Ah Goo Baby Plush Pad - Branding a Business

Manufacturing Strategies in China - For the Small Business

2011-10-09T09:30:00.000-07:00

Generally, the stereotypes for manufacturing in China are not true. Yes, there are bad factories and good factories. Those that pollute and those that do not. Those that cut corners and use poor quality source materials and those that do not. Those that make the highest quality goods and those that make poor quality goods. I submit the same is true in the USA and other countries as well.

We see everyday trash on the side of our interstates. We hear stories on the news of con artists bilking investors out of millions. Corporations who try and skirt EPA laws. The list goes on. Branding identity and the quality of our products are what matters to most. As businesses, we must do our due diligence before making any major investment decision, and manufacturing partnerships definitely qualify as an important investment decision. We must decide between pricing and quality and find a combination of both that meets our customer's demands.

Getting away from the geo-political elements that go into manufacturing in the USA vs. abroad, this article focuses instead on the presumption that a business has decided to manufacture in China. I will leave it to others to debate the pros and cons of this, but instead concentrate on how to best set up a strategy of manufacturing to a) keep product costs down, b) address scaling needs, c) increase shipping opportunities for international distribution.

Prototyping - Generally, it is expensive and time consuming to create concept pieces in China with shipping time and expense back and forth as well as limited communication due to language barriers. It is therefore advisable to use a local seamstress or one of the variety of prototyping companies (depending on the complexity of the product) to develop a handful of finished pieces from which you can with 95% or better accuracy, give your overseas sourcing agent a physical sample of what you need duplicated. I try and get away from sterotyping, but generally, China factories are very good at replication but not overly good at taking a concept to production sample. The more you can show them the better your results, pricing and speed to market will be in your overseas manufacturing efforts when starting any new product. This article presumes that you have at least 5-10 production samples in hand from these prototyping efforts.

Pre-sourcing Materials - before sourcing invest in a decent digital camera to take detail photos of your product along with any close-up images of detail work required. Also if possible, put together an RFP (request for proposal) document going through all of the specific fabrics and labor from start to finish, including packaging assembly, quality control, types of shipping cartons (wall thickness/logo printing, etc.), minimum order quantity per production (MOQ) and what port you will need it shipped (FOB). Have the factory source as many of the materials as you can for the first production, but MANDATE that they ITEMIZE each fabric / material / labor portions. If your product has special sizing requirements, be sure to include +/- tolerance that is required to accept delivery and/or expect crediting beyond. Further in the article I will show you how to further reduce your costs by separately sourcing your own materials. You will also want to source locally whatever fabrics/materials the factory will need to make a countersample.

Sourcing Factories - This article is based on my experience on the textile side of manufacturing both fabrics as well as cut/sew/assembly factories. Although it also applies to other industries, please remember the perspective this article is coming from. Please see other of my blogs about the details of sourcing. Generally, you will be best served finding a good trading company agent who will get their commissions from the final factory but will be able to help you navigate the maze of options to find your initial factory at a reasonable starting price.

I would engage at least 15 different trading companies - alibaba.com is a good source for finding these. Simply search for products similar to what you are looking to make and next to each search result - if relevant - look to confirm they are a trading company and then contact them. Of the 15, you will likely get back 10 responses that are an indication of how well they can communicate in English. This is a good weeding out method (unless you speak Chinese) as communication via e-mail is the primary way you will be working with your new partner.

Take the 10 best respondents and e-mail them your above-referenced RFP. They will all say they will need a sample to give you a specific price, but you can say back that the detailed photos and documentation should be sufficient to get an estimated price. Like with any other bidding process, you probably don't want the lowest price or the highest price, but a lot has to do with the professionalism in their reply at this point. Pick your top 5 respondents and arrange to send each of them a sample along with enough materials to make 2-3 countersamples. Generally, it is standard to have them make the countersamples for free but you will supply your shipper number (fedex, ups, dhl, etc.) and pay for shipping back and forth. It is ok to see if they will pay to ship them to you, but do not dwell on this. I would steer away from any factory requiring you to pay a sample fee, unless it is a very complex sample that requires making a mould (products with plastics, etc.) If you do have to pay a sample fee, it is customary to get them to apply the sample fee against a future order. Generally estimate about a 3 month process to get this far. Yes it is a long time, but you be surprised how long it takes to do this. I'm also anticipating that this is your first time sourcing overseas, so everything will be new to you so you will want some buffer to take that into account.

Generally, the 5 respondents with countersamples should give you a final price with the MOQ you required ahead of sending you the countersamples. If any of these are far off from the original estimate price, it is a good indicator to drop them off the list. Presuming they are all close to the estimated price, you really should only be worrying now about comparing quality of one countersample to the other along with the communication quality which is your service expectation.

This is where strategy comes in.

You will likely select one factory to make your goods. TRY AND GET THEM TO COMMIT TO A PRICE TERM GUARANTEE as a condition to proceeding. Your first production run will ideally have all materials sourced by the factory and everything shipped to the US (or whatever your destination country is). If you do not have your own import and export agents for ocean shipping, you will probably be best served having them manage the shipping for you. You can either negotiate a CIF rate (where they deliver to your destination port) or FOB and then separately pay the shipper that they use to manage your initial run.

You will want the initial order to be the smallest MOQ. If possible try to negotiate an even smaller than the MOQ test run, as you will likely get a different quality in piece #843 than you did from the countersample which was perfect. Generally payment terms are 30% start of production, and 70% upon completion. Prior to paying the 70%, you can have either a few units or a carton of units air shipped to you (at your cost to ship) so that you can test the quality. When the shipment is complete, get a consumption report from them regarding the meters per unit per fabric to make your product, along with the roll widths per fabric (as a different roll width will change the meter/fabric figure.

Once you receive your shipment, it is a good idea to break it down and spot check the units (correct assembling, sewing lines look good, labels all in the right place, etc.). If everything looks good, you start increasing your orders.

Stage 2 strategy - you will VERY QUICKLY want to get more than 1 factory online as the Chinese are known to be very crafty in pushing for higher pricing, regardless of the price guarantee. Inflation is crazy there now and with the dollar/yuan price changing by the day, pricing will always be your unknown moving forward - yet your customers will expect pricing to be consistent.

What I like to do is to immediately find a second and third factory that is competitively priced
to split my orders between them. Let each know that you have other factories that make your product as they do and so long as they all remain competitive with one another, you will split your orders between them. If pricing or quality drops significantly, you will split orders with the other two factories while you find a replacement for them. This would not be a threat but a mantra for you to actually follow. It is not unfair, but good business.

Stage 3 strategy - This step would only occur when you start working with international distributors and have order sizes large enough to warrant your efforts to further tweak out your pre-unit costs. You can save a lot of money here, but it requires much larger investment costs and overseas logistics.

You will know the itemized costs for each of your materials, so the factory should be fine with you sourcing the materials yourself to further reduce the costs. Unfortunately, all fabric and materials come with different MOQ themselves - fabrics should be 1,000 meter minimums + mould costs per color if printed fabrics. Also make sure that you are getting roll width and quality specification consistently with each quote as a shorter roll width is an easy way to quote you a lower price. You should already know the specifications from your prototyping company but you can also get them from your cut/sew factory who presumably has already sourced them for the initial order.

Go through the same sourcing techniques as you did with the cut/sew assembly for each of the materials. It usually takes about 4 weeks from start to finish once you have gotten to the point to wire them start of production funds. You ALWAYS want to spend the additional cost of having them ship you a 1 meter full roll width sample to confirm the roll width size is correct. They may look to cut corners by lowering the quality, or there are errors in the pattern printing, etc. Your best leverage is prior to paying the 70%.

You will need a place to ship them. As you will have left over fabric for any production run, you don't want to ship to your cut/sew factory more than you require to do any production run.

