To protect your product or commercial product idea, actually need yourself.Let’s go back to
market to see what might be happen now. A factory owner who is located in Guangdong or
Jiangsu China, he does not keep abreast of what is selling well this month in New York or
Paris. So in many cases it is actually a Western importer who asks the China factory to reverse
engineer and copy a product that’s selling well in his country. It is important to note is that copying
is often initiated by companies originating from the target market. So patenting your idea in your
own country and other target markets will likely make more sense than doing so in China.
In China, due to we are still lack of effective enforcement. It means no guarantees that the offending
factory will be closed down. And if the factory does get closed down, they very likely will take their machines
and start up again at a new location. So just focus your patent on yourmarket, you need not patent cost for
it in China actually, But you must take a way to manage your supply chain well.
ONE KEY ISSUE WHEN YOU MIGHT FACE IN CHINA
You might find a final product producer in China, it helps you to manage supply chain and even promote new product to you timely. We normally call it OEM factory.
What if you only want to buy these kind of product to sale in your market, and never mind the complete same or almost same product are also sales in your market.
It is a choice for you. But frankly speaking, adding the internet B-C or C-C impact. This way to sale this kind of product is really a challenge.
Someday, you got an idea, or you finally make a decision to make a new product, it should belong to you completely. Should you deal a contract with this OEM factory and assign them to make your product completely? It looks a good and easy way to develop your product and make them. Sure, but if your product is successful and become hot. Then, you will face a nightmare. Let’s talk about this later. We’d like to give you our suggestion if you are really want to have your own product, not only physical parts, like PCB, enclosure, ect… but also more important concept and business idea.
We strongly prefer you give up this kind of OEM factory. You’d better take more time and effort on product development and have your own supply chain. Also, it is time to come to us, our end-to-end product development can low your cost and risk to realize your own product, while providing you protect mostly.
HOW DO WE PROTECT FOR OUR CLIENTS?
Non-Disclosure Agreement, normally, at the first time, our clients would like to request us to sign this kind of documents. Beside this, we also have our own way workable way to protect our client.
- No final product making
We did not produce final product. it makes our customers can entrust their complete development project to us. no worry about we copy their idea or product, this is different with OEM factory.
- Divided Management
We do in-house development in Shenzhen. Our usual strategy is to choose dedicated supplier to make our design parts. For most of our projects, we would like to choose the supplier who has no capability to make final product and no related resource.
We allocate plastic molding, silicon molding and metal molding to different factories. In this way, none of the parties get to see the complete picture and so are unlikely to know what their parts are used for. At last, we check and combine all of them and ship to our clients.
- Full deployment
What if there is very strong functional part in our design. We will apply patent in China, of course, the IP belong to our client too. Though the patents on a design are often all can be circumvent, but let our supplier knows we have the patent, we are care about this and we are keeping eyes on it, this is very important, It can scare off potential copycats.
We always recommend our clients to pay vendors a realistic fee for any tooling and special molding. This way is no doubt as to who owns the property.
Many problems we have seen arise when tooling was offered free or far below cost, and the client’s sales numbers did not meet forecasts, or the client was not able to sell in a long time, the manufacturer feels morally justified in making back his investment by reselling it to others or provide it as common molding. We will never make this happen, even our client stop in a long run or make small order as always.
We understand product investment has risk, but business has its cycle, we need ensure once business opportunity comes back, our client can catch it back. Also, we know how to find the right vendor and how to deal with them on this kind of risk.
In conclusion, at first sight it may look frightening to take a highly confidential new product idea to China for development, but when enough precautions are taken, leverage local product development team support, It is completely can be controlled well. Meanwhile, the advantage is absolutely.