Invent It, Sell It, Bank It!: Make Your Million-Dollar Idea Into a Reality (8 page)

It appeals to a wide age range.

It’s manageable in size.

If you can check off eight or more of these, your product might be a hero.

3

YOU’VE GOT A GREAT IDEA, NOW WHAT?

“If you are interested, you’ll do what’s convenient. If you are committed, you’ll do what it takes.”

—J
OHN
A
SSARAF

On his first day of work as a mailroom clerk at the mega-corporation Hudsucker Industries, Norville Barnes, the hero of Joel and Ethan Coen’s screwball comedy
The Hudsucker Proxy
, shows his coworker a simple drawing of a circle on a rumpled piece of paper. “This is my ticket upstairs,” he says proudly. “You know, for kids!” The coworker looks at him in dumbfounded confusion. A few minutes later, Barnes takes advantage of a moment in front of Sidney Mussberger, the company’s chairman, to pull the drawing out of his shoe. Carefully making sure the circle is shown right side up, he says, “You know, for kids!” Mussberger glares at him like he’s a moron. Later, Barnes makes a prototype, but as he energetically makes his pitch for what we now know is a hula hoop, the company board stares at him uncomprehendingly. Even after Barnes’s invention is produced, in spite of the
large color poster of a child spinning a hula hoop around his waist and front-row placement in the window of the town toy store, no one buys it. It isn’t until the store owner throws the plastic rings out into the street and a little boy picks it up and starts to twirl it around his waist, to the delight and astonishment of his friends, that the toy becomes a hit.

The movie is a satirical take on corporate America, but with these scenes it humorously depicts the truth of what one
Shark Tank
entrepreneur said when she came into the tank to pitch: a product can sound like a really great idea, but it’s not until people can see it, feel it, or touch it that they can experience the wow factor that leads to sales. Poor Norville Barnes didn’t even have the benefit of a great-sounding idea, and on paper his design was meaningless. But once the product made it into the hands of its intended audience, his invention finally revealed its true bestselling potential.

It’s just a movie, but in its exaggerated way
The Hudsucker Proxy
illustrates why a well-designed prototype, tested by the people you think will most want to use it, is crucial to the success of your product. Every step you take from this point, from conducting market research, to getting funding, to landing your first sale, will depend entirely upon the perfection of your working prototype. Your prototype is what can transform a potential consumer or retail buyer’s reaction to your idea from a tepid, “How nice,” to an insistent, “How fast can we get these in the store?” Plus, this is your chance to make your product the best version of itself it can possibly be. Try not to be too easily satisfied. Until your prototype is exactly right, it’s not ready to share with anyone. Introducing your product to the world is no different from introducing yourself for a job interview: you’ve got about ten seconds to make a good first impression, and you only get one chance. So make it count!

Another reason why prototypes are important is that the trial-and-error process of making one teaches you everything you need to know about your product: what materials are best suited to make it, how complicated the manufacturing process will be, how easy it will be for a customer to assemble it, and whether it even really works. It allows you to fix problems now while it’s cheap, not later on, when you’ve got 20,000 units suffering from a design flaw.

Today my factories and suppliers make my prototypes. We’ve worked together for a long time, so they know me well and have a sense of what I want. I can grab a napkin or piece of paper and sketch out the approximate dimensions of my idea, and their design engineers can draft more sophisticated drawings from that. They send me a first sample, and then we perfect the design along the way. I send them fabric swatches or color ideas, often using Pantone Matching System (PMS) color books (a system that allows you to explain and share the colors you want for anything from packaging to fabrics to book covers; say “PMS 326,” and every designer knows what you mean). We email ideas back and forth. Once I’m satisfied, the design is sent to one of my manufacturers, who uses the drawing and other information to create a perfect sample of my product. So I have a lot of help with my prototypes. But back when I was just starting out, all I had were my own two hands and a set of power tools that I didn’t know how to use.

THE FIRST DRAFT

Many people find inspiration in the shower or other environments where they get a chance to relax and shut out the noise and distractions of the outside world. I often have eureka moments when I’m sitting in an airplane, where there are no phones
ringing and no interruptions. It’s one of the only places I get some quiet time to think. However, the first bolt of inspirational lightning that launched my career hit me during a massage. My friend Pam was a massage therapist, and one day while she was working on me, we started commiserating about one of our pet peeves: the annoying fact that there was no good way to store your earrings. You wound up having to throw them all in a heap in your jewelry box if you owned more than a few pair. You’d lose a back or find only one of the two just when you were in a hurry to get out of the house. My head still squashed into the massage table’s face hole, I sighed, “There has to be a better way.”

