31–40 of 464 posts
This line caught my attention - "I also love learning about mechanical engineering and manufacturing"
How do you go about that? Have you found any good books, YouTube videos, etc. that are accessible for us SWEs?
What will it cost you to make?
For toasters or similar, what is the typical ratio of manufacturing cost to retail price? Is this enough to pay for distribution, marketing, logistics and returns?
I'd say you've found a slightly slower way of setting fire to your money
Hardware burns capital way faster than software (in general).
Though it’s easier to spin BS reasons to burn billions on software maybe, since no one is expecting to actually hold the thing?
Maybe unrelated, but I have a Deciso DEC2752, which is an OPNsense firewall appliance. For some reason Deciso made it in the Netherlands instead of China or Taiwan. I don't know for sure how much cheaper, or more expensive it would be if it was Asian-made. It's unique for sure. It's a bit pricey but other firewalls were less-than-statisfactory. Chinese Mini PC boxes were too little, Supermicro Front I/O boxes were to…
The above example comes from a colleague who used to work in the SSD business.
Dualit is in the UK and has been manufacturing high quality, hand built toaster for a long time, but most consumers would balk at the prices they ask for their appliances and I doubt you as a startup would be able to manufacture a toaster any cheaper.
https://www.dualit.com/collections/classic-toasters https://www.dualit.com/collections/spares
Frankly, I don't even own one, in spite of being a champion of the "buy it once" mentality. But it's on the bucket list.
I have seen the lack of an American made toaster appear in several venues, so there is pretty clearly some interest in this topic. How many would buy one is another matter. I worked for a company that made customized versions of relatively basic electrical devices and they didn't spend much money on it (couple thousand for the prototypes and the devices they disassembled to copy). The one pitfall they did note was th…
I've got more than decade of experience in designing products that are built in North America. I wouldn't touch a project like this unless it had a team of people with the proven manufacturing experience heading it up and some very convincing numbers about the commercial viability of the product because I don't believe they exist. There is good reason why the market only has commercial kitchen grade devices available.