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Designing A Product That Doesn’t Suck

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StrategyDriven Innovation Article |Designing a Product|Designing A Product That Doesn’t SuckProduct design as a small business owner has to be one of the most exciting parts of the entrepreneurial process. When you start your own business and you finally get down to creating your product; it brings such a sense of achievement that cannot be replaced.

If you are new to product design and you need some help with the process, we have some ideas for you to help you create a product that is fun and will draw the attention of your customers.

Create a product that doesn’t suck by using these simple tips.

Get input from your team

When designing a product it is important to remember the value of other people. Two heads are better than one; and a whole room of heads is better than two! Make sure when designing a product that you have a meeting with your team and start brainstorming it together. You may find that your team has some amazing ideas you wouldn’t have thought of before and this will likely help you to succeed in a way you couldn’t on your own.

Collaborate with an artist

One of the things that can really help you in terms of product design is a stunning box. When designing your product, consider getting a local artist to help you design a pattern for your box to make it stand out from the rest. This is a trick companies such as Birchbox have done with great success because not only will you get more customers through better design; but as you promote the artist, the artist will also promote your product because it has their design on it. You can even make this into a community event where you have a new artist come and help you every few months. Building a community like this is a clever way to build your audience and sell more of your product – as well as make your product look amazing.

Use recyclable materials

It is so important these days that we consider the environment when making a product and this includes using recycled as recyclable materials. Source materials that are recycled and make a point that your product is made as such. This will draw in an audience who cares for the environment and you will gain support as a result.

Ask for opinions

When stuck between a few designs for a product or looking to create the final design – be sure to ask for opinions before you go ahead. Ask your team, a focus group, and even ask people online via a social media poll. Show people that you value their suggestions and you might get better responses, as well as a better looking product.

Keep it simple

There’s a reason why the Apple logo on a plain white box is so well loved and known the world over. Less is more. Keep your design simple and don’t ever make it too busy that it puts people off buying it.

Use our tips to make a killer product today and squash the competition.

Paper To Product: Bringing Your Ideas Into The Real World

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StrategyDriven Starting Your Business Article |From Paper to Product|Paper To Product: Bringing Your Ideas Into The Real WorldPeople are great at coming up with completely new ideas, though far too few are able to act on their ingenuity. It’s not too hard to think of new products or inventions, but turning something like this into a reality can be much harder, and most won’t have any idea where to start. To help you out with this, this post will be going through the whole process from paper to product. Exploring each of the stages you will need to take on before you can bring a product to market, this should give you a much better idea of the path you should be taking, while also giving you the chance to get started on your dream product.

Research

The first stage in this process is going to involve some research. This will serve more than one purpose; giving you the opportunity to make sure that the idea doesn’t already exist while also ensuring that the idea will be possible in the first place. You can do all of this research online, and there are plenty of forums and communities around the web which can be used to help you to test your concept. If a lot of people think you’re onto a winner, this will be a good sign, though you should avoid giving away your idea if you think it will be a success.

Inspiration & Design

Next up, it will be time to start thinking about designing your product. This process should always start on paper, even if you aren’t very good at drawing, as this will give you an easy way to get your ideas into the real world.

The sketches you make don’t need to be perfect, but will serve to make it much easier to come up with the form and style of your product. Most designers will look for inspiration at this stage, using sites like Pinterest to look at other products to fuel their creativity.

Once you have a good idea of how you’d like your product to look and work, you can begin to create a 3D model of it. Tools like Solidworks are perfect for this, though they can be tricky to use and you may need to watch some YouTube videos before you’re able to make beautiful models with it. This sort of model will enable you to make the product very easily, as you will already have a CAD design for it, but it will also give you the chance to get an idea of what it will look like when it is made.

Most modern products involve some sort of electronics, and this is something you may have to design at the same time as the physical form of your product. Designing a PCB isn’t easy, and you may need to use a microcontroller, like an Arduino, to get started with this. Once you’ve managed to make a circuit and script which works, you can start to think about designing a dedicated PCB for it, though you may need to hire someone to help you with this.

Prototyping

With a 3D design made, the next stage in this process will involve some prototyping. This stage is crucial, as it will ensure that you are creating something which people will want to use, while also giving you a chance to test your concept before you spend loads of money on getting it made. Of course, though, you have to use the right tools for something like this, or you will end up wasting a lot of resources.

Companies like rapidpsi.com can offer rapid manufacturing services which will make it much easier to prototype your ideas. Using 3D printers, rather than regular CNC machines, companies like this are able to make products extremely quickly without having to invest money in special tools for the job. This gives you the chance to make a range of different prototypes without having to wait for months each time you make an improvement to your designs.

Testing will also be a big part of this stage. You can handle this largely by yourself, though it can be worth getting other people to put your products through hell to make sure that they work properly. Prototypes are usually more fragile than a finished product, but you will still have the opportunity to make sure that they function well, while also establishing the weak points of each product to make sure that they don’t break when they are used by customers.

The Manufacturing

After you’ve done some testing and are happy with the prototype you’ve made, it will finally be time to get one with manufacturing your product. This can be an expensive process, and there are quite a few different ways to handle it. Some people will want to make their product themselves, and will buy the machinery and tools they need to do it from home. For larger operations, looking to countries like China can be a good idea, as there are a lot of businesses in this part of the world which specialize in manufacturing for other companies.

