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Inventor clubs can provide the resources, encouragement and contacts you will need as you move your product to market. The clubs are often populated with inventors who have successfully navigated the idea-tomarket maze. They are willing to share their experiences and the expertise they have gained along the way. The knowledge the members of these organizations share can help you to avoid many of the pitfalls in inventing.

It can also shorten the length of the process by teaching you the shortcuts they have learned. The inspiration club members offer can be as important as anything else can for keeping a new inventor motivated. Inventing is often discouraging, and just knowing a living, breathing person, not unlike yourself, who has invented successfully, can provide the encouragement you need to see you through the discouraging times.

Some of the successful inventors who belong to their local inventor support groups have licensed their products, others have chosen to build a business around their inventions, and still others have chosen countless other options such as catalog or infomercial sales for their products or patents. These individuals belong to the local inventor clubs because they wish to share their knowledge with others who are seeking success with their inventions.

The importance of matching your product to the manufacturer with the best “fit” for that product should not be underestimated. Your best chance of getting your product to market is in having it picked up by a company that already distributes similar products to the various retailers. Retailers almost never make the time to talk to an independent inventor with only one product and they will rarely, if ever, disrupt their planogram, or map of the store space, to make room for a one-product vendor. Getting your product  with a manufacturer who already has the retailer’s attention and shelf space solves these problems handily.

Our own personal story is the perfect example of this. While we were patent pending we manufactured and sold Ghostline® ourselves. We sold it to small office supply stores and teacher stores. That obviously was not our marketing goal at the same time, so we were also contacting all the large mass merchandising stores, such as Wal-Mart, K-Mart, Target, Kroger, Fred Meyer, etc., where we eventually wanted to see Ghostline® offered for sale.

When we were able to get someone to talk to us, which was a rare event, we heard the same refrain over and over again. They all said, “We don’t carry products from one-product vendors. Get your product with one of our distributors and we’ll be happy to carry it.” Most of the retailers would not talk to us at all because all of their buyers’ time was taken up meeting with their regular distributors. It would have been much too time-consuming to meet with inventors of individual products.

Contact retail buyers in a professional manner if you choose to manufacture and distribute your product yourself. Do not attempt to get their attention with gifts or gadgets. This is a dead giveaway that you are an amateur and it will destroy your chances with them.