Selling Garden Products
An introduction to commercialising new garden product ideas.
This is it! The end of the product development process. It is time to sell your new garden products to retailers, distributors and or private customers. Selling your new garden products is still a step during which you have to take many things into consideration, such as packaging, distribution and marketing. But your initial idea has finally become a product.
There are several ways in which you might want to sell your brand new garden product. It is important to remember that before you start showing your product to any retailers or companies, you have to register it as your Intellectual Property (IP). This way you can avoid other people copying and profiting from your idea.
License your garden product
In order to profit from your garden product idea there are two main paths you will have to consider:
Licence your idea to a company
When you license your product to an external, already established company you sign a contract that allows them to use your IP. This way, the company is the one in charge of producing, distributing and selling the product. Because they’re benefiting from your idea, you receive a fee or royalty from the products they sell. In order to negotiate this kind of license, you have to own exclusive rights to the intellectual property you want to license (for your new garden product).
For you to be able to own this exclusive IP rights, you need to register the design of the product or be granted a trademark or patent. All of these are things our team at D2M are prepared to assist you with, during the development process.
Working with a company has many benefits. You can forget about producing and selling and simply reap the benefits. However, said benefits will be smaller than if you were doing the work yourself.
Setting up your own company
There are some benefits to selling new garden products by setting up your own company. The most obvious of them is that all benefits go entirely to you. On the other hand, it is more expensive and you will be responsible for producing, packaging, distributing and selling the product. It might be necessary for you to hire a small team that can help you through this.
If you choose to set up your own company you might need to get in touch with several retailers and convince them to buy your new garden products.
You can start doing this once you have a good enough production sample. A production sample is an example of the finished product that has been made at the production factory. (click here to know more about the manufacturing process and samples).
Production samples are more expensive than prototypes but a retailer will ask to see at least one before agreeing to sell your garden product. Only use a prototype if you can’t provide a production sample and make sure that the prototype is as close to the final result as it can be.
Before you contact any retailers, you must figure out how much you need to charge for your product, taking into account the costs of production, packaging, delivery and even stock storage. To all of this, you need to add a mark-up in order to make a profit. All of these aspects combined is what makes the final price at which you sell garden products.
You also need to take into account that, whatever the selling price is, will later be added the VAT and doubled. You shouldn’t expect to make a lot of money with your very first sale, but hopefully once you have made that first sale, other retailers will also become interested in selling your product.
It won’t matter how good your new garden product is if your pitch for it isn’t. You only get one chance to pitch your product to each retailer, so we recommend that you prepare thoroughly and, if you are inexperience, consider taking any of the available courses on pitching to retailers. Being prepared will boost your confidence in yourself and your product.
At D2M we have worked with several clients to help them develop their new garden product idea. We are a professional team with years of experience and can help you through each step of the development journey. Carry on reading about developing a new garden product.
Contact us today and let’s start talking about your great idea.
Let us help you bring your new product to market.
If you’re looking to develop a new product or re-design an existing range but lack the in-house capacity or expertise to make it a reality, get in touch with us today to discuss your requirements.