In some cases, you may be able to get another company to buy your product from you. This can be trickier, and you won’t get the chance to work on your product anymore, but it can also make the whole thing far more cost-effective. Most people will be happy to see their product on the market, and it won’t matter how it got there as long as you’ve been paid fairly for it. Of course, though, this will be a last resort for a lot of people.

With all of this in mind, you should be feeling ready to take on the challenge of bringing your product ideas into the real world. This process can be a difficult one, but the results will almost always be worth it. Even if your product isn’t successful, not many people can say that they’ve achieved something like this, and this makes it well worth all the work.

Revealed: The Secrets To Successful Products

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StrategyDriven Entrepreneurship Article |Product Marketing|Revealed: The Secrets To Successful ProductsWhat makes a product successful? Well, the bottom line is that products that sell lots of units are bound to be successful. But how do you ensure that this happens in your business? If you want to grow your company, then you need to keep increasing sales and reeling in new customers. All of this relates back to the products themselves.

If you’re in the middle of starting a company – or releasing a new product – then you’re in luck. Today, you will see the secrets to successful products. Below, there are a few key points that must be paid attention to:

Attention To Detail

The best products have received exceptional attention to detail. This means that you take extra care to ensure that all of the tiniest aspects of the product are perfect. If you’re making clothes, then you use attention to detail to make sure that even the clothing labels are up to scratch and gorgeous. If you’re making a car, then you ensure that the small trims on the inside are all made to the highest standards. You’ll find that by doing this, all the little things start to add up. A product that’s had no attention to detail put into it will ultimately fail as people start to recognize the flaws.

Unique Selling Points

What makes your product better than similar ones out there? How can you guarantee that people will pick you over a more established business? It all boils down to your unique selling point. With a USP, you provide customers with a specific reason (or two) to pick your products. The way you do this is by researching your rivals. Look at the existing products in the same category as yours, then think about what’s missing. Develop your product to tackle this missing thing and give customers something new. If no-one else offers what you do, then you’re bound to find a lot of customers calling.

Exceptional Marketing

Yep, the secret to successful products is excellent marketing campaigns. Think about some of the businesses out there that release new products all the time. Companies like Samsung and Apple will make new smartphones every year. Most of the time, there’s hardly any difference between the new models and the old ones. So, why do they sell so successfully? It all comes down to how the products are marketed before and during release. They create hype around the products, releasing teasers here and there. Then, they do a big reveal, detailing all the main points.

By the time the products are released, everyone’s keen to have them because they feel like they absolutely need this new phone over their old one. Sometimes, a killer marketing campaign can take an average product to a phenomenal one.

Those of you that are developing products should pay close attention to these three things. Think of them as a mini checklist. Tick each one off, and you’ve got yourself a successful product. Now, go ahead and make lots of sales!

Mastering The Product Development Process

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StrategyDriven Online Entrepreneurship Article |Product Development|Mastering The Product Development ProcessWhatever it is that your business does, there will be some kind of product that you need to make along the way – unless you offer a service free of products of any kind, of course, which is not commonly the case. Because that product is what the customer ends up with in their hands, it is one of the major determinants of what they think of your business, and as such you should make sure that it is going to be as close to perfect as possible. There are a lot of things you can do to make sure that you are going to create a close to perfect product, and in this article we are going to look at a range of them. Mastering your product development process is going to bring huge benefits to your business, so if you take the following on board you should find that you are in am much better position on the whole.

Strong Ideation

An early and important phase in the development of any product is ideation, or in other words where you actually come up with the idea for the products you are going to create. Having a good process for coming up with those products is obviously always going to be important, as it will result in much more successful products being created in the end. But how can you make sure that you are going to improve the ideation process involved in your development? For a start, you should consider trying to solve a problem that you have identified as being common amongst people in the society. Doing that will mean that you can get a better sense of what kind of thing you need to produce, and you are much more likely to end up making something people really need.

Whatever ideas are generated, it’s important to make sure that you have plenty of people around the table who can talk it through together and decide on what needs to be improved or what needs work in any way. The more you have a range of experts and so on, the more likely it is that you will be able to create something that is as close to perfect as possible. This process should be worked on as much as you can if you want to create great products, so be sure to put a lot of effort in at this point for benefits later on.

StrategyDriven Online Entrepreneurship Article |Product Development|Mastering The Product Development ProcessCreation

When it comes to the actual start of the manufacturing process, you need to make sure that you are doing everything in your power to really make it work out as well as possible. You want as few things to go wrong here as you can manage, so that you can have less to work on later on, and the best way to make sure of that is to look at developing a manufacturing process at this early stage which is set up to succeed as well as possible. You will be surprised at how much you have to think about here. For a start, you’ll need the space, which in most cases will be a factory. Within that factory, you’ll need to set up the proper equipment for ensuring that it goes as smoothly and swiftly as you would hope: that means having the right roller conveyor systems in place and ensuring that you have all the materials necessary to be able to actually create the item in question.

Having the factory set up means you can then work on ensuring that the manufacturing goes well, and that ensures the future quality of the product. Clearly, it’s something you should spend some real time on if you are to ensure that your product ends up as successful as possible.

Marketing

It’s often easy to forget that marketing is a part of the process of product development, as much as any other part of it. You need to have one eye on your marketing from the very start if you are to make the most of it, as you can gather more ideas and make sure there is a synthesis between product and marketing later on, making it much more likely to sell well. A big part of this too is ensuring that you have looked into the right kind of packaging and labelling for your products, which ultimately form the last part of the marketing process. As long as you have done that, you will find that you are going to have much more success with the product on the whole.