer, who my product is designed for) are however throwing around their weight at the moment, and bringing lawsuits to people using/abusing their copyright. I don't see how my product would be in breach however, and I should avoid all issues by stating outright that I am not affiliated with them, and that the trademarks all belong to them. Alternately, I could just completely avoid saying anything to do with Games Workshop, and give myself a stronger leg to stand on.
As a last thought, should I be factoring a possible "failure rate" of any of the boards per panel? or is that not as necessary with modern manufacturing? I'd rather be doing my best to err on the side of caution here, rather then being faced with the "oh crap oh crap oh crap" moment.
And thanks heaps for all the advice guys, it really does help calm down my worries, and give ideas that I otherwise wouldn't have thought of.
-kizzap
Home
Help
Search
Login
Register