Option 1 - negotiate deals with each factory you source materials to keep remainders at their location to ship as needed to each factory. That way there is not left over at your cut/sew factory for them to use as leverage for future orders (not that they would hold it from you, but they would know it would cost you to get it shipped somewhere else which they can factor into a price increase later on). Also, you do not want one factory sending materials to another factory making the same product as they could conspire to set prices with each other. Better to have a more neutral 3rd party keep the remaining materials. Your consumption reports from the cut/sew factory would be used to determine exactly how much of each material should be sent to the cut/sew factory order to order. The problem with this option is that you will likely have more than one material to make the product and multiple locations with different remainders of inventory. Depending on your US general liability insurance, it is unlikely that you will be able to get this inventory insured so it is at risk. That said, you can usually get each factory to do this at no additional cost to you other than shipping (which you can have them do or have the factory do as a pick up).

Option 2 - This is a better overall option, but it comes at a price. It is also the only recommended option if you are looking to provide FOB China shipping services to international distributors. Presuming you ship bulk to international distributors, if you do this from the USA, you are paying to ship the goods twice, including the costly expense of customs entry into the US and an expensive US warehousing/fulfillment rate.

Find a warehousing and fulfillment company in China - ideally based out of Shanghai which is the least costly, fastest, and most commonly used China port to 3rd party countries. They will likely also provide shipping services that will likely be less than your factory's shipper, so get quotes for this as well as your primary destination countries where you distribute (LCL - less than container load minimum at 1 CBM - cubic meter). You will also want price per month per pallet along with pick-pack rates (will be different depending on how custom you ship international). Generally, I require my international FOB distributors to take by outer container which limits my inventory tracking and fulfillment costs. This warehouse will take possession of your raw materials, will ship those materials to each factory and will receive (warehouse and fulfill) any finished inventory to international distributors, not otherwise bound for your US home destination.

Make sure you are specific on all fees so that you can incorporate them into your international FOB pricing to distributors. Also get at least a 1 year price guarantee (ideally a 2 year) which you should be able to do.

You should find a significant price savings doing it this way than doing it from the USA which will make your goods more cost effective to distribute abroad. If you select a warehousing company that also has offices based in the USA, it may be possible to insure those goods against loss (fire, theft, etc.). Depending on your comfort zone, it may be more cost effective once this is up and running to keep most of your inventory in China and then ship them to the USA in 3-4 month inventory requirements.

For us, we keep just enough for international needs and spot orders to the US (in case we move more of one product than anticipated) with the rest going to the US. I used to place orders and shipments once per quarter, but given the price instability in both labor, commodities (cotton, etc.), and shipping (price of oil), we are now producing 10 months year worth of inventory per production run and split those between 2 factories with a 3rd and 4th factory vetted, sourced and ready to take the place of one of the main factories if I have any problems. I keep only the amount needed for international orders in China as the shipping savings going FCL (full container load) offsets my higher costs of inventory warehousing in the US and it is less expensive to insure it when it is in the US.

Stage 4 strategy - You should be doing the same thing with the warehouse solution in China that you did with all other sourcing protocols, by finding a 2nd and 3rd go-to location in the event that your warehouse starts raising prices or quality changes. That way you can immediately ship the goods from one port address to another. If you are required to ever do this, make sure you negotiate into the new deal that the new warehouse pay the costs to move the inventory to their warehouse. It is close for them and they should want your business enough to agree to this.

Stage 5 strategy - Find your own export and import agent. Start looking and get detailed quotes for both the export out of china side and the import side to your destination address. It is almost always most cost effective to have a separate export agent from the import agent and they will work together to hand the goods off once they reach port. That is why you want a detailed quote, as you will do the same thing you did with your raw materials for your shipping. Shipping is usually a large percentage of your cost of goods sold, so you should find significant savings doing this, but it does increase your logistics oversight and the number of wires required to get the goods to your destination address. You may want to look into finding a wire-friendly bank for international business - I like HSBC. They have a low cost, 0$ balance account with 5 free wires in and out a month. As with the other sourcing requirements, check your prices each time you ship and always look for new shippers. At a minimum you can use these quotes as a means to lower your current shippers fees, and at a maximum it provides you with an alternative to use in the event you have to.

Stage 6 strategy - relocate your US fulfillment to Long Beach California area. As with Shanghai, Long Beach / Los Angeles is one of the most frequented destinations in the US - especially from Shanghai. The combination is the most cost effective and fastest shipping route - usually 10 days including customs for FOB and 3 weeks including customs for LCL. Note that customs has been increasing the number of "random" container scans which gives you a surcharge + a delay of 2-3 days. I would take that into account when estimating the delivery time line just in case. But I digress. Most other destination in the US from China will still land in LA and then either train or truck (depending on the distance and location) to the final destination. This cost can be as much as double the cost of ocean shipping the goods. You can almost offset the entire warehousing and fulfillment cost from the US by simply filling doing away with the second leg of the rail/trucking cost. Also, labor in the LA area is relatively low so I have also found savings in just the warehousing fulfillment portion alone.

So that was pretty exhaustive but theraputic for me to get off my chest. Hope it can help some people out there looking to make the leap or to make their current efforts more cost effective.

Social Networking Must-haves

2011-04-06T08:27:00.000-07:00

Social network is a great way to market your site and company for free.

Here are some must-have products to help you do that (also free):

Facebook.com - start a fan page for your company and each of your products.

Twitter.com - start a page for your company and each of your products.

Hootsuite.com - allows you to view facebook and twitter sites as well as competitor sites to help narrow who is saying stuff about you or your competitors products.

Klout.com - see what your klout score is. Generally you need a score of over 100 to hit the radar of most prominent "retweeters".

Bitly.com - register for an account here and use bitly urls instead of full urls that you can generate from within your bitly account to post on Twitter. Then by typing your bitly link followed by the "+" sign, you can see how many people have clicked on your link. You can reuse the links too, plus it lokos a lot neather and saves more space for content on your tweets.

Social Twist - go to http://tellafriend.socialtwist.com to get a downloadable icon allowing your website viewers a one-stop icon where they can repost to just about every social media site available.

Quickbooks Tweaks for Manufacturers

2011-03-16T19:21:00.000-07:00

When using Quickbooks Premier for a manufacturing business there are a few tweaks that need to be considered. First, this presumes you are using Quickbooks Premier - Manufacturing and Wholesale Edition.

Situation 1: You have raw materials that make up a finished product and use a 3rd party factory for inventorying the raw materials, assembling the raw materials into your product, and then packaging it for retail.

For example, let's say your product is made up of Part A, Part B and Part C + labor + Part D (retail packaging). For simplicity you need 1 unit of each to make one salable product, and your factory has a MOQ of 1000 unit minimum and each raw material factory has an MOQ of 2,000 units.

A. Step 1 - Each raw material is an inventory part. Set each one up separately. I usually put the cost to cost of goods sold and the income to sales. Be sure to include your full cost of goods sold in the cost item as it will be important for tax purposes and your accountant. You will send a PO to each factory that makes each raw material. Upon delivery, you will receive inventory with a bill and click the relevant PO. Pay the bill with a check and your inventory will now populate in the Items section. Do the same for each item, including an inventory part for whatever labor rate (I usually call it "Labor[and the product name]" so it's easy to recognize) you have per unit for the factory you will use to assemble your product. Based on the above example, you would do a PO for 2,000 units for factory A, B, C and D and then a PO for your labor factory at 1,000 units of Labor[product name]. Each bill is received and paid and now in your items list with applicable inventory units.

