Episode 6 - MANUFACTURING ( I yam what I yam) part 2

There are always mistakes in manufacturing—even after you have the perfect prototype.

Are you ready for that?

Are you really an inventor or designer?

It's not an easy road, but you can do it!

Jack will get you ready for the task.

Contact: [e-mail]

Episode Transcript

(00:15):
So tell me if you've heard thisone before. I think I was a
great inventor in a past life,like Thomas Edison or Tesla. I mean,
I've got these great ideas, butI just can't seem to make them.
Why else would I get these ideasif I hadn't been these guys before.

(00:36):
Well, maybe, just maybe itis just you and you just haven't
learned enough about manufacturing. I meanjust saying, Hi, everybody, Welcome
back to the thirty year Overnight Sensation. This is part two of the Manufacturing
episode. I'm your host, JackCourage, and this podcast is a conversation

(01:00):
hopefully can tell, not a classand not falling asleep. If you're a
novice inventor or want to be aninventor, I'll take you through the trials
of designing, manufacturing, selling,and getting your product into the market.
This podcast is not upfront for asubscription service or some company trying to generate

(01:21):
money off of your ideas. It'sabout the trials of inventing and it's not
easy, but you can do ityourself. If I can do it with
no formal training, you can doit too. And if you noticed I
was trying to make these episodes alittle bit shorter. That's since the part
two section, adding a little bitmore music, talking a little clearer,

(01:45):
or trying to doing a podcast forthe first time. A friend of mine
brought it up that it was probablya perfect metaphor for inventing a product.
I'm learning as I go, hopefullygetting better, so one day I have
a good episode. Now. Agood thing to remember manufacturing is that mistakes

(02:06):
happen. In the early two thousand, I was selling my designs in fashion
and things are going pretty good.A new design team in town had designed
a new type and style of genesthat all my fellow female designers were raving
about. I mean raving, butthey were making them one at a time.
Their key to growing for the nationalawareness that they wanted was to have

(02:30):
them made by a manufacturer in thesoutheast part of the United States. If
that went well, they would takethe profits and place a larger order overseas,
which at that time that's the onlyway jeans were being made. So
they pulled all their money to havethe designs cut of their very special selection
of denim, then sewn and thenplaced in a couple big local stores for

(02:55):
sale. Since they had already wonover the buyers. We were all waiting
based on the in person reviews forthese guys to really make it. They
had received a lot of press andhype, almost excessive, if that is
even possible. But a month laterI got the bad news they were out
of business boom over. So whathappened somehow? And I'm sure it was

(03:22):
a rookie startup mistake. They didnot take any account that as the denim
was being cut, it shifted andall their cuts were off. Now,
I'm sure the startup for the tooland dies was a tremendous cost, but
after this setback they quit. Tothis day, decades later, it still

(03:44):
bothers me. I think what bothersme most is that they quit. They
were not beaten lost to his superiorproduct. They just had a super mishap,
looked at their losses, which wasprobably around twenty five to fifty thousand
dollars, which is nothing to sneezeat, and said we're done, not

(04:09):
done with the design, done completelygoing back to their previous professions. Now,
I have had setbacks way bigger thanthis, and it would never dawn
on me to quit unless I wasbeaten on the idea, and if that
was the case, I would stilllet it go. I would suffer for

(04:30):
a little bit as I have lickmy wounds, get whatever pride I had
left, and then I would startagain. It would have been a different
story if these guys were beaten inthe marketplace, but they weren't. What
happened is at that moment it wasn'tworth it to them anymore. Just quit,

(04:50):
and sadly I have to say theywere probably just posers or put it
in their bag of ideas to bragabout later about being designers. They had
a chance and it just didn't workout. And another aspect that bothered me
was that they settled. It botheredme because they didn't lose. Everybody liked

(05:12):
their product, they weren't beaten.People would have probably still after that mishap
still would have gone line and boughtthe product. It was a terrible setback,
but they accepted it. And asI've said, I've had much worse
than they did, and not bragging. It's not anything I'm proud about.
So when it happened to me,I pivoted. It took some time to

(05:33):
get back in the game, butI didn't settle and if you're going to
be an inventor or a designer anda designer, you just can't settle.
But that doesn't mean to be unreasonable. I've met inventors that have also been
purposely unreasonable. In those cases,it was just really to prove who they

(05:55):
were and what they could do,because they were big designers and they were
going to get what they wanted andshow everybody. You just have to keep
in mind there's always another way.Always, it's just are you going to
pay the price to get that otherway. This is the same example that
I keep beating home. You're eitherdesigner and inventor or you're not. It's

(06:18):
brutal to say. It sucks tohear, but I will never be smart
enough to invent the cure for cancer. My mind just doesn't work that way.
I don't excel in chemistry or biology, and sadly wasn't very good in
science. But what I have cometo accept is that what I design,

(06:40):
for the most part, prior tothe head covering product, I design frivolous
items that make people happy for avery short period of time. And if
I'm lucky, and I've been prettylucky, some become an icon in that
moment in time. So you know, as a kid, I watched a

(07:00):
lot of cartoons, probably way toomany. Popeye was a favorite then of
course Tom and Jerry. The onething everybody knows about Popeye is that he
ate spinach to get strong and thenhe'd beat up the bad guy. Don't
really see that much anymore, butthe overarching theme was that he was a
sailor. Everybody knew he's a sailor, and that he knew who he was.