And that’s when, literally in a flash, like a lightning bolt, a picture appeared in my mind, instantly and fully formed. Sliding earring stands, one behind another, on top of a base. They’d slide to the left and to the right, so you could see everything at a quick glance. It would hold pierced and clip-on earrings and take up a small space. It was different from anything else out there. Like all entrepreneurs, I was certain it was hero and that every woman on earth would want one.

All entrepreneurs think everybody will need and want their products.

This was not the first time I’d had an idea that I thought could be a commercial hit. Not long before that eureka moment, I’d had an idea for a collection of modern, updated fairy tales, which I called
Fairy Tales for the Nineties
. They were alternatives to the traditional versions that were so sexist and unnecessarily scary. They needed to be updated for our times. I had written several stories when, one day, while checking out purchases at a Barnes & Noble, I happened to look down and see an easel holding a copy of a book called
Politically Correct Bedtime Stories
.
The book’s jacket was prominently displayed, and on it there was a starburst saying, “
New York Times
Bestseller!” Well, that was that. Of course, there was no guarantee that my book would have made it big, but if there already was a book of modernized fairy tales on the bestseller list, the idea was on the right track, and I had just missed the boat. The next time I had an idea I thought was a hero, I was going to act on it immediately (and think more about question no. 3 in the previous chapter!).

After my idea hit me on the massage table, I raced home with my mind on fire. It was July. If I wanted to get my product into stores for Christmas, I was going to have to get moving fast (little did I know that most buyers shore up their fourth-quarter orders, which include the holiday season, in April!).

When Dan walked through the door, I said, “Honey, I have a great idea!” He thought the organizer sounded interesting and told me to sketch it out. I pulled out a sheet of paper, a pencil, and a ruler, and started drawing. Once I had transposed the picture in my head onto the page, I started to think about the dimensions it would need to be. I thought about my space, and my mother’s, and the bathrooms, bedrooms, and closets of all the women I knew. I wanted to create an organizer that would hold three times as many earrings as the typical jewelry box, yet be compact enough that it wouldn’t sit like the Hulk on a woman’s vanity or bathroom counter.

My drawing skills are just okay. I tried to be as meticulous and neat as I could be, but my style is kind of sloppy, big, and wild—true to my artistic nature. When I draw on a pad of paper, my columns aren’t straight; I write on a diagonal. Dan, on the other hand, writes in neat, precise little lines. He is detail-oriented like an engineer. So once I got the basic design of the organizer down, I asked him to redraw it. He pulled out some graph paper and
drew the organizer according to my specifications. We talked and drew and erased and measured and drew some more until finally Dan handed me a perfect representation of the organizer I had envisioned in my head. It was beautiful. It held one hundred pairs of pierced or clip-on earrings on five sliding stands that allowed you to see all of the earrings at a quick glance.

Looking back, it’s incredible that Dan didn’t question whether this idea was really something I should pursue. He’s cautious—not at all the type to push the envelope. And yet, in this instance he was on board from the minute I told him about my idea.

If you’re artistically challenged, or your idea is complicated and you’re unable to make your own accurate design, and you don’t have someone like Dan to help you, you can hire a design engineer to draw it for you. Design engineers will work with you to draft a computer-aided design (CAD), which is essentially a 3-D blueprint that can be viewed and spun around on your pc, then manipulated, tested, and altered before being sent to a prototype maker or manufacturer. In an increasingly common process called CAD/CAM (computer-aided design/computer-aided manufacturing), the prototype maker’s or manufacturer’s computers send the CAD data to the machines to direct them how to make the product.

Commissioning a CAD can be a pricey option, though. If money is an issue, you might consider going to a local college or university and hiring an engineering student to design your CAD. One advantage to the CAD is that you can sit with designers while they’re working and see your virtual product take shape on the computer monitor. This gives you the ability to tweak things along the way before actually trying to build it. CADs are impressive in their quality and accuracy; the finished
drawing makes it look like your product is going to jump off the page.

CREATING A MOCK-UP

Many times I’ve picked up a new product on the market and wondered if the person who designed it ever actually tried to use it. You can always tell the items that an individual or a company designed just to make a buck. A pancake batter dispenser that leaves all the blueberries crushed and smeared against the inside of the dispenser instead of leaving them plump and whole in the pancake on the griddle—that couldn’t have been designed by someone who loves blueberry pancakes, or who had even tested it (testing and retesting your product is really important). A lipstick holder too shallow to properly hold a lipstick couldn’t have been designed by a person who actually wears lipstick and who wanted to create a better way to store her makeup. You tend to know what a market needs if
you
are the market. Of course, you can successfully create products for demographics beyond your own; you’ll just need to be extra careful with your market research and how you target that audience.