B. Step 2 - Building inventory. Now create an inventory ASSEMBLY item. I usually call the item the same as my product sku for simplicity. It will also help if you migrate to an intranet ordering system where the orders by sku can easily map to your inventory items in quickbooks - (see more on this from my other blogs on backend web-based wholesale intranets). Put in your actual COST (as full cost of goods sold) including all raw material costs and labor costs - this is important as it may change from shipment to shipment taking other costs into account such as ocean shipping etc. Then put in expense as cost of goods sold and I usually put Sales as income account. List each inventory part as an item for the inventory assembly to make your product. So it would include Part A, B, C, D and the Labor item with the number of respective units (or yards, or meters, etc. - whatever unit of measure you use for your parts) to make 1 unit. Based on your inventory on hand it will let you know how many units you can make of that final product. here you should have 1,000 units as you have 2,000 of everything except the labor. When you build 1,000 units, 1000 units will show in that inventory part for the assembly item and Parts A-D will now show only 1,000 units left (since you used 1,000 of the 2,000 originally purchased in the assembly.

SITUATION 2: You warehouse the same product but in different locations (internationally or otherwise). Here you would need to build an inventory assembly item for each warehouse you have product in. I generally use the same sku code with -[CITY] to distinguish between them. If you are MOVING inventory from one warehouse to the other, you would go to the Adjust Inventory Quantities section and then deduct out inventory of the one warehouses sku and add in that quantity into the other warehouse's sku.

SITUATION 3: You manufacture a slightly different version of the same product. An extreme example of this would be Factory 1 makes Product A for high end stores, but factory 2 makes the same Product A in a slightly cheaper version for value stores. Another example would be that you have Product A in 2 different types of packaging. You will need to track inventory separately for ordering and reordering purposes and your warehouse will need to separately maintain that as a different sku. To do this you would need to build a separate inventory assembly for this item. I like to do this with the same sku but with a -B or a -V2 or something like that so that they are similar but still distinguishable. This has no bearing on the software or tracking - it is just easier for you to manage manually.

SITUATION 4: Your shipping vendor is different from your packaging factory. This may or may not include sending multiple products from multiple factories to a consolidated shipping company to ship everything in one container for more efficient shipping costs. Your COGS still must contain shipping with them, so for the inventory build you need to include the pro-rated shipping COST (normally you get a quote prior to shipping and you build after receiving the inventory) for each product into the cost of the inventory assembly prior to building it.

Low Priced Corporate Videos, High Priced Look

2010-11-29T10:28:00.000-08:00

One of the best ways to generate free marketing potential for your business is to take advantage of video on the internet.

Previous blogs discussed the necessity of high-end photography to use as a means to display your product on your website and others as well as print advertising, tradeshow displays, and for press kits, video is an ever-expanding medium that shouldn't be overlooked.

We have found it useful to have a nice 30 second, 1 minute, and 5 minute piece on each product as well as our company for different purposes from time to time, and include these on our marketing kits that are available for download on our site for press, bloggers, and retail partners who have websites of their own (or may look to do local traditional advertising). An example of what we do, can be found on our site by clicking here.

Creating a video can be daunting if you haven't done this before, and budgets aside, there are plenty of expenses you can rack up if you aren't a do-it-yourself kind of person. Presuming you are like me and want things to look high-end, but don't want to budget the multi-thousand dollars to do a custom video, a lot can be done in the form of a photo montage with a trailer clip that you shoot from a standard video camera.

We already discussed the importance of photography, so this article presumes you have that in place already sitting on one of your computer drives. I use a really great service called Animoto that is basically a Hollywood video editor in a box for dummies. With a simple interface, you upload your videos in the order you want them, and add a music file that they have pre-cleared songs on their site available (or you can upload your own - there are no copyright restrictions limiting your use on the site, but you can still get yourself in trouble if you don't have rights to use a song you upload). When you click the process button it automatically does all of this fantastic yet high-end jazz to your photo montage to perfectly meet the beat of the song and end it at the right place. They also have video options to add up to 10 seconds of video to your montage.

Although regular accounts are free, they are very limiting and for a corporate video you will want to upgrade to the professional option at $40 / month. I basically get all of my video needs together at once along with the song I want to use and then sign up for 1 month and burn them all out at once. This gives you high def downloads, no Animoto watermarks, and a link to your site at the end that will still work in youtube.

As a bonus, the month is unlimited videos so I do a few videos of each of my girls with their best friends as xmas gifts for them and a separate one to the grandparents and close friends as an e-holiday card on steroids.

The formula I like to use is text cards to intro each relevant photo, a promotional video of the product somewhere in the middle (I used our NBC Today Show clip), followed by some more photos telling the rest of the story. Here is an example of one.

I also use this for corporate training videos at bigger box retailers like Babies R Us when helping introduce our product to each of their stores. It's nice to personalize a few slides specific to them (like showing it properly displayed at one of their stores) and a personalized thank you slide. We also add a separate full size video clip from our President and Founder as a personalized touch thanking everyone in the end. You get my point though as to the possibilities for you.

If you are filming video yourself, any video camera will work, but I recommend one that shoots in high definition. The most important thing is a tripod so that you can get the right angle and that there is no shaking on the camera. Test out your shots in different rooms at different times of the day to get the best lighting.

Good luck!

I like the formula

Manufacturing in China

2010-01-29T07:58:00.000-08:00

Manufacturing in China is always a unique undertaking. For textile products, the quality can be very high, and costs of about 1/4 of that in the US (including shipping and duty). The biggest obstacles are a) language/communication, b) sourcing quality vs. cost to the right factory, c) financial trust, d) logistics. I will talk about each below.

Language / Communication: Everyone speaks Chinese, and the time difference is significant, so generally the best way of communicating is through e-mail. Generally, due to this, it is easiest to fully prototype EXACTLY what you are looking to be made so that it can be sent for replication. The less communication needed to allow your Chinese counterpart to understand what you want the less delay and cost for you to have a product ready for production. Time is money.
Sourcing quality vs. cost to find the right factory: There are thousands of factories all of different qualities and costs. Finding the right one can literally be an impossible task without the help of an agent. Finding an agent is equally as difficult since there are thousands of them vying for your business. Generally working with 3rd party sources such as www.madeinchina.com or www.alibaba.com are good ways of finding agents. Usually they will be the ones that are representing the factory with certain specific types of materials (like foam or cotton or elastic). Simply contact them through these sources and ask if they are an agent or the factory as you have other materials you need to source as well. If they are willing to help you source other materials, they will be an agent, as the factories are very specific and usually only product one type of product. You will get a good idea of the quality of the agent based on the promptness of their e-mail replies, comparative quotes to what other agents you have found are giving you, and the quality of their ability to write in english. I recommend asking them for any US references that he/she has worked with in the past and contacting them. It is a great way of getting a bit more comfort in trusting this person with your mone (which I will get to shortly). Your sourcing agents will be vital in your success manufacturing in China.
Which Factory to select: Once you have an agent you think you can trust, you need to get the names of the factories from him that he is sourcing for you. A good resource to vet these factories is www.panjiva.com which is a free way to see what the volume of product they have been shipping to the US and on behalf of what companies. A factory with small volume could be a major danger flag, as they too will need to be trusted with your money.
How to start with any factory: Most Chinese factories will require payment in RMB, which means you will need to either set up a bank account in China (more on this later), or use your agent to wire funds in USD for him to then convert to RMB and pay the factory on your behalf. Time and costs of setting up a China bank account is large, so most will need to start by paying through your sourcing agent. This will take a leap of faith, as it will be nearly impossible for you to reclaim your money if they simply receive your wire and never contact you back again. A legitimate agent that you have researched and vetted will recognize the future business and referral potential and ultimately will result in an acceptable mid-term solution. That said, it is always advisable to start small. Have your agent negotiate the minimum down, the price down, and provide payment terms (at a minimum, 30% advance upon PO and 70% prior to ship after inspection. You should never have to pay your agent, as they get their commission from the factory, but recognize that this could be a conflict of interest, so always have multiple agents aware that they are competing for the business. Prior to production, get a countersample and have it shipped to you and the agent to compare against the product when it is ready to ship, when you should get a second countersample to check for mistakes. Sometimes you will have mistakes, and these will be material evidence in negotiating a solution. Ease into larger orders once you have confidence that your product is quality, that costs are consistent and reliable, and that your agent can be trusted as a way of reducing your risk.
Logistics: you will need a freight forwarder that is large enough to receive goods in the nearest port to your factory and take them in the nearest port to where your company warehouses the goods. You can either pick the goods up once they clear US customs or have your freight forwarder arrange for a courier service to delivery them locally to your warehouse. Generally, when starting from scratch (i.e. you need to find an agent), and presuming you do not have a difficult product to source (i.e. it is of a standard material like cotton, and does not require special talents to cut and sew) budget a year - yes you heard me - to get to the point where you have your first test shipment of product. 3 month to find an agent, 3 months to vet the factory and receive countersamples, 1 month to negotiate, 1 month in wire delays to go from you to the agent to the factory, 2 months to manufacture, 2 months to receive goods. From there budget 6 months from one order to the next, as you will have each factory you work with re-negotiating rates, and at some point you will need to plan on having an option to leave one factory for another to keep your existing factory honest. There are a lot of holidays, and production delays are frequent (especially toward Jan/Feb during the Chinese New Year when everything stops), so 6 months is a very realistic and wise presumption to prevent having inventory problems. I generally recommend keeping 3 months of raw materials inventory stocked in China (you can usually negotiate this with the factory where you do the cutting and sewing/assembly), 3 months of finished salable inventory warehoused in China (also usually you can negotiate this with your cutting/sewing factory), and 3 months of inventory in the US. Presuming you do international distribution via distributors, you can also negotiate with your cut/sew factory to fulfill large distributor carton shipments drop shipped directly to your distributor through your finished product inventory. This way you have enough inventory available to take into account what will inevitably be the 6 months of re-negotiation haggling with your raw materials factories (which your agent will do on your behalf). Their knowing you have the time to negotiate is the best leverage you have and don't be afraid to pull your business and give it to another factory, as logistics for continued supply for your customers is an ongoing concern.

