PRODUCT DESIGN
Prior to embarking on specific product designs you need to know the approximate price your product will be selling for. From that point you can work back towards your manufacturing price.
You will need to subtract all your costs such as shipping, tooling, advertising, profit margin etc. After that you should be left with your manufacturing cost.
If you do decide to engage me as your production engineer, below is an outline of what I provide during the design stage of your product development.
Initial sketches and concept – Artistic designers can draw up what you have in mind. This way you get the most for your money from your creative contacts. So how do you get a good designer? You simply test them out? You can create a design brief and put it up on a freelancer site. I talk about design briefs in one of my videos in the Step By Step Guides section. Below is a flow chart of the basic process of finding a freelancer on the hire site.
Initial sketches and concept – Artistic designers can draw up what you have in mind. This way you get the most for your money from your creative contacts. So how do you get a good designer? You simply test them out? You can create a design brief and put it up on a freelancer site. I talk about design briefs in one of my videos in the Step By Step Guides section.
3D modelling – The next step is to convert these sketches into 3D models. This will require modelling in professional CAD software. My approach is to build the model based on how it will be made. I consider the raw material the product will be made from, and build the model based upon these limiting parameters. There is little point in creating something that cannot be made at a reasonable price.
Logistic parameters – I simulate different materials and assemblies, and calculate costs based on the variations we come up with. We also determine how your product will be shipped, how much it will weigh and how it will pack. Small changes to the design might result in large cost savings for shipping and transport.
Decoy product – There will be a time when you need to share your IP with manufacturers. However, you may not want to share your Intellectual Property with suppliers in the vetting stage. A good practice is to create a decoy product that has similar manufacturing parameters as your real product. It can be a simple shape, which does nothing besides give you an approximate cost of your real product.
Patents –Naturally you will need to engage an attorney for the legal side of your product protection. The role of engineering in this scenario is to make changes to the design so that it fits a patent brief. This part of the process can happen much earlier in the design stage too.
Deliverables – This is the final stage of product design prior to going into production. Files are created to provide to your manufacturer so as to enable them to quote on your product design. However, this is not the final version of the production files. Revisions are made after your chosen manufacturer is selected, and there may be limitations that the design needs to meet that are imposed by the manufacturer.