in just a few minutes I'm going to work you through the road map to 5K months as a designer we will explore the different stages of bringing a product to life and how to choose the right prototype for production one year of experience packed into a single video not even a book sounds good right so grab your tea and let's get started the first step is choosing a product whether it's a lamp a stool A Wass or something else once you've made your choice the next step is to make sure it will actually before jumping
into production and how do we make sure of that we develop several different prototypes I'll dive into the details of developing prototypes in a moment but for now let's focus on choosing which one to produce this is the plan that I followed to make different lamp prototypes until one of them resonates with enough people that way I could be confident I would have enough orders when I launched it into production but unfortunately my second lamb prototype got good feedback it happened too early and I'm still inexperienced decided to go for it and launched it and
this is how a more optimized plan would look like minimum 10 prototypes of different products with all the media assets and stick to that plan until one of the next ones gains significant traction so even if the Seven's prototype is a heat you should still finish all 10 this way you'll gain valuable experience in video production marketing design editing and other stuff or you can also go back to sevens and update it now let's look at the stages of launching a [Music] product once you have decided on the product you want to launch the next
step is to assemble a mood board for inspiration I use a combination of pure and Pinterest We Gather a bunch of photos and then move on to modeling or sketching it's up to you this is one of those processes that you'll keep revisiting and adjusting on to the very end there are a lot of different 3D modeling programs I use Rhino 3D and blender when it comes to prototyping I believe 3D printing is the way to go creating a single prototype is fairly straightforward you don't worry about ease of assembly or packaging you just focus
on making it look stunning and functional but if you want to move beyond the Prototype stage you need to think about those aspects and more it's easy to have ideas it's very hard to turn an idea into a successful product when we reach the step it becomes a circle of these three processes to adapt Your Design to available materials and making sure the product is producible we wrap up this stage by calculating our profitability and deciding on a price simply put it's cost to make plus shipping plus your profit that will equal your price and
don't underestimate shipping find a reliable career as early as possible or you might end up losing money or facing delays if you're working with a low budget like I was you probably rely on free marketing strategies starting with YouTube but before diving into video production there are some preparations to make your website should be ready for lunch and you need to prepare some animations renders photos and Graphics of your product for both the website and the video let me share a quick story I had a successful YouTube video before this project so I thought I
had it all figured out I was counting on my YouTube viewers to make pre-orders for my lamp but after month of design development the new video flopped I only got one order I obviously didn't give up I tried Publications as my second free marketing Source I reached out to countless magazines and designers the response rate was only about 1% this publication Journey brought me a couple of hundred subscribers and two orders one of them is Michael from work clouder I'm super grateful to him for his advices at the very beginning when I had just 300
subscribers so we're at three of 100 sold during this time I kept polishing the design and started making reels about it I had made about 10 reels before but they each got under 500 views this time I posted a real every day and after 17 reals almost all of which had under 1K views the next one took off and then the one after that hit a million views and just like that in 2 weeks I got got 40 orders and more importantly Grew From 300 to 25k subscribers this marketing stage is counterintuitive you put in
so much work to develop prototype and manufacture the product hours of non-stop physical and mental effort but in the end that's the easiest part of the lounge the hardest part is selling there is no logic to it at the beginning you might post a super polished video like this one here is an exclusive look at our first lighting product rechargeable gramophone lab it's a perfect final life you can swap discs in under a minute to go from Modern minimalistic to contemporary retro style and it gets no views then you post the silliest Mar like this
one and it blows up that's what I mean by counterintuitive life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact and that is everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you true story this clip of jobs actually made me realize that I can make first battery of lamps myself and just imagine how scary it all looks when you have no clue how anything lamp related Works soldering Electronics aluminum bending and treatment packaging shipment Etc it made me realize that little by little you can actually
build anything I'll be making a separate video on the production process make sure to subscribe so you don't miss it I walk you through the main processes and show how most of the parts are handcrafted partly because of budget constraints let me know in the comments if you prefer narrated videos of this kind of content [Music] [Music] w [Music] oh [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] a [Music] [Music] [Music] St [Music] I can't skip over the GS they're so important to the process they make your life much easier just look at how many I've made for the
project not sure if we can call this one a jig I've made a separate video for version one it has broken already version 2 video is coming later next month and finally let's talk about packaging it's super vital to a product I think some of the orders I received were mostly due to the packaging packaging completes your product just like your reels or shorts we all love nice packaging it chose the care that went into the product so make sure your packaging is as attractive as a product [Music] [Music] there are two things left to
say in this video one I'm not going to produce any more of these lamps that's the one and only batch of 100 handcrafted gramophone lamps so get one for yourself before they gone to become a foundation of this company and two it's important to mention that I figured this all out on app fly and all these methods and plans is me reverse engineering my path and how I would approach my next project if my main goal was my money but maybe you like this wrong path more so you could as well just pick any of
the prototypes and squeeze yourself in the market that's what I had to do blinded by an early success of a video with a wider topic than just a lamp so maybe you should enjoy the process more than focusing on an idea it's the disease of thinking that a really great idea is 90% of the work and then if you just tell your all these other people you know here's this great idea then of course they can go off and make it happen and the problem with that is is that there's a just a tremendous amount
of craftsmanship in in between a great idea and a great product and every day you discover something new that is a new problem or a new opportunity to fit these things together a little differently and it's that process that is the magic