When you grow to the size where it starts becoming uncomfortable transferring large amounts to your agent, you need to think about setting up a China bank account. This is unfortunately not an easy task or an inexpensive one. Plan on it costing approximately $10,000 to set up a company, file paperwork and establish an account. From there you will also need to enlist someone to file annual returns (although there will not be a tax event in China if all you are doing is transferring money from a US account to your China account for the SOLE purpose of paying China-based vendors. All income should be posted to your US account if you want to steer aware from greater complexities and costs of that China entity. More specific information about this is as follows:

1) In order for you to open an bank account in China, you are required to establish a legal presence. This can be accomplished through the creation of (i) a representative office, (ii) a joint venture or (iii) a wholly foreign owned entity (i.e. a subsidiary). Of these options, the least expensive and least burdensome is the establishment of a representative office.

2) In order to establish a representative office, you will first need to have a lease for office space (which you could arrange through your local manufacturer if it owns the facility) and to appoint a legal representative (no employees required and the legal rep. need not be a Chinese national) before filing for clearance on your business name and registration. The approximate cost to register a representative office (including government filing fees, filing agent fees, attorney fees and preparing corporate consents and resolutions, is approximately $6,000 to $8,500, and takes approximately one month to complete from the date of the filing of your application for registration. There are some post-registration requirements which you can accomplish on your own, or through local counsel or a filing agent at an additional cost of approximately $500. You will then be able to open a bank account. In this regard banks generally require that you produce your business license, a certification from your legal representative and certain seals from the local business). The banks generally charge a fee to open the account and an annual maintenance fee.

3) A representative office will be required to file annual returns. However, you are not taxed for simply wiring money into the country.

Generally, I like HSBC Bank as they have a low cost wiring account in the US for receiving and sending wires, have a very good presence in China, as well as throughout the world, so it is a great bank for your business to grow globally with. US support is limited, but once set up everything can easily be done online, so for me it isn't an issue at all.

You will probably need an attorney to get your corporate structure in place in China and to help you set everything up. Although I haven't used them and cannot specifically recommend them, the firm, Graham Curtin in Morristown, NJ did come to me through my HSBC banker and have been very prompt and helpful in my initial efforts of setting up my China bank account. Simply do a Google search for them to contact them.

Hoping this helps everyone better understand their options in manufacturing in China.

Quickbooks for the Small Manufacturer

2009-09-09T06:47:00.000-07:00

Quickbooks is a great piece of accounting software for the small manufacturer who has limited accounting knowledge. Setting up the software to work with your business is the only technical knowledge that requires a little bit of accounting and some degree of difficulty understanding how the back-end of quickbooks works. If you are not generally computer savvy, I HIGHLY recommend hiring a consultant BEFORE YOU START SELLING to manage your books and inventory so that you do not pay forward a much more expensive and time consuming problem with your accountant at the end of the first year.

This article presumes that you are a manufacturer of products, some with different styles (i.e. for us it was Plush Pads of different pattern designs. We later further complicated matters by changing our packaging such that we had 2 types of packaging options (one for mass retailers and one for boutique retailers) as well as inventory in two warehouses (one overseas and one in the US). Further, we sourced our materials that make up our product and outsourced manufacturing, so we generally over order materials to get price breaks and need to reorder from time to time when our materials run low. There are a number of materials that are needed to make up one unit of our product so tracking all of this was necessary both to understand what assets we currently had to account for their value, as well as to understand what we had on hand to know when we were running low. Quickbooks has some great features that manage all of these needs, but they are a little difficult to understand and need to be somewhat tailored in a custom way for this, as they weren't originally intended (or listed in the menu systems / help manuals) for these purposes.

Inventory Parts - Let's start off with simple inventories - each product is an item, but since our product is made of different materials, each of those are an item as well, so it's important to start off at the most basic level of material (item) that you purchase. For us it was the cotton, elastic, memory foam, etc. each being a separate item as the base level of items that make up our ultimate Plush Pad product. These base items that make up a finished product are called in quickbooks "inventory parts". So you would go into the items section and create a new item for each of them as their own separate "inventory part". You should know how much it costs (either per unit or per yard, per meter, etc. - you can even create custom "units" to describe your unit of ordering) and there is a provision here to list that. For example, our cotton material is purchased per yard, so we place the cost and list the "yard" selection as the unit of measure. We also have "labor" as a cost of our goods sold, so we "tricked" quickbooks into including this as an inventory part and listed the labor cost we pay to our cut and sew factory per unit as it's own item.

Inventory Assembly - your finished product (for us the Plush Pad) incorporates a number of different materials + the labor "inventory part" all together (be sure to include packaging, UPC labels, etc. and assembly costs as additional inventory parts that make up this inventory assembly if these are a part of your finished salable good. Basically every cost to make up what a customer ultimately buys from you.

Managing different styles and /or different warehouses - For us, we have 13 different styles of the Plush Pad - all of them made with the same materials with the exception of the cotton that comes in different patterns that make up different styles of our product available to our customers. Further we have different packaging - for us we had packaging in tubes and in boxes. Lastly, we had both located in 2 different locations (one overseas and one in the US). Ultimately, to track each separately, we had to create slightly different inventory assemblies (i.e. product item names) for each scenario. For us, we coded our sku names to provide consistency for this - for example, Plush Pads in Tubes in the US that were in the Blueberry style were given the sku: PPTUS-Blueberry-10. PP =Plush Pad, T= tube, US=USA, Blueberry=style, and 10 = when the style was first made available. A separate inventory assembly for our Poppy style would be PPTUS-Poppy-10, and the assembly would contain all of the same inventory parts except the Poppy Cotton which would replace the Blueberry cotton. Quickbooks easily allows you to create a duplicate item so that you can copy all of another inventory item to a new one without entering everything in again. It makes it much easier to create new styles, warehouses, etc. by doing this. PPTOS-Poppy-10 would be Plush Pads in Tubes in our Overseas warehouse of Poppy style.

