By the time you have a few dozen customers, perhaps sooner, you will know what changes to your product you want to make. Some are improvements and some are optimizations from a manufacturing standpoint.
Here is a warning, though. Consider all the effort you put into making your first batch of product work. You also came up with a few workarounds to minor product issues that surfaced. Every time you make a product design change, no matter how minor, you risk breaking the product.
If the product works, if you know you can make a profit on it as it is designed currently, faults an’ all, consider remaking your higher cavity molds with no change to the product design. The cost of making the mold will be lower if you can say to your mold makers “make it exactly like the last one, except make it with 16 cavities”. The mold-maker knows exactly what the new pieces must be and there is no time wasted second-guessing changes to the design. And you know your product works; why mess with it.
- You will save time and money, and probably reduce risk, if you redo the molds for higher cavity counts without making any product design changes.
But, if you do need to make product design changes as well as remaking one or more of your molds, make sure you won’t have to do it a second time.
Make a list of improvements
Make a list of everything you would like to change and improve about your product. Group them by mold. Let us say your product had 10 molds in total. It may be that only one or two of them will need changes. In my case, of the six molds I got made, I will remake two of them with high cavity counts simply to reduce manufacturing costs. I might remake a third one, and the remaining three molds I will leave as is.
According to my good friend Gary Selke, to replace a low-cavity mold (2 cavities) with a high-cavity mold (12 or 16) roughly doubles the cost of the mold. (At least, that is a reasonable rule-of-thumb, but you need to verify cost estimates for the specifics of your mold needs.)
- A rule-of-thumb: A twelve-cavity mold will cost twice as much as a two-cavity mold of the same piece.
If you also add product design changes to the replacement mold, the cost increases.
Each one of your molds will either:
(a) need to be redone to fix product design issues,
(b) need to be redone to increase cavity count and reduce cost, or
(c) Not need to be redone at all.
I expect I will spend upwards of $50,000 on replacing several of my molds to reach the point of getting my first profitable product to market. Your mold costs might be a lot more or a lot less than mine, so your upfront costs might be significantly different.
End of chapter exercise
Q: How many molds have you created for your first iteration of your product? _______________
Q: How many of these molds must be redone because of product design problems you need to fix? __________
Q: How many molds would you remake because you need to increase the cavity count to reduce production costs? _________
Cost of this stage: $50,000. Costs so far: $127,000
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