(07:25):
I am when I am for me. I was fortunate to have parents
to let me be me, althoughthey weren't exactly very thrilled with some of
my daredevil escapades and some of thepaths that I chose. But I know
who I am. And a friendasked me for advice, like maybe on
accounting, I'd give him the numberto my accountant. I wouldn't say anything

(07:49):
because it's not my field. Soit's time to figure out if you're an
inventor or not. Why put yourselfthrough this. It's a tough road to
me personally, it's rewarding, butnot everybody's been as lucky. So do
you settle? Do you see thingsto the end? The learning of how

(08:11):
to get something made has very littleto do with being a designer or an
inventor. The actual producing of theproduct is just one small step of being
an inventor. And this isn't reallyto be negative. It's just you gotta
want it. You can't wish forit, you gotta really want it.
Also, you don't have to walkaround with a chip on the shoulder to

(08:33):
be an inventor. I mean Iprobably do, but I try to not
to have it seen as much asit is. You just have to want
to make something that you don't have. What is lost on most people on
inventing to me is that not everypridanct needs to be patented, and not

(08:54):
every prict has to sell a millionunits or be sold at Walmart or on
Amazon. When you're starting out,maybe the first idea or two are good
enough only for like a local market, and there's nothing wrong with that.
You might find like one of myin laws who just creates good woodworking items
and periodically goes down to the localmarket and sells them. He finds joint

(09:18):
creating the items out of scraps.They don't exist anywhere except for in his
brain. Then he sells them sothat he can find more scrap and buy
more wood and just keep creating becausethat's what makes them happy. So this
brings us all around to where westart in episode one, that dangerous time.

(09:41):
So you don't have the connections thatI have an experience. What next
It depends on your product. Butgenerally speaking, someone close I mean in
your state or provinces who is creatingsomething at least in your area. People
talk. If you aren't a jerk, they will give you a little time

(10:03):
in general and try to help you, and we'll try to help you get
started in the right direction if you'renice about it and you're considered of their
time and you're earnest. Find outwhere they got it made, find out
how much they paid for it,if it's in your same ballpark. For
me, when I go into anew area, I visit those industry trade

(10:26):
shows. I also do plenty ofresearch online or at the library. And
yes, people still go to thelibrary. So everything I just said sound
too simple, didn't it? Visittalk research? But for me that could
take many months of research calls andit usually even tests my patience. But

(10:48):
I'm trying to be as thorough asI possibly can because when you finally find
the source you need, there willbe set up charges and charges on top
of charges, because there's always morefreaking charges. My head covering prototypes from
the manufacture the samples for the finalproduct were only a few hundred dollars,

(11:09):
which is very low in price becausemy manufacturer wanted to work with me and
he trusts that I was on tosomething after all these years of working together.
However, when I tried to anew manufacture in another country as a
backup due to COVID, the priceswere outrageous. It was the first time
to use this guy, and hereally stuck it to me just to set

(11:33):
up a loan, not the molds, not the short production runs, not
the line corrections. It was justa thousand bucks for the guy even to
talk to me. That was justthe buy in. But due to the
lingering pandemic, I needed an alternatesource to manufacture, and at the time
that new company did not have thelatest wave of COVID. So now I

(11:56):
had two manufacturers and the big beginningwas rough and expensive for a cut and
sew. But I now had analternate. But how did I find the
guy? Serious time consuming trial andair, and that all costs more money,
way more than I budgeted for,and enough that one investor even started

(12:18):
to get cold feet. Now,on the plus side, the rest of
the plant was burning down, solucky for me, the moment I sniffed
problem with COVID, I changed gearsimmediately and went to the second manufacturer,
the alternate for a couple runs.So when it comes to manufacturing, thirty
years of making things have taught metwo major attitudes. One there's always another

(12:45):
way. Yeah, you've heard mesay it. I'm beating in the ground.
I just got to keep saying it. There's always another way. And
the second, which is mainly moreimportant than the first, is money is
not finite. I had this oldlong time ago man thirty five years ago
at least. He used to say, unless you're dead, you can always

(13:05):
make money. And Daryl, you'reabsolutely right. And believe me, I've
been in some deep pits myself,but you're when you're at the bottom looking
up. You just need your healthand time the money will happen, which
always cracks me up. So manypeople act like there's only a certain amount
of money out there, that thebezos, the musk, the gates.

(13:28):
They have got most of it.I'll say it again. Money is not
finite. It is infinite. Youmay not like the speed in which you
make money, but here still inAmerica, it's the land of opportunity.
Even with the coming recession, youcan still make money. And because you're

(13:48):
creative and you're already in the inventorworld, you can find a way to
make money to pay for your product. You just have to be creative.
Like I talked about that last episodeabout how I found funds from my high
school club. Be creative. Lookaround. Maybe you've got something to sell,
or you have to take a secondjob, which I've done multiple times.

(14:11):
And when you're looking to have yourprotype manufactured, there are places out
there. One might even be aroundthe corner from you and you just don't
know it, but you have tolook. You have to find it yourself.
But it's there. So until nexttime, when you're thinking about ideas,
never settle. And when you're struggling, i mean really struggling, just

(14:35):
stay the course. Keep in mindthat's when most people give up and quit.
There's always another way. Haven't youheard that enough today? It's so
true and so simple. I'm yourhost Jack courage the thirty year overnight sensation.
Stay at It