Build assemblies - you would create purchase orders to list the materials that you were ordering and then receive inventory to then have the inventory show up when you see your inventory part items in the items screen. Once you have sufficient materials to make your finished product, go into the "build assembly" screen in quickbooks and select the assembly item - in our example, PPTUS-Poppy-10 to build the number of items ordered in your PO. You do this for every product sku that you have, and as you create new invoices you select those item numbers and each time it takes the number of units from that invoice out of your product item inventory in the items page. Quickbooks also allows you to list an alarm when your inventories drop beneath a certain number.

Moving inventory from one warehouse to another - the cool thing by doing it this way is that you can "move" inventory that may be in one location to another location by simply changing your inventory item assembly to build from another inventory assembly. Using our example, if you wanted to move 10,000 units from our overseas warehouse to our US warehouse, you would edit the PPTUS-Poppy10 item (US inventory) to be made up of the PPTOS-Poppy-10 (overseas inventory). Be SURE to look at the average cost of the items you are taking from (here the overseas inventory) and hard code the item cost in the respective window in that item before building it, as you want to make sure that this average cost (which can change from order to order) is accurate when building it into your other warehouse item. Then simply build 10,000 the PPTUS-Poppy-10 item from the PPTOS-Poppy-10 item. You will see it takes the number away from the one inventory and adds it to the other inventory, and will average cost the new cost per unit with the cost per unit of the new inventory you just moved into there.

You can customize this to suit your needs, whether it be one retail store to another, etc. It all works based on the same underlying way of maintaining items.

Good Luck!!

How to Land Large Accounts

2009-09-03T15:28:00.000-07:00

Here are a few bullets to keep in mind when looking to go after bigger business:

1. Don't lose touch with your core competency - diversify yourself by holding on to your smaller business. You don't want to put all of your eggs into one or two large customers to have one of them fall off and jeopardize your company's continued existence. Make sure you can lose any one account and still have a plan to move to.

2. Get the top name of the company you're going after - Find out everything you can about what they do and what they need so that you can help them with what it is that you do. It's easy to then find out who their CEO or President is and contact their office. That's usually the easiest place to get an understanding of their org chart, and decision makers relevant to your business. Many times this person will walk down to the office of the highest person you might ever hope to sell to and present them with your company as an interest.

3. Know as many people in the different parts of the company as you can. Never underestimate the power of a receptionist or assistant. Not only can they help navigate the internal waters for you, but they are frequently the people who can be promoted to a role of importance, and they will never forget that you cared enough about them before their importance.

4. Try to find imperfections that you can help with - look at their website and get into depth with their sales people. The more value you can show by adding you to their business the more interested they will be to get you in.

5. Sell smart - don't just go into a generic pitch. Understand what they sell, how you can make it better for them and pitch your company's value to them in a customized way.

6. Be persistent - if you are close but they are waivering, don't give up. Persistence over time shows you have real value in the potential relationship. Perseverance is a virtue that they will respect so long as it is done with respect. But if it is a clear pass or a vehement no, then move on.

Syndication of your business

2009-09-01T17:22:00.000-07:00

Do you sell on eBay, have a YouTube channel, Yelp listing or Twitter account? They all have RSS fees that you can use to syndicate your self and build traffic to your site. Here's how to do it:

Do one mega feed of all of your online activity - Friendfeed.com allows you to put in all of your social sites, blogs, etc. to come up with what they call a "lifestream" allowing you to link people to all of your content.
Amazon - you can easily become a published author on Amazon, and if you are (or once you become one) you can syndicate that feed on your AmazonConnect profile. If you aren't able to take the time to make a book, apply to have your blog on Amazon Kindle's subscription list, getting a 30% cut from each subscriber's fee.
Blog to E-newsletter - Feedburner.google.com allows you to go into your account and activate e-mail subscriptions or set up a Feedblitz.com newletter allowing people associated with you to get daily updates from you in their inbox.
Widgets - widgetbox.com allows you to enter your feedurl, add a custom header and then mess around with the appearance settings and publish it on Myspace, facebook or other locations you can paste some html.

Good luck going viral!

3 Questions to Build Your Brand

2009-07-29T16:43:00.000-07:00

Every brand you love fulfills the promises that they make to you. For your company you will need to do the same thing.

Answer the following 3 questions: 1) Why did you create your product or service? 2) What are you able to absolutely deliver on without question, every time and 3) How do you make your customer's day-to-day life experiences better each and every day?

That promise that is met is what will make your customer come back, and once you have repeat customers, you'll have a true brand.

Generating Sales Online

2009-07-23T13:36:00.000-07:00

Answering questions on Yahoo! Answers can give you the opportunity to acquire new customers at zero cost to you. You will be surprised at how effective it is and will likely get your more sales leads than your own blog.

When You Want to Create an API For Your Site

2009-07-23T13:32:00.001-07:00

Try Mashery, a San Fran start-up that has developed API tools for The New York Times, Netflix, and Best Buy. Mashery charges $499 a month or more for businesses with fewer than 500 employees. Note that 2/3 of Twitter's traffic come from 3rd party applications.

Free E-Mail Follow-up for Cart Abandonment

2009-07-23T13:27:00.000-07:00

SeeWhy.com, an analytics provider based in Andover, MA, recently launched a free service that provides e-mail addreses of customers who abandon their carts. Use this to follow-up via e-mail to focus on resolving "technical difficulties" that occurred during the purchase rather than simply giving a sales pitch. Wait at least 10 minutes before you send the e-mail or you could look a bit stalkerish. Also be sure to include a prominent "Unsubscribe" link at the top or bottom of the message.

Build Your Website Around A Purpose

2009-05-24T13:26:00.000-07:00

Don't simply make a website because every other company has one. Build one around a purpose and you will achieve much greater impact to your customers.

1. Know the purpose of your website
2. Know your target audience
3. Have a clear picture of design choice
4. Think ahead about how you want your customers to navigate through it
5. Determine the extent to which you may want account login requirements
6. Determine whether you will want to integrate video or audio
7. Determine whether you will have e-commerce
8. Think ahead about optimizing your site for search engines
9. Know what your hosting and maintenance requirements will be
10. Determine a realistic not-to-exceed cost
11. Timeline a development schedule and milestone a launch date
12. Know how you will need to manage it

With the above in mind, it will help organize one of the more important parts of your business.

Customer Referral Offers to Boost Sales

2009-05-10T18:02:00.000-07:00

Use some of these ideas to stay on top of the minds of your customers for referrals:

1. Plant a seed - Let them know that you know they will be so satisfied with your product that in 2 months you will check in with them. When you do - and they agree - use that as a way to ask them to suggest 3 others who would also benefit from your product. This works more than you would think.

2. Gift Certificates - Send a quarterly mail out to your best customers offering a gift certificate for your products/services that they can give to someone they know who could benefit from your services.

3. Charity partner - find a charity, propose a variety of ways you can create a deep partnership, benefiting them by a dollar-amount for each product you sell. In return the charity will introduce you to their constituency.

4. 100% Money Back Barter - Refer 4 friends who purchase and they get a full refund of their purchase price - 25% for each customer. Take photos of the refunded customers to use as support to get others to try the program.

5. Special Pricing - Once they agree to a price, give them an even lower price if they give you referrals right at that moment.

Get Free Help With Your PR Pitches

2009-05-10T17:59:00.000-07:00

YourPitchSucks.com is a free service that promises to get those annoying buzz words out of your pitch. Set up a free account and upload your pitch; they will unleash it to its community of PR professionals who will proofread and edit it.

Recognizing Cash Flow Problems

2009-05-10T17:54:00.000-07:00

Cash flow problems are common with small businesses, and although many time people have a hard time figuring out the cause, there are really only just a few ways they come about:

1. Too much cash tied up in receivables ( or for products-oriented companies in inventory);
2. Too many customers who aren't paying you on time (or are bad debts);
3. You are spending too much on overhead;
4. Weak gross margins (i.e. your prices are too low).

