Read Online Invent It, Sell It, Bank It!: Make Your Million-Dollar Idea Into a Reality by Lori Greiner - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Lori Greiner
Ads: Link
stores for Christmas, I was going to have to get moving fast (little did I know that most buyers shore up their fourth-quarter orders, which include the holiday season, in April!).
When Dan walked through the door, I said, “Honey, I have a great idea!” He thought the organizer sounded interesting and told me to sketch it out. I pulled out a sheet of paper, a pencil, and a ruler, and started drawing. Once I had transposed the picture in my head onto the page, I started to think about the dimensions it would need to be. I thought about my space, and my mother’s, and the bathrooms, bedrooms, and closets of all the women I knew. I wanted to create an organizer that would hold three times as many earrings as the typical jewelry box, yet be compact enough that it wouldn’t sit like the Hulk on a woman’s vanity or bathroom counter.
My drawing skills are just okay. I tried to be as meticulous and neat as I could be, but my style is kind of sloppy, big, and wild—true to my artistic nature. When I draw on a pad of paper, my columns aren’t straight; I write on a diagonal. Dan, on the other hand, writes in neat, precise little lines. He is detail-oriented like an engineer. So once I got the basic design of the organizer down, I asked him to redraw it. He pulled out some graph paper anddrew the organizer according to my specifications. We talked and drew and erased and measured and drew some more until finally Dan handed me a perfect representation of the organizer I had envisioned in my head. It was beautiful. It held one hundred pairs of pierced or clip-on earrings on five sliding stands that allowed you to see all of the earrings at a quick glance.
Looking back, it’s incredible that Dan didn’t question whether this idea was really something I should pursue. He’s cautious—not at all the type to push the envelope. And yet, in this instance he was on board from the minute I told him about my idea.
If you’re artistically challenged, or your idea is complicated and you’re unable to make your own accurate design, and you don’t have someone like Dan to help you, you can hire a design engineer to draw it for you. Design engineers will work with you to draft a computer-aided design (CAD), which is essentially a 3-D blueprint that can be viewed and spun around on your pc, then manipulated, tested, and altered before being sent to a prototype maker or manufacturer. In an increasingly common process called CAD/CAM (computer-aided design/computer-aided manufacturing), the prototype maker’s or manufacturer’s computers send the CAD data to the machines to direct them how to make the product.
Commissioning a CAD can be a pricey option, though. If money is an issue, you might consider going to a local college or university and hiring an engineering student to design your CAD. One advantage to the CAD is that you can sit with designers while they’re working and see your virtual product take shape on the computer monitor. This gives you the ability to tweak things along the way before actually trying to build it. CADs are impressive in their quality and accuracy; the finisheddrawing makes it look like your product is going to jump off the page.
CREATING A MOCK-UP
Many times I’ve picked up a new product on the market and wondered if the person who designed it ever actually tried to use it. You can always tell the items that an individual or a company designed just to make a buck. A pancake batter dispenser that leaves all the blueberries crushed and smeared against the inside of the dispenser instead of leaving them plump and whole in the pancake on the griddle—that couldn’t have been designed by someone who loves blueberry pancakes, or who had even tested it (testing and retesting your product is really important). A lipstick holder too shallow to properly hold a lipstick couldn’t have been designed by a person who actually wears lipstick and who wanted to create a better way to store her makeup. You tend to
When Dan walked through the door, I said, “Honey, I have a great idea!” He thought the organizer sounded interesting and told me to sketch it out. I pulled out a sheet of paper, a pencil, and a ruler, and started drawing. Once I had transposed the picture in my head onto the page, I started to think about the dimensions it would need to be. I thought about my space, and my mother’s, and the bathrooms, bedrooms, and closets of all the women I knew. I wanted to create an organizer that would hold three times as many earrings as the typical jewelry box, yet be compact enough that it wouldn’t sit like the Hulk on a woman’s vanity or bathroom counter.
My drawing skills are just okay. I tried to be as meticulous and neat as I could be, but my style is kind of sloppy, big, and wild—true to my artistic nature. When I draw on a pad of paper, my columns aren’t straight; I write on a diagonal. Dan, on the other hand, writes in neat, precise little lines. He is detail-oriented like an engineer. So once I got the basic design of the organizer down, I asked him to redraw it. He pulled out some graph paper anddrew the organizer according to my specifications. We talked and drew and erased and measured and drew some more until finally Dan handed me a perfect representation of the organizer I had envisioned in my head. It was beautiful. It held one hundred pairs of pierced or clip-on earrings on five sliding stands that allowed you to see all of the earrings at a quick glance.
Looking back, it’s incredible that Dan didn’t question whether this idea was really something I should pursue. He’s cautious—not at all the type to push the envelope. And yet, in this instance he was on board from the minute I told him about my idea.
If you’re artistically challenged, or your idea is complicated and you’re unable to make your own accurate design, and you don’t have someone like Dan to help you, you can hire a design engineer to draw it for you. Design engineers will work with you to draft a computer-aided design (CAD), which is essentially a 3-D blueprint that can be viewed and spun around on your pc, then manipulated, tested, and altered before being sent to a prototype maker or manufacturer. In an increasingly common process called CAD/CAM (computer-aided design/computer-aided manufacturing), the prototype maker’s or manufacturer’s computers send the CAD data to the machines to direct them how to make the product.
Commissioning a CAD can be a pricey option, though. If money is an issue, you might consider going to a local college or university and hiring an engineering student to design your CAD. One advantage to the CAD is that you can sit with designers while they’re working and see your virtual product take shape on the computer monitor. This gives you the ability to tweak things along the way before actually trying to build it. CADs are impressive in their quality and accuracy; the finisheddrawing makes it look like your product is going to jump off the page.
CREATING A MOCK-UP
Many times I’ve picked up a new product on the market and wondered if the person who designed it ever actually tried to use it. You can always tell the items that an individual or a company designed just to make a buck. A pancake batter dispenser that leaves all the blueberries crushed and smeared against the inside of the dispenser instead of leaving them plump and whole in the pancake on the griddle—that couldn’t have been designed by someone who loves blueberry pancakes, or who had even tested it (testing and retesting your product is really important). A lipstick holder too shallow to properly hold a lipstick couldn’t have been designed by a person who actually wears lipstick and who wanted to create a better way to store her makeup. You tend to
Similar Books
