Titmouse Notes
Titmouse: a computer mouse shaped like a breast. Rubbing the Nipple down scrolls. Pushing the nipple left or right achieves left click or right, correspondingly. Squeezing achieves left click. In hardware, the titmouse would comprise a gel-filled SEBS TPE, with a soft-touch TPE outer shell (fabric reinforced), inner workings of standard mouse technology, and the nipple-scroll would be a simple capacitive touch-sensor array.
Costing and plan:
The device should cost only -$3 per unit to manufacture in China. To proceed, one would seek bids from factories via specifications in a request for quotes (RFQ), then let 2 or 3 factories build prototypes. The factories will solve all problems including engineering, design, materials choices and sourcing, testing, and safety approvals, Once a the prototypes are approved and a factory is selected, then the factory will need 3 to 6 months to tool up and then can begin delivering the product in quantity. The minimum order will be approximately 10,000 to 50,000 units. The total cost of development (including tooling and manufacturing setup) will run about $250k minimum, and could go as high as $500k. Final figures will be determined by the factories' quotes for development costs. Total development time should run about 1 year minimum, but expect 18 months to deal with inevitable complications.
For marketing purposes, expect that the total amortized cost per unit, if making 100k units, will run about $8 per unit. The MSRP should be about 5x this (to allow for profit and retail markup), thus $40 per unit.
To move a great quantity of these, one would need a good marketing, sales and distribution infrastructure. This can be obtained by hiring a company to perform these services for a commission. One needs to move at least 50,000 units to break even. Only above that does the enterprise becomes profitable. Consider forging deals with Susan B Komen foundation, so they buy them to give to donors. Key point: getting women to use these is a hidden market, and linking it to breast cancer research (maybe by giving say 5% of proceeds to breast cancer research?) can legitimize the product, and quadruple sales. Men will still buy the item too. The breast cancer angle can get the item in SkyMall and other high-yield marketing venues, including in the news. This represents free advertising.
Breast regards,
David Hanson, Ph.D., Founder/ Chief Scientist, Hanson Robotics Inc. www.HansonRobotics.com
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