Understanding the cause of your cash flow problems is the first step to solving that problem.

Branding A Business - Your Exit Strategy

2009-05-09T18:11:00.000-07:00

Back in the 90's the exit strategy for most start-ups was 1) go public, and 2) as a fallback, be acquired.

In today's climate, this may now be reversed. Think about the challenge of regulation and liability, and stock prices aren't what they used to be. Acquisitions are almost always a significantly easier than the process of an IPO. Liquidity is often immediate, presuming buyers are paying in cash.

IPO's also aren't the financing strategy they used to be, as it isn't sustainable, since public markets aren't a particularly good source of long-term, stable investment capital in speculative high-growth companies.

Investors are constantly changing their needs in search for short-term profits.

Essentially - work hard to build somthing valuable and the exite will take care of itself at the right time.

Step 3 - Primer on "Gearing" Up

2008-02-03T07:49:00.000-08:00

Now that you have completed all of the paperwork in setting your company up, it is important to have the tools you need for success.

Some space to call an office that you can shut out from the rest of your normal life. It doesn't have to be a leased space; it can be in your home, but it should have 4 walls and a door. This is not only important for tax purposes (home office deduction), but for your sanity. It will help you focus, give you a place to call "work" and a place to leave at the end of the day so that it doesn't bleed into your personal space.

Computer. You should have at least one. I love Apple, but in the end, most of the software is done on the PC, so I still begrudgingly opt for a windows-based machine. Ideally at least a Intel Duo Core 2 processor with 2 gigs of memory and a 200+ gig hard drive. Ensure there is a network adaptor on it so that it is already set up to plug into your high speed internet connection, or a wireless adapter if you have a wireless network. ~ $1,000

Separate Phone line and High Speed Internet. Simply put, get it. Not a question of whether but what kind. Ensure that the download speeds are at least 5MBPS, and uploads are at least 2MBPS. Cable and Verizon FIOS both have burst levels that will exceed 10MBPS, and for what it's worth, I use cable and am very happy with it. Comcast for example has a great plan that provides phone, internet and cable all in one bill and saves a lot of money in the aggregate. ~$60 / month.

Routers. Simply put, also get one. This takes your internet connection and splits it into usually 4 connections. I think Linksys is the best and they easily work with Windows based machines. Ideally get one that has both hard connections and wireless. The wireless is great to expand into other areas that may not be accessible to a hard connection. Be sure it has at least a wireless G, and preferably wireless N. If you get the wireless N, make sure the computer you have has wireless N capability before you buy it. If it doesn't you will need to buy a wireless N card to connect wirelessly and install it in your computer. ~$80.

Multifunction Printer with Copy/Scan/Print features. I recommend Cannon products and prefer the laser to the inkjet. I steer away from color inkets in particular as the quality isn't as good as you can find in a Kinkos or Staples and it's easy to print to a disk ~ $350

4 Gig USB flash drive (allows you to take large files off of your computer to a local printer or copy center). ~$50

Blackberry - I really like the Curve model. Get this with wireless and internet access from any of the providers. They work great with many of google's free services and will help you address e-mails and view web files while on the go. Any internet friendly phone with a full keyboard will work, but for what it's worth, I've found the BB Curve to be the best after trying most of them.

Software - Prices will vary but you can usually find low priced versions on ebay.

Windows XP Professional (or Vista Premium)
MS Office 2003 or later (or for free Open Office you can download off the net)
Adobe Products (buy a suite together to save money)
Photoshop - for image resizing and for exporting photographs for your website.
Illustrator - although photoshop can be used to create brochures and postcards, this is a much easier program to do this type of work. Generally, I outsource new graphic designs (logos, advertisements, etc.) but frequently there will need to be small tweaks (change of address, etc.) and it save a lot if you can do that yourself.
Business Plan Pro - You can use any business plan software, but I've used this and think it's a worthy piece of software. (See my next blog on writing a business plan)
Quickbooks 2007 (or higher) - this is the perfect solution to your bookkeeping needs. Spend a few hours with your accountant to set up the accounts and vet the structure (see below on accountant needs).
ACT 2008 (or higher) - this is a good sales tool to help organize all of your contacts, sales opportunities, e-mails, documents, etc. Once you start selling it will be imperative that you keep yourself organized, and I think this is one of the best software packages to do this without needing a full time IT person, computer network, and presuming you have a sales staff of 5 or less.
Swishmax - this is only if you are doing a website in flash. I believe for companies with products, this gives you the best look on the web and image is everything. You sacrifice a bit on who can view it, but in the end I think it's worth it.
Panthercart - again presuming you have a flash-based site, this gives you a good and easy way to jazz up your shopping cart (if you are going to sell online) in flash. It integrates well with google checkout and other checkout services (see later). I recommend either Panther Cart (not jr.) or storefront (use this if you are not good at or have flash 7 or better).
Adobe Flash CS3 - will be needed for Panthercart (unless you get the full storefront).
Coffeecup google sitemap - easy way of setting up a site map to help better your results on a google search - especialy if you have a flash-based site that won't otherwise be recognized by the search engine crawlers.
Coffeecup password wizzard - flash based way to keep viewers from accessing sensitive files on your website like pricing info.
Coffeecup flash forms - flash based way to create forms for registration and ordering.
Coffeecup photo gallery - flash based way to show your photographs in a slick way.
Adobe Acrobat Professional - for manuals, line sheets, order forms, and other files you will want to send digitally to customers that have photographs.

thelogofactory.com - create your corporate logo, letterhead and envelopes artwork.
Vistaprint - line sheets, fliers, postcards, letterhead and envelopes
48hourprint.com - hangtags and catalogs
google talk - great way to instant message and transfer larger files from and to another location.
google grand central
kodakgallery.com - will allow you to print out 16x20 and 30x20 photographs for display purposes.
swishzones.com - inexpensive web templates for swishmax.
google checkout - least expensive way of selling online.
google analytics - great way of tracking where you are getting traffic from
aplus.net
gmail DNS with IMAP
google calendar
google sync for blackberry
google maps for blackberry

A good accountant. Don't pinch pennies here. You will need your books
a good photographer
a decent lawyer

Step 2 - A Business Plan

2008-01-21T07:35:00.000-08:00

Although starting, branding, and running your own business can bring a lot of satisfaction to your life, do not forget that your success will require your recognition that it is also a daily war filled with small battles. Going into any war requires an overall strategy and individual battle plans to help navigate through to victory. I know, a bit of an extreme analogy, but it helps to push the point that in your excitement to get your business moving, it is easy to overlook planning as a waste of your limited time, but your business plan will be the cornerstone and building blocks of your organization and without this solid foundation of business focus, your efforts can easily become scattered. This plan should be revisited often, and reassessed.

There are a number of software programs out there that can help you with this. One example is BusinessPlan Pro, but there are templates in Microsoft Office via Word or Presentation that help you create a business plan as well. The point is you need one, so find some solution to help you creat it. You should have at least some basic business plan before starting on your day-to-day operations. Generally, it will describe your specific business endeavor in detail, and address where and how you expect your business to grow over the next few years. Revisiting the plan will allow you (and others financially interested in your business) to gauge whether you on track. It is important to note that it is unlikely you will exactly land where you have planned, but that is what the revisting is for. Think of it like climbing a mountain. You plan your assent, but there are externalities like weather, areas that are too dangerous to cross, your own endurance, the tools you have access to, that all affect changes in your plan as you go along. But as you make those changes you need to keep in mind the ultimate goal you set out to accomplish to ensure that those changes are still bringing you to that goal.

"Tools" are a key element. Tools can be reduced to financing, your (and any partners you might have) own expertise, and the weekly aggregate time you have to spend on your business. Where "you" are limited, you can use that financing to compensate - whether that be with additional people, equipment or services. Because your financing at some point is always limited, the decisions of how you spend that financing is material in your potential for success. Staying"lean" is always a mantra in any start-up business, but you can't expect much in results if your only funding enough to stay on life support.

