BRINGING PRODUCTS TO MARKET MADE SIMPLE

BHR Global Associates, Inc. is dedicated to helping companies bring their products to market successfully. We can help with finalization your design, to helping find the right source at the right price, help you maintain a solid on going supply chain and help you sell the product through our team of sales professionals. Our blog will supply information and details on successes, failures, and road blocks to avoid in bringing products to their full potential.

Sunday, January 16, 2011

Are You Ready To Make A Sale

This posting has nothing to do with product but with the basic items needed to be given to your sales team.
1) The UPC- the Universal Product Code which is on every product sold at retail. In Europe it is known as the EAN. The vendor and product number is also the basis for all barcodes that are needed when dealing with retail.
2) A source to do EDI- There are a number of options open to small to mid-sized companies but you must be able to have this available. EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) is how retailers communcate their orders to their vendors. The are a number of different types of transactions that are performed. The basics include receiving an order and advanced shipping notice of the order.
3) Item Dimensions-Inner Pack Dimensions-Master Carton Dimensions-Cube and Weights for all of these.
4) Sell Sheets that highlight the features and benefits of the product and the depict the product(s) and how they look when "working".
5) Pricing- The prices that you are looking to sell the product for. There are a number of issues beyond the cost that need to be included in the pricing decision.
These issues include: Disocunts including advertising-warehouse-new store, terms, slotting fees, and other similar ones.
6) How will you do distribution- Will you do it yourself or outsource the process and how to account for these costs. Should they be part of the pricing or the profit structure?

Friday, January 07, 2011

Do Not Make Hard Tooling

If you have designed a product and want to take it to market DO NOT invest in hard tooling especially if it is an injection molded part.
There are options where prototyping can present a "finished" looking part that can be used for presenting to potential customers.
From these prototypes and the files that create them you can get costs to produce the product and thereby developing a selling price.
Prototyping will also allow you to go to trade shows to show off your product to attract potential customers.
Mock-ups of packaging is also a low cost alternative to showing how the product would look on the retail shelf.
The bottom line here is to avoid spending $100's of thousands of dollars on a product line that potentially no one wants.
I recently met someone who did that and he and his wife are still looking for their first customer.
Do not get yourself into this financial hole.
Also the time to show your product to customers is faster/better/cheaper way to go.