How to Get Your Inventions Into Retail Stores

Things that you need to know before you start selling inventions to retail stores

Inventions to Retail – So let’s talk about how to get your product or invention past idea stage and into retail stores. There are a few ways to get your products in the stores if you are in the idea phase. You kind of have to choose what you want to do. Option number one is you decide to rent your idea to a manufacturer or someone who will make the product for you, create the product and will sell it. And then you get say a few percentage points of every unit sold. So you don’t get to keep the company. It’s not your company. It’s not your brand. It’s not anything. Someone else is going to develop that product for you. And every time they sell a unit, you get a certain percentage. Usually, you know, a very small percentage. 1 to 5 percent I would say typically for a product that you license. And that’s called licensing. 

What to do if you are low on funds

So the reason why you want to license your product is maybe you don’t have any money to build out a business or brand. You’re not a manufacturer. You don’t have the time to start a business or whatever. And so licensing or renting your idea to a company can be a great option. The problem with licensing is that manufacturers may not pick up your product for various reasons. And if you get a licensing deal, then you need a lawyer, you need to set stuff up appropriately. You need to make sure that you know, they are doing things reliably. And you have no control. A lot of the times what they do with the product is either change it or tweak it some way. Inventors really love their ideas. Start freaking out over the fact that they literally like created a worst product than they have imagined. And so you definitely want stipulations in there on the quality and all sorts of things. 

It’s a little tricky to sell inventions to stores

So the bottom line is that it can be tricky when you rent your idea to a third party. But that is one way to get the word out about your product. And it’s a licensing, basically renting the idea to a third party, you can handle that. Another way to do it is to build out your brand. And that actually means you selling your product to retailers yourself. And what that means is you will have to start your own company and take it seriously. And you can actually go and create your logo, find a manufacturer, invest some money or get some friends or people to help you invest, get some prototypes done, get some samples and so forth. And then approach retail as yourself or hire somebody to help you with that. It does require a little bit more effort. And some of you, your personality would be you would never rent your idea and that you actually want to start a company and that sounds perfect for you. 

Get training on selling to inventions to big chain retailers

The good news is that if you are an inventor and want to sell your inventions to retail you’ve decided to develop your product and do the work yourself, I have a training system that explains exactly how to do that. I’ve worked with a lot of inventors. So you are never stuck or alone. Someone can actually explain to you how to package your product, how to price your product, how to actually talk to a buyer if you don’t know how. All sorts of things. So there are resources out there available to you today if you want to develop your product and bring it to life. There’s no wrong way to get your products into the stores whether licensing or building out your product and getting it in your way. 

The trick here though is that you have to take action.

 For many years, I’ve been teaching tens of thousands of product companies across the globe on how to make money with their physical product. And for the last 10 years I’ve been teaching with this stuff. And for the first 5 years I’ve only been working with inventors and so forth. 

There is some finessing that you have to do when you want sell to inventions to retail stores

The hard part with inventors is that a lot don’t take action. They have ideas. They come up with brilliant stuff but the actual moving forward is very complicated for them. They need accountability or something. Something’s doing where they don’t take the action to get their products out to the world. And it’s very, very common in the inventor space which is why there are all these Inventor Help companies out in the world who are willing to take your money to go and try and pitch your product in your behalf and so forth which doesn’t always get you anywhere. It doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing. It’s just another way to go. But generally speaking, accountability and taking action is the number one thing I see why people and inventors, product companies are not getting past idea stage and into retail stores. 

If you’re going to come up with this idea, stick to it.

 Don’t quit. If you decide to start with licensing and you got rejected by everyone all across the board and you learn how to do it. And or you got someone to help you. Don’t quit. Just keep going until somebody says yes to you. Or switch it over to starting a company, building out yourself until that product gets out into the world. By the way, you can develop a product, start a company, build it out and eventually you can actually license that product to companies after. 

There is no one way to selling inventions

You don’t have to be just in the idea phase to get your product licensed. You can actually sell the product, get in on to retailers and then license it afterwards. People do that. You actually make way more money as a person who licensed his product. If you actually show proof of concept and you’re out in the world marketing your product and so forth, they actually give you more money for the licensing deal if you do it that way.