At the beginning employees and rent are two of the more expensive areas that create monthly financial stress against sales and investment capital. In some businesses, this is mandatory. In some other businesses you can go a long way before even needing to consider these; as a result there is a lot of savings that can be redirected in other areas that can better impact your sales. Generally, manufacturing, wholesale, and online retail businesses in this world of global commerce and outsourcing can be done almost entirely virtually. That means no overhead (employees and rent) and low start up costs. We liked the baby manufacturing business because a) we were parents and had a great understanding of what was needed and what was lacking, b) it was a market boutique niche that had lower barriers to entry, c) the baby market was growing in size and had global potential for us, d) our entertainment and celebrity access lent well to the branding growth, e) it was a season-less business in that babies were being born all year long, and f) marketing to the luxury end of the baby products demographic limited sales impact in the event of a recession.

Metro Moms selects The Plush Pad® as it's Best and Hottest Product for 2007

2007-11-28T14:49:00.001-08:00

Selected Product in the 2007 Metro Moms Best and Hottest Products from Pregnancy to Preschool. The name says it all - the Plush Pad® is luxury at its best. This portable and plush diaper changing station has body-contouring memory foam for baby's comfort. Its patented rolling system makes it perfect for on-the-go parents.

read more | digg story

Summer 2007 Edition of My Child Magazine - The Plush Pad® by Ah Goo Baby®

2007-11-28T14:35:00.001-08:00

The Plush Pad® by Ah Goo Baby® expands into Australia as seen in the Summer 2007 edition of My Child Magazine and sold through Mint & Lilac.

read more | digg story

2007 Celebrity Baby Blog Holiday Gift Guide - The Plush Pad® by Ah Goo Baby

2007-11-28T14:30:00.001-08:00

Ditch the plastic changing pads for a cozier place to diaper your newborn, at home or away. This pad is a cushy gift for a new Mom who has an upscale diaper bag and wants the accessories to go with it.

read more | digg story

The Plush Pad® by Ah Goo Baby® -- Urban Baby Daily Everywhere, June 2007

2007-11-27T18:33:00.001-08:00

“…The part of the mat the baby lies on is a soft, fuzzy minkee material, as if he were in the nursery. It's machine washable and water repellent (for when nature takes its course), and conveniently rolls up and unfurls (with one hand).”

read more | digg story

Ah Goo Baby Plush Pad - Babble Drool.icio.us Article

2007-07-06T12:27:00.001-07:00

Check out the recommendation from Babble's Drool.icio.us reaching more than 3 million users a month!

Babble Drool.icio.us

Ah Goo Baby Plush Pad - She Unlimited Article "The Changling" - July 2

2007-07-06T09:34:00.000-07:00

The Changling

Monday, July 2nd, 2007
Posted in She Baby |

by: Gary Connolly

Ah-Choo! Bless you. No. No. Ah Goo Baby. Okay, your baby will bless you or certainly thank you when you slip his bare bottom onto this plush changing pad. Elegance and comfort all in one tidy little package. The Ah Goo Baby Plush Pad is the only portable diaper changing pad combining luxury, comfort, and style.

Talk about pizazz and practicality rolled up into one fashionable accessory that you and your little one should never be without. When the Plush Pad is wide open it measures a whopping two feet by two feet. After little johnny has done his duty and you’ve done yours, you can roll it up and fit the 3 inch cylinder, almost anywhere.

When your on the go and so is baby, in more ways than one, you’ll want to keep a few of these around. Put some upstairs, downstairs, in the car, and at grandma’s place. With a range of colors and patterns to choose from you’ll find one just right for your lifestyle and fashion statement. Moms and dads alike will relish in comfort with the Plush Pad. Changing a baby doesn’t have to be a chore any more, not when you get to use the Plush Pad. You may find yourself taking it out even just to look at it!

Technorati Tags: ahgoo baby, Baby, changing baby, changing pads

Ah Goo Baby Plush Pad - She Unlimited Article - July 2

2007-07-06T09:30:00.000-07:00

Ah Goo Baby: Flat Out Style!

Monday, July 2nd, 2007
Posted in She Baby |

by: Erin Chrapaty

Ah-Goo! Bless you. No, no. It’s not your allergies kicking up, its Ah Goo Baby, the premier portable diaper changing pad. Slip your child’s bare bottom onto this plush contouring foam mat, and he will certainly bless you. With elegance and comfort all in one tidy package, the Ah Goo Baby Plush Pad lays out complete luxury and style.

Rolling pizzazz and practicality into this fashionable accessory, the Ah Goo Baby Plush Pad is one item that you and your little one should never be without. The Plush Pad measures a whopping two feet by two feet when opened wide, and will neatly roll into a 3 inch cylinder. After little Johnny has done his duty and you’ve done yours, you are able to tuck the pad almost anywhere.

When you and baby are on the go, in more ways than one, you’ll want to keep a few of these around. Put some upstairs, downstairs, in the car, and at grandma’s place. With a range of modern colors and patterns to choose from you’ll find one just right for your lifestyle and fashion statement. You may even find yourself taking it out just to look at!

Technorati Tags: Ah Goo Baby, Baby, Changing Pad, The Plush Pad

Urban Baby Daily Comfort Zone - The Ah Goo Baby Plush Pad

2007-06-28T10:47:00.001-07:00

Ultra-sheik mommy destination, Urban Baby, selects the Ah Goo Baby® Plush Pad as their worldwide baby product highlight of the day for metropolitan moms on the go.

read more | digg story

Getting Started - Branding A Business

2007-05-05T05:42:00.000-07:00

I have been a practicing entertainment attorney for over 12 years, and have had significant experience setting up and securing intellectual property rights for ideas. I found in starting Ah Goo Baby, LLC with my wife that in branding our products company my background was quite helpful, as each television program, motion picture, or recording artist has their own brand, and marketing and cultivating that brand is material in its subsequent success.

First a quote from Steve Jobs: "Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart."

The first step is to develop your central idea. What has driven you to start your new enterprise. For Ah Goo Baby this came from my wife, Karin. Karin had been an entertainment executive for over 10 years prior to our getting married and having our first child. She chose to stop working and be a full time mom. From the day-to-day needs of our kids, she realized there were a number of things simply not offered for her kids that she really wanted and had been looking for. After our second child got into the toddler stage, she realized that she wanted to get back into the business world, but in a way that allowed her to still have control over the time she still wanted to spend with our children. We spoke about her starting a baby products company and the various ideas she had.

Before engaging in any of the ideas, we concentrated on what the central "feel" she wanted to convey in her company. Given her background in the entertainment industry and the Los Angeles style and fashion surrounding that industry, she wanted her company to bring that style, fashion, and celebrity to motherhood. Her focus was the "yoga-mom" rather than the soccer mom. That was the brand identity that she wanted to permeate her company.

Now that company brand identity needed to be capsulated into a name. She felt strongly that the company reflect something directly related to children, yet unique to be memorable. As most new parents do, she did a lot of reading from the experts on child rearing. A few books referenced the phonetic "Ah Goo" as the first organized sound that comes out of a new baby's voice. Ah Goo ... cool, memorable, and related to a very important memory of her (and every parent's) baby's early years. It needed a little pizazz as well as a direct reference to what we do, given the word "Ah Goo" were not traditionally recognized. So we attached "Baby" at the end, and there it was born, "Ah Goo Baby," the brand.

