Last Night I attended my first Inventors’ Association of New England meeting.  It was a great meeting and and interesting talk by Keith Bibby, “inventor for hire” and Professor at the University of Phoenix.  He talked about his experience innovating in the curtain rod industry and selling those products to / through Wal-Mart, QVC and Home Depot.  The buyer pitch was a main topic and the conclusion is that you have two minutes (max) to explain your product.  That isn’t a lot of time to sell your product that you have been working on for years, unless you compress it in an understandable format that buyers understand.  The suggested format was SWOT.  For more info on SWOT go to the Wikipedia Page.

The other major take away from the talk is it’s all about Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart sells approximately 14% of all retail and they are good to work with. They don’t ask for exclusive selling rights, they pass ‘earnings through savings’ back to you and are open to the smaller companies beating out the smaller ‘innovative’ companies.

As I look over my notes from the meeting, there were so many stories of successes and failures that it would take 10 pages to retell them so I will focus on just a few.

The PegBar was a cornerstone innovation in the talk.  It was a new product that was conceptualized (prototyped and then produced by) the shop foreman. Its creation led this company to expand their distribution network into QVC where Keith was doing pull ups on the bar at 2 in the morning.  Take aways: Moto: Buyer relationships are key, do what it takes for the customer.  The PegBar is currently being sold by McMaster-Carr, picture below from their website.

The second story that I would pass on is the Printed Curtain.  Keith had a curtain that had Blue cartoon character, (Blue the dog).  This product was well received by many stores like Bed Bath & Beyond and Wal-Mart but did not do well because of it’s price point.  During the development process, the inventor had agreed to exclusive domestic manufacturing and that forced the price of the curtain upto $12 while most other simple curtains are apx $3.  While the curtains did very well at clearance prices ($4) the consumers were too used to the existing price point to pay the high end price for kids curtains.