Manufacturing your product can be quite an expensive exercise especially when it is your first product because you aren’t sure how your target market will respond to your product and the size of batch you will need to produce. Here are 5 top tips on reducing your manufacturing costs:

1.Reduce wastage

When your product is manufactured it is best to choose the manufacturing process that is best suited to creating the least material wastage. The more waste produced the higher your material costs will be. Ideally you should design a product that can be produced with manufacturing processes such as plastic injection moulding. Injection moulding is one of the best processes for the less wastage because the material is injected into the moulds with no left over product.

2.Have a self-locking design

If you can create a product that requires no adhesives because it can self-lock will inevitably be cheaper to manufacture because you will not require the use of an adhesive, a machine/worker to administer the adhesive and extra time to cure the adhesive. If you are able to present a ‘flat pack’ style product you will save costs on packaging as well as the manufacturing and assembling process.

3.Reduce product parts

Reducing the number of parts involved in your product reduces your manufacturing costs because you not only need less adhesive, less manufacturing time and reduce the following:

• You will need fewer moulds. If you have chosen a manufacturing process like plastic injection moulding the moulds are the most expensive cost throughout the entire process. Therefore, the fewer moulds required the lower the overall costs will be. You will make further savings if you can design a product made from one single part!
• Reduction of materials. The less material needed to create your product because of the fewer parts is an obvious saving.
• Quicker production time. The fewer parts that are needed to be manufactured the quicker your product manufacturing time, therefore your costs will reduce.
• No assembly needed for one part so you make a saving on mould production, materials, time and assembly.
• Rapid production for products with fewer parts, therefore, the quicker the production the cheaper the manufacturing process.

 4.Take less time over your decisions

Producing the final product can be daunting but you need to just do it. Hesitating and taking too much time over your decisions and continual re-visiting of your designs will cause you to experience increased costs without even creating your product. The prototype stage should tell you all you need to know for testing and for consumer feedback. Therefore, once you have the product prototype that you are happy with then you should go for it and manufacture your product. The more time spent over the finer details and re-invention the longer it will take to get to the market and the higher the manufacturing costs.

5.Larger batches can be cheaper

If you can face taking the gamble with making a larger batch order, you will reduce your manufacturing costs and therefore you can make higher margins on your product profit or you can sell your product for a lower price. However, this option is a big risk if you haven’t guaranteed any orders with your prototype stage.

Therefore, when you design and manufacture your product(s) the main thing to consider in your designs is to keep your product parts down to a minimum to avoid higher production costs, due to the creation of expensive moulds, the need for use of multiple machines and the use of adhesives to join your parts.