Next came the strategy to translate that brand into a product line. We went through a number of her product ideas and realized one rose to the surface. She found as most parents do, that in today's world she was out of her home with the kids more than inside our home. What things happen to infants and toddlers all day long? They go to the bathroom A LOT. Ironically, we spend a significant investment in the baby's nursury, and have soft and cozy changing stations, but there were no similar plush changing stations that were portable. Sure there were the free changing pads that came with the diaper bags, but they were drab, cold, and uncomfortable making quite a stressful changing experience for the baby and the mom. Especially for parents on the go, this situation happens a lot when you consider road trips, airplanes, hotels, restaurants, the park, pool, for Grandma when she takes the kids, and the list goes on. She wanted something with fashionable style fabrics, luxury comfort for her baby, and portability so that it could fit in a traditional bag.

So now we refined the company brand identity with a product concept. Similarly we needed to come up with a name for that brand. Something simple, memorable, and cool. And the "Plush Pad" was born. We went with 5 styles to suit a variety of mother's tastes, each of which having it's own sub-brand: "Paradise" with a beachy aloha print, "Rascal" with a leopard/fuchsia prints, "Jungle" with a camouflage and sage prints, "Vintage" with a pink and chocolate damask print, "Cha-Cha" with a Palm Beach feel of lime, orange, baby blue and chocolate stripes, and "Retro-daisy" using pinks and chocolates with a cool retro daisy print. I'm sure you can think of mom that would fit one of the above!

Limit your liability -

Formalize your company structure - Any company having vendors, and that sells to the public will have liability. Protect your personal assets by securing layers of protection. One of those ways is by incorporating. See an attorney about which type of company structure works best for you, but most small businesses will find a Limited Liability Company structure to be best. It has no limit to ownership, no limit to annual revenues, and it is taxed as a flow through to your personal taxes, so you won't be "double taxed" for corporate income. It also legitimizes you with banks, vendors, distributors and investors. Follow the rules that expect you to treat your company no different than larger companies are treated. The general rule is that you don't co-mingle company funds and expenses; treat this no differently than you would as an employee in some other job.
Get a company bank account - make sure that all payments are made and deposited into the company bank account and not directly into your personal bank accounts. You don't want to show direct co-mingling of assets or you could lose your corporate protection. If you have to pay for something with a personal credit card or check, have the company reimburse you via a journal entry on your books. If your company needs more capital to work than you have coming in, make a journal entry as a capital contribution or loan and pay it back. Be sure to check with your accountant about your specific situation to determine how you should journal added capital from time to time.
Get a company credit card - be sure to make all payments with that card as it will help you organize yourself for taxes. You can also find cards that give points so that it can help you earn free flights and hotel stays.

Design Patent - As a lawyer there are a number of protections that can be utilized to secure intellectual property. Here our intellectual property was a patentable design that utilized a special way the product was folded and rolled along with a memory foam pillow insert that allowed the product to be over 2 foot square when opened, yet was only 3 inches x 10 inches when rolled. So we went the extra step and had the product patented. Although expensive - approximately $10,000, with no absolute guarantee a patent would be granted, we decided as a small company it would act to help us with the future possibility of licensing our product and preventing knock-offs; it also would act as a selling feature in legitimizing our claim of the product being novel and unique in the marketplace.
Trademarks - Securing separate exclusive ownership of the brands "Ah Goo Baby" and "Plush Pad" were important and necessary steps prior to exploiting the names and investing in the sales and marketing of our company and product. Trademarking the names prevents others from having the right to use them. Here, the names were novel enough to be trademarked solely by the words alone. Federal trademark protection (see US Patent and Trademark Office) is one of the best ways of doing that. They make it generally easy enough for you to do this part on your own through their on-line step-by-step process. For approximate $250 per trademark, you receive 5 years of protection to that name once approved, and your protection is across all 50 states. Ah Goo Baby secured our company name that we will associate with all of our product designs, and Plush Pad as our first product. Although both are associated with one another, they are also mutually exclusive of one another, so they required 2 separate trademarks. We utilized the patent in conjunction with the trademarks as a part of the clear design to maximize the value and association of our brand to the product. This is similar to what Polo did on their shirts; although there are a lot of shirts that look the same, none can use the polo trademark / logo and that is what makes them unique. That is what makes their demand. That demand is a reflection of their branding.
International protection - although long arm statutes arguably give you protection in the US for international infringement of patents and trademarks, it is highly recommended to patent and trademark your intellectual property internationally as well. This is something a small company will need to weigh as it is costly (patents are approximately $5,000 in costs per jurisdiction in legal fees and filing costs) and need to be filed in many jurisdictions for full protection. Then comes enforcement which is very expensive when suing in foreign jurisdictions with judgments less heavy than in US courts. On the other hand, not having those protections in place PRIOR to placing them into commerce in those jurisdictions could forever lose your rights to secure them at a later date when your company and / or product becomes more valuable. There is no real right or wrong answer regarding the extent to which you choose to protect your intellectual property overseas and is ultimately a business decision for each company on a case-by-case basis.
Web URL. Be advised. Before you register ANYTHING secure your URL. Even if it is a unique name like Ah Goo Baby was, there are companies that crawl new listings of patents and trademarks and company names and they take the name, requiring you to pay them a premium to buy it from them. Get the name first, and park the name for use later.

Introduction to Our Company - Ah Goo Baby

2007-05-01T13:56:00.000-07:00

The Ah Goo Baby® Plush Pad™ is a luxury but portable diaper changing pad available in various styles to cater to your sense of fashion.

Whether you live in the city, the country or the beach, there’s a style for you. The Plush Pad™ is for the mom or dad on the go – whether you’re working, traveling, or at home. Throw it in your diaper bag, or leave it open for a week in a hotel.

Use it as a second diaper changing station downstairs, or give it to Grandma for when she takes the kids.

Make the choice... Get the Plush Pad™ for you and your baby.

c o l o u r c o m b i n a t i o n s

c h a - c h a

r a s c a l

r e t r o - d a i s y

j u n g l e

p a r a d i s e

v i n t a g e

What is the Plush Pad™?

The Ah Goo Baby® Plush Pad™ services the sophisticated and discerning mom on the go who wants her baby to be comfortable and clean, while giving herself the satisfaction of retaining a flair for good taste. Where other diaper changing pads are made of uncomfortable vinyl and plastic surfaces, the Plush Pad™ is fashioned with boutique and ultra-soft fabric selections that are both water resistant and machine washable. Coupled with a high-density, memory foam pillow, it also acts to provide comfort and protection by soothing your baby’s pressure points, and is all carefully packaged into a portable design so novel, it received a US patent.

Why is it so unique to receive a US Patent for its design?

The patented design is built similar to a traditional pillow, in that the high-density memory foam acts as the cushioning, a water repellant taslin fabric covers the pillow protecting it from accidents, and the two are then slipped into the outer cover. The center piece of the Plush Pad™ covers the memory foam pillow (which is where most of your baby’s body will rest) with a fold on either side that together acts as an extended barrier for your baby’s arms and legs. When you are finished with each changing, you simply snap the folds together, roll it up, and secure it with the woven elastic loops.

What makes the Plush Pad™ so plush?

The Ah Goo Baby® Plush Pad™ comes with a memory foam pillow that relieves pressure because its cellular structure is completely different. It's made up of billions of high-density, visco-elastic micro-cushions. When the temperature sensitive cells come in contact with the warm areas of your baby’s body, they get softer and pliable. In cooler areas, they stay firm. The cells will literally shift position and reorganize to conform to your baby’s tiny contours. The cells shift so your baby doesn’t have to. Its molecular structure also efficiently absorbs shock to help protect your baby’s head and neck when laying them down for a changing. In short, the Plush Pad™ conforms to the curves of your baby’s body, so that they can sit back, relax and enjoy the experience!

»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»

Dimentions:

Opened Position (Square): 22" long x 22" wide x 1/3" thick

Closed Position (Cylinder): 10" long x 3" in diameter.

»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»

For More Information:

If you are a retailer and are interested in receiving more information about Ah Goo Baby® or the upcoming Plush Pad™ product, please contact us directly at info@ahgoobaby.com or visit our website at www.ahgoobaby.com.