196: Common Gaps Being Ready for Manufacturing

05-10-2023 • 24 mins

Laura is the President of FORGE, a non-for-profit organization that helps specifically hardware startups in scaling from prototyping to manufacturing growth. They have worked with over 700 physical product startups to ensure that those companies are a commercial success by ensuring new product manufacturing is done right. Today, Laura is going to share valuable knowledge for inventors, startups, and small manufacturers on how to ensure your product is designed properly and correctly for manufacturing, how to ensure your documentation is complete, and how to best approach contract manufacturers to transition your developed product into a successful first manufacturing run.

Here are the key takeaways from the episode:

The importance of building a simplified design for manufacturing
Design for manufacturing is required to ensure the product is ready for production, and does not need any more design to complete to what is needed for market or for reliability or for certifications.
What to do when you haven’t tested enough the design
There is a false assumption that manufacturers are going to fix your design problems.
Use design firms to do design for manufacturing specifically
The effects of a lack of manufacturing documentation
Reaching out to partners too soon

Laura Teicher Links:

The Product Startup Podcast Links:

https://www.ProductStartup.com/

Mako Design Links:

https://www.makodesign.com/

Kevin Mako Links:

Instagram | LinkedIn | Quora | Facebook | Twitter

Partner: PTC’s best-in-class software solutions Onshape: The only cloud-native product development platform that delivers full-featured computer-aided design (CAD), integrated product data management (PDM) and enterprise analytics in a single system, and Creo: 3D CAD solution that provides designers with the most innovative tools to build better products faster, such as generative design, additive manufacturing, real-time simulation, IIoT, and augmented reality.

Producer: MAKO Design + Invent is the original firm providing world-class