New Products and New Inventions - Real Invention Stories

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New product story  -  Pat. No. 4,940,347    Continued                                 Page 4  

I was pretty excited about the new invention, the burster/trimmer, our new product, the hand held trimmers, were actually selling.  I had also designed a battery operated hand held margin trimmer and was thinking about developing a prototype and getting it into production.

About the time that Product Genesis finished the prototype trimmer/burster, the parent company of Curtis, a gold mining company I believe, declared bankruptcy.  I'm not clear on the details, but somehow the bankruptcy caused the president of Curtis to resign. I think he got a golden parachute or something.

The new president of Curtis without explanation canceled the burster/trimmer project, and the hand held trimmer as well. They had sold 27,000 of the hand held trimmers, not enough for us to pay for the tooling and packaging costs.

Marketing our new products ourselves

We obtained the prototype trimmer/burster from Product Genesis and tried to market it ourselves.  We were unable to interest any manufactures in our device.  Probably because it was so inexpensive to build that the profit margin would have been much smaller. Or maybe I am just terrible at marketing.

We were getting nowhere with our marketing of these new inventions, and had no money to manufacture the new products ourselves, so the whole thing just died.  

To this day you can still buy one of those big heavy expensive bursters if you need to separate continuous forms in batches.

Sheet printers have pretty much taken over the printer market, but there remains a large market for multi-part forms since they need an impact type printer to make the simultaneous copies, and are generally continuous perforated sheets that have to be separated.

Anyone out there interested in marketing a new invention or product, specifically an automatic trimmer/burster for multipart forms with perforated margines?