Design and Engineer Your Product With Gembah

Henrik Johansson is the CEO and Co-founder of Gembah. Gembah is a pioneering global marketplace for product development that provides a streamlined and simplified process for creating products by connecting individuals with first-rate product designers, manufacturers, and supply chain experts worldwide.

Henrik is a successful serial entrepreneur with a wealth of experience in technology-enabled services, SaaS, and marketplaces. He has also co-founded and served as the CEO of several venture startups, including Boundless, a $100M promotional products company and platform. Henrik is a recognized expert in scaling startups, developing world-class teams, creating a positive organizational culture, and establishing scalable processes and infrastructure.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [02:48] Henrik Johansson discusses Gembah and its services
• [04:22] Product research, identifying market opportunities, and differentiating products through features and design patents
• [08:47] Launching new products faster and avoiding costly mistakes in product development
• [11:13] Henrik discusses Gembah’s product design techniques
• [16:05] The value of working with Gembah from ideation to finished product
• [19:32] Sourcing and finding reliable manufacturers
• [27:33] Who are the ideal clients for Gembah?
• [30:09] Henrik explains Gembah’s business model

In this episode…

Developing a new product as an entrepreneur can be intimidating, as it demands a unique set of skills, knowledge, and resources to bring an innovative idea to fruition. From conducting thorough product research to designing, sourcing, and manufacturing, precisely executing these stages helps to launch new products from concept to shelf.

Serial entrepreneur Henrik Johansson acknowledges that most entrepreneurs lack the necessary expertise to navigate this complex process. However, he believes that with the right mindset, approach, and support, entrepreneurs can turn their product ideas into tangible reality. To help aspiring entrepreneurs overcome this challenge, Henrik has created a marketplace for product development. By providing access to a streamlined process and top-tier designers, manufacturers, and supply chain experts, the platform has made the process of creating a new product more accessible and less intimidating than ever before.

In this episode of the Quiet Light Podcast, Pat Yates sits down with Henrik Johansson, Co-founder and CEO of Gembah, to discuss the product development journey. Henrik talks about Gembah and its services, product research, product design techniques, and sourcing reliable manufacturers.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Henrik Johansson on LinkedIn
• Henrik Johansson’s Email: [email protected]
• Gembah
• Quiet Light
• Quiet Light Podcast on YouTube
• Joe Valley on LinkedIn
• Pat Yates on LinkedIn
• Mark Daoust on LinkedIn
• Quiet Light Podcast email: [email protected]
• The EXITpreneur’s Playbook: How to Sell Your Online Business for Top Dollar by Reverse Engineering Your Pathway to Success by Joe Valley
• Helium 10
• Jungle Scout
• DataDrive
• