Are You Ready To Start Building Your Own Products?
Whether you’re starting from scratch with your products at the centre of your business or you’re moving into building your own products for the first time, it’s important to understand that it’s a big deal. Running a business that creates things is much more demanding than running a business that provides services alone. Here, we’re going to look at what resources you might need to help you get production off the ground.
An idea to develop
First of all, every product begins with an idea. An idea should respond to a real need in the market and intuiting that need can help you find a hit idea. However, don’t underestimate how much data plays into product development, as well. As such, paying for product and market research can help you ensure that you’re developing a product that’s likely to be a hit. When we built MIKOL, there was a surge in marble designs, especially marble iPhone cases. In short, with that data, we realized how popular printed marble was, so we decided to offer the world a real marble option.
A prototype to test it
Once you have developed your product, it’s important to make sure that you’re getting plenty of feedback on how to ensure it reaches the market in the best possible state. Gathering feedback and testing your prototype widely is an essential part of this step. You want to make sure that it’s not only tested internally but by people who aren’t familiar with the product at all to ensure you get objective viewpoints on it.
The factory to manufacture it
When you’ve gotten past the stage of working with just a few prototypes, you need to establish the setup that will see a whole line of the product getting shipped out. This means that you need a factory with all of the essential equipment. You can build or buy your own and equip it with the machinery you need, but in most cases, business owners are going to find a factory to either outsource development entirely or to stock with their own team members. We were lucky that we had our own marble and granite factory, so we just needed to outsource the other components and assemble them at our plant. If you're looking for China manufacturing, the team at Acor helped out a lot and made it much easier.
The team to produce it
Whether you’re establishing your own factory or hiring another, you may find yourself in need of workers with specific expertise to help you ensure the best quality products available. A process worker hire agency can help you find the specific skills that you need to bring your product to completion. Cross-training is a great way to help establish a shared knowledge base amongst your workers, too, so that you can end up incorporating even the skills of your temporary workers in the long term.
The partners to finish it
You may find that you’re not able to take care of every step of manufacturing within your factory. In some cases, it might be possible, but purchasing the equipment might not be a cost-effective solution, especially if it requires specialist knowledge to operate. For niche needs that aren’t a key part of the development process, you might instead want to look at outsourcing. For instance, many manufacturers will outsource plastic moulding and laser cutting.
The assets above are not everything that you might need to start manufacturing your own goods, but they are some of the most important assets without a doubt.
