Creating Therapeutic Games

I have not posted anything about inventing in years, but I have been going full force on my therapy games.  After bringing out the baby product, Hug ‘n Hold, and spending more money on it than I will ever make on it, I have determined what my criteria are for a product that I am working on.  I am not willing to spend a lot of money on marketing, and the product has to be easy to get manufactured and have a fairly low price point so that people would be willing to buy it.  The objective is to make money on your products, not to lose money.

My current thing is therapy activities and games.  The games that I make are sold as digital downloads so that people can print them out, laminate them, and use them in therapy.  This is the easiest way to create and sell a product, but sometimes people don’t want to have to make it themselves.  If I am planning to have a product made to sell, then it needs to be cheap to have made, the base materials need to be easy to find and access, and it needs to be easy to package and ship.

My shop has all of my products available, but the ones that are hard goods that I have made and then have to package and ship are:

• Felt food
• Writing charms
• Roll a Creature Dice game
• Roll a shape dice game
• Fabric Marble Maze
• Weighted pencil
• Roll a sentence dice game

I am working on a new game as well that will include a digital version or a hard good version.

The key steps to figuring out the viability of a product are

• what materials will the product use
• can you easily acquire the materials
• what will the manufacturing cost be including materials, labor, packaging
• figure out a wholesale price
• figure out what the retail price would be
• would people purchase the product at the needed price?

You also have to make sure that your packaging has the required warning labels (choking hazard for under 3), and you need to have a UPC bar code for your product if you hope to sell it wholesale in stores or web stores.  The product may need to be lead tested if it is to be used with kids.  My current products I have made sure that my raw materials are all lead free.  If you are having very small amounts of product made (which I am) you can get clearance from the CPSC as a small manufacturer.

Good luck on your products, and I will try to post a tiny bit more frequently (maybe twice a year?).  🙂