My wife does product lifecycle management and development, and it’s been fascinating watching just how hard it is to actually make and sell something physical.

My wife does product lifecycle management and development, and it’s been fascinating watching just how hard it is to actually make and sell something physical. Her company’s products aren’t even electrical, but require complex textile work that has its own set of challenges. Concept to sales in stores can be a multi-year cycle. There are late night meetings with factories in China. Patent issues that can require workarounds that seem absurd to those of us in software. Iteration time of product concepts that require a physical prototype can take months of work between a designer and the manufacturer. And then there is one of the most important final steps of having the product end up in stores across the world: shipping! Pre-COVID a shipping container ran between $6-9k, during COVID it ballooned up to $36k. Margins suddenly got waaaay smaller and that had a trickle down effect where even retailers were then pushing for higher margin to compensate —- squeezing her company on both ends. Don’t even get me started on Amazon….