Kevin Mako is a leading expert on hardware startups. He is the Founder of MAKO Design + Invent, the pioneer firm for providing world-class end-to-end physical consumer product development tailored to inventors, product startups, and small manufacturers. Est 1999, Mako Design is a 30-person team with offices in Austin, Miami, San Francisco, & Toronto, has developed over 1,000 products for clients and has earned over 25 design and business awards including Red Dot, Inc5000, Entrepreneur360, Indigo Gold, Creative Pool Gold, Best Places to Work, Lux Magazine Best Design Firm in North America, and many others. Kevin lectures at the Masters of Engineering program at Ryerson University, sits on a number of entrepreneurship and education boards and holds the Duke of Edinburgh Gold Award designation. He is the host of The Product Startup Podcast, the hardware development industry’s leading podcast.

The financial formulas for scaling a consumer product business are really only applicable if your goal is to build a scalable venture. If you're just looking to run a lifestyle business you can disregard this article - but if you want to build a scalable consumer product business, these are the numbers that you need to understand.

Use the financial formulas to compare the efficiency of each channel in your consumer product business and increase or decrease your resource allocation to the most efficient channel or customer segments.

So you’ve got your amazing product idea, and maybe you even have a prototype. But now you’re considering larger scale manufacturing and you’re speaking with factories that are halfway around the world where English is not the native language. You’re also talking about spending tens of thousands – or even hundreds of thousands of dollars on your production run, and it’s starting to dawn on you how much could potentially go wrong – and how much those mistakes could cost you!

One of the most important factors in the factory/designer relationship is how you communicate your product requirements. And that’s where TECH PACKS come in.

Belinda Jacobs is a technical fashion designer from London (now based in California). She had her first job in fashion at the age of 15, stapling swatch cards together! Belinda has been designing & creating tech packs for more than a decade for household brands and independent designers alike