Injection mold tooling runs $3,000 for a single-cavity aluminum prototype tool, $12,000 to $60,000 for a production steel tool on a moderate consumer part, and $80,000 to $200,000 for a high-cavitation tool with hot runners and multiple side actions. The spread comes...
The crossover between 3D printing and injection molding falls between 300 and 3,000 units for most consumer parts, and part size is what moves it. A 5-gram clip that prints for $4.50 and molds for $0.09 in a $12,000 tool crosses over at about 2,700 units. A 600-gram...
A molded plastic part costs between $0.15 and $3.00 to produce once the tool exists, and the tool costs $3,000 to $60,000 before the first shot. Those two numbers are the whole story. Piece price is built from resin, machine time, secondary operations, scrap,...
Consumer product design services cover four things industrial design alone does not: hitting a landed cost near 20% to 25% of shelf price, designing packaging that survives shipping and sells from a peg or a shelf, meeting the safety standards your category triggers,...
The product development process runs through six gates: concept definition, feasibility, industrial design, engineering, validation, and production release. Each gate has an entry condition you must satisfy before work starts and an exit condition you must prove...
You can evaluate your own invention in a weekend, for free, across five dimensions: market pull, manufacturing cost, patentability, competitive density, and personal fit. Score each from 0 to 5, apply the weights below, and you have a number out of 100 that tells you...
File first, then sell. That order is not a preference, it is the only sequence that leaves you with something to sell. A public disclosure or an offer for sale starts a 12-month clock on your U.S. rights and forfeits your foreign rights outright, since Europe, China,...
Companies buy solved problems, not ideas. To sell one you need three things in hand before you make contact: a filed patent application, a one-page sell sheet with a working prototype photographed on it, and a landed cost estimate. Then you pick a route. Large...
Inventing is a process with five repeatable stages: find a problem worth solving, map the constraints the solution has to live inside, generate far more concepts than you need, kill most of them within an hour each, and reduce the survivor to a described and tested...
The first twelve months of an invention can be done for under $600, and a meaningful part of it for nothing. A micro entity provisional application costs $65 to $130 in government fees. Prior art searching on the public databases is free. Patent and Trademark Resource...
