Calling All Consumer Product Entrepreneurs

This morning while watching The Wall Street Journal Report With Maria Bartiromo, I saw an interesting segment on a "social product development" company, Quirky.  Quirky takes the concept of an idea lab to a new level, by opening up the floor to anybody out there with an idea - all you have to do is post your idea online. 

Here's how it works: anybody with an idea can submit their idea on Quirky's website.  Then, Quirky's online community (again, anyone can be part of this - all you have to do is join) votes and comments on the ideas posted on the site.  Every week, Quirky staffers select popular products to be labeled "under consideration", and these are the products that are thoroughly evaluated on whether they are worthy of production.  Once selected, the product is then available for sale online and must hit a predetermined threshold of unit sales before moving to manufacturing.  When this happens, you're golden.  You will receive "perpetual royalties" from Quirky for every product sold.  And Quirky has partnerships with major retailers, such as Target and Amazon.com, so your product has potential to gain substantial distribution. 

Quirky launches 1-2 new products every week, which unheard of in the consumer goods industry.  Consumer goods is a difficult industry to be an entrepreneur, as you need an enormous amount of capital for R&D, manufacturing, and distribution.  Even the large CPG companies with deep pockets only introduce a handful (or less) of new products a year, so you can imagine the challenges to entrepreneurs without the budget or network necessary to produce and sell a consumer product. 

I think Quirky is a fantastic company that helps bring ideas to market in an innovative way.  Allowing the idea to be critiqued through a social network can help make product improvements and help formulate the marketing strategy early in the process.  It also allows entrepreneurs to gain feedback on their idea from a like-minded community, and perhaps give them confidence to move forward with their business idea.

Find out more or submit your great idea here:
http://www.quirky.com/