Shop4Patents

By Julie Austin – Inventor

After making the molds for the bottles, I would need to find a company to sew the bands. I found a factory in Los Angeles to make some prototypes for me and I tested them on the bottles. I ended up with a thick terry cloth band that had to be threaded through a small slit in the bottle. Since the factory didn’t do that part of the labor, I carried 1,000 bands home and started the painstaking task of assembling them in my living room. After several hours of doing this, my fingers were raw and bleeding. And I had only put together a total of 100 bottles, or 50 sets.

So here I was sitting in my living room with a pile of assembled bottles, but no packaging. So I went to a friend who owns a manufacturing company and he graciously offered to give me a couple hundred empty clamshell boxes, which happened to fit my product perfectly. Then he informed me that I would need a header card to go in the box. I had to admit that I didn’t know what a header card was. He went on to explain that it’s the part of the packaging that has your product’s name, company’s name, address, website, and UPC code on it. UPC code. Another term I was unfamiliar with. It looked like I had a lot to learn. So I turned to yet another person who knew more than I did about these things…a graphic artist.

While he was busy getting me a UPC code, I had to find a photographer to take some pictures for the header card. No time or money to get a model, so I did it myself. I would advise spending the money getting the best pictures you can, as they will be used on the retail packaging and in future press packets.

Another graphic artist was kind enough to make me a logo for free. The logo, finished product and UPC code, etc. were made into a header card that slipped into the clamshell package.

By this point, my patent was approved and I had secured the trademark for HydroSport. I thought that I was surely ready for business now, but little did I know that I was still years away from making any money with my product.

See, there’s this little obstacle called distribution. You have to have a place for people to buy your product. I was naive enough to think that I could just walk into a store and they would buy lots of it, then keep buying, and then…well, I don’t know what I thought.

Because I didn’t know the right or wrong way, and I didn’t really have any fears about it, sometimes it just happened to work out. One of the first places I went was a decent size sporting goods chain in Southern California. I drove around to each of their stores and managed to get the product into all of them.

I later found out that it was on the bottom shelf, in the wrong department, and nobody knew what it was or even to ask for it. But that wasn’t the store’s fault. It’s not their responsibility to promote the product. I hadn’t done the job of marketing and PR yet. In fact, one sporting goods store told me to come back when I had a commercial on the air.

So before I charged forward again, I decided to make a commercial. More info from Julie Austin the inventor – Next posting.