We sat down with Gareth Everard, an entrepreneur and a co-founder of Rockwell Razors, which has raised over $1,000,000 through crowdfunding campaigns to discuss the dangers of counterfeits while making crowdfunded products.
This is what we learned:
This is the golden age for entrepreneurs.
This is the golden age for entrepreneurs and aspiring founders trying to create products and consumer-goods companies.
Revolutionary new sourcing and manufacturing platforms, like Alibaba and ThomasNet, allow entrepreneurs to find worldwide manufacturers and suppliers for your idea.
Additionally, crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo allow developers to validate their products and collect pre-orders (or dead-easy Shopify if they want to go right to selling your product online).
Sites like Upwork even enable developers to find remote engineers to help design products for a fraction of what it would have costed 10 years ago. (Side note: Gareth still recommend working local 3D design agencies to develop physical products. He runs all his company’s design work through Think2Thing in Toronto; you’ll likely have a local equivalent).
Altogether, these tools are all an entrepreneur needs to bring a consumer product to market. Luckily, it is all easier to access than ever!
Ease of communication.
This ease of communication comes with a price though: the risk of getting knocked off. What used to only be a thorn in the side of luxury brands and iconic electronics companies is now a very real threat to any company making a visibly-popular product.
As soon as complete-product design files are shared - whether to a manufacturer in San Francisco, Shenzhen, Milan or Mumbai – it becomes simple to copy. This problem received significant attention recently when a CNBC article went viral profiling an “entrepreneur” who makes a living beating successful
Kickstarter campaigns to market. This individual was likely able to beat a recent campaign, the Fidget Cube, to market by partnering with one of the many manufacturer sales representatives that are thrilled to share (for a fee, of course) the ultimately-successful design files they have received while giving a quote to the original entrepreneur.
Of course, it’s logical to shop around to find the best-suited supplier and best price for a new product, but there’s a better way to do it than handing over the complete blueprint to product.
Simple solution.
Fortunately, there is a very simple solution to being knocked off: send a few select parts to a wide array of potential manufacturers for quoting (maybe 20-25% of your complete design), ensuring that this subset doesn’t allow for easy replication of the rest of the design (which should remain secret for now).
Only share the full design once you have received quotes, spoken extensively with, and preferably traveled to meet your manufacturer shortlist (this will always be worth the expenditure, if you can afford it).
Only once you’ve followed these steps, and selected your one preferred manufacturer, should you share the complete design file.
This is the strategy Gareth employed for his Rockwell Model T crowdfunding campaign, which allowed me to execute a global manufacturer search and make my final selection before even launching the campaign.
This strategy, combined with Rockwell Razors’ portfolio of international patents, has been instrumental in protecting his products from counterfeiting.
Of course, as soon even product pictures are available for an in-demand product, that product is at risk of being knocked off, but following the above steps will severely reduce your risk of falling prey to counterfeiting or being beaten to market.