As a distributor our business is generally about buying and selling other manufacturer’s products, offering us little scope for our own product innovation and development. However recently we launched our own new product, to meet a need in the market, and I’ve got to tell you, it felt good, albeit a little daunting. Tubester, an off the shelf solution for storing redundant fluorescent tubes, simply came about when a client enquired what package we could put together to help them with the issue of safely storing used fluorescent tubes. It got us thinking and within a matter of days the creation of Pipekit’s first branded product was conceived. Coming from a sales and a marketing background in the plastic pipe manufacturing industry, I am used to having a long list of new development projects to hand. From individual fittings to completely new pipe systems. However I am also used to big businesses’s large development funds, allowing cutting edge technology to be used, employing market research companies to critique new products, creating focus groups, implementing trials and of course substantial advertising budgets. But in a small, independent business like ours, the prospect of N.P.D, although exciting, is certainly a more daunting prospect. I suppose with over 27 years in the industry you do get a feeling for what will work and what won’t. But it would be a fool who took a product to market on a hunch. So how can you launch a new product as a small business? What can you do on a small budget? How do we know if we are doing the right thing? All questions I have been asking myself over the last few months as we have developed Tubester. As a team I trust our knowledge of the product, our understanding of the market and taken on board feedback from our customers to get us to launch. We haven’t got huge marketing budgets to throw at it. As a result we need to be smart and target our potential buyers accordingly. So for those who need to comply with the WEEE Directive, we’ll be knocking on your doors first! But there is certainly an element of ‘testing the waters’ with this first new product launch. The benefits of having your own product are certainly very attractive. We’ll have more control of it’s direction, hopefully achieve better margins, look to sell far and wide, create volume sales through various outlets, establish a niche market where we can develop other similar products etc… All these things have occurred to me and excite me during the development of Tubester. Only time and hard work will tell whether our first foray into N.P.D will be successful. But what ever happens, I’ve got a feeling this won’t be our last journey on the path of developing our own products.