Advice: Launching a New Gear Item for Sale

People have discussed new products on this site.  And people bought it, reviewed it,…

What are you making and how would one buy it?

If I was doing this I would first finish developing the product to a gen 1 state, test it as much as you can, and see if the product makes “you” happy. For me the will it break standard is important when I make something for my use. Only a few items am I willing to look at as disposable (polycro).

Anyway once your willing to put yourself out there people have presented products here, on you tube, and some of the social media sites. Who knows which they use first. Just make sure you have a functioning website if you do that.

Trying to think of an ultralight product that needs ground breaking. More efficient battery designs, stoves, wind shedding umbrella:), shoes that grip well while conforming to your feet and last a 1000 miles, ultralight non clogging filters that also remove viruses, 2 oz. sleeping bag liner that doesn’t self destruct…

I’ll stop there but I surprised myself how easy it was to think of things that need improving. So no cynicism implied. I wish you luck.

I’m kinda holding out for teleportation. That would lower the old base weight.

There is an old saying ” the best marketing research is releasing a product”.  If you release the product, you will get immediate feedback.  Take the best advice and roll the product quickly.  Assume that oit will take a year to fine tune and stabilize.  The first buyers will be early adopters knowing that it is a new product.  Good bold, iterate quickly.  My 2 cents.

I have also seen MYOG gear sold on r/ULgeartrade. People seem interested in new gear and haven’t seen any pushback as they are not promoting a business. So you could gage interest there as well but would need a finished product. Just not the expense of the website and licensing. Some of the same people use this site. I’ve bought off ETSY also.

Jon has a good point on quick release and sharing the testing. He is most likely right. Think of all the sub-optimal rain jackets that have been released. Just be prepared for both positive and negative feedback. It may be your baby but it’s a tool to the buyer. And one they hope will work them under adverse conditions.

If you launch the product and it is a huge sucess, you will be left with the nightmare of scaling up (labor), reducing manufacturing cost  and distribution.

If it is not successful, you have time to iterate, improve the product or kill the project before you have invested too much time an energy.

Needless to say, customers will drive your actions.  Best wishes.

Hi Brian!

I’m in a similar boat, and I definitely don’t qualify as a success story (I literally formed my LLC 2 days ago) but I agree with Jon. There is no better way to spread the word and develop a reliable/desirable piece of gear than to simply just start selling it.

Product Dev. Through User Experience:

I’ve been developing an ultralight sub 10 gram electric sleeping pad inflator for over a year now. Within the first 4 months of “development” (blind tinkering is probably the more appropriate adjective) I had something I felt was as good as I could get it without feedback. So I bought enough materials to make 20 units and posted them for sale on reddit’s r/ULgeartrade. They sold rather fast and everyone who purchased one took their time to reach out and give me feedback. Which made me realize I should probably do that again!

I took that feedback, implemented improvement changes for the next batch, doubled the batch size, and posted for sale again. Rinse and repeat a couple more times and now I’m on batch 6 and the 5th iteration of the design.

Generating Buzz:

I so far have not found the need to try and cultivate “buzz”. During that process of iterating and selling, interest in the device grew very fast and I did nothing to try to make that happen other than posting a batch for sale once a month on average. It’s gotten to the point where I’m sold out of a batch before I even finish it because of people reaching out in-between batches and asking to be notified when the next is ready. So if you have something truly novel, and it works, I think you’ll find you dont need to hype people up. Enough of the word gets around by itself in our tight community to keep you busy until you master your production/assembly process to handle larger volumes.

r/ULgeartrade Community are Beta Testers at Heart:

In addition, the community over at r/ULgeartrade is awesome! Pretty much every person who purchased one treated it like they were beta testing the device for me and no ever acted like a snobby customer expecting perfection. ( I worked at REI for 4 years and saw plenty of those ;) )

There were mistakes, and some people got unlucky in discovering those mistakes for me. When that happens, it’s important to express tremendous gratitude to them for finding the issue. I would also offer to refund them 20% more than what they paid for the unit, or to replace the unit with an updated version when they were available. No one ever took the refund option, everyone has wanted to continue along in process of development with me and that’s just amazing!

Doing it this way meant that with each batch the devices improved quite a bit and at a rate much faster than it would if I was developing it in solitude. After just 7 months, I think I finally have a design iteration that is very close to ready for the larger market and not just the UL gear connoisseurs of the nich r/ULgeartrade subreddit. I think there is no way the inflator would be as refined as it is now, or have the same amount of interest from the UL community without having done it this way.

Moving Forward:

This project has kept me very bussy, but it’s gotten to a state where I think it finally warrants its own website, and an LLC formation. I couldn’t imagine trying to jump straight to this step without going through the entire process I went through first. I made no money during that process, all revenue was channelled back into doubling the batch size, tooling, and making many many prototypes… but I did finally manage to make something pretty darn cool, and I’m excited to see where it goes next.

It’s also given me the courage to revisit the Joule Bandit, Joule Thief, and the unseen/unshared Joule Crook heat exchanger pots I’ve made in the past and start them down a very similar journey of development as the Pad-Pal sleeping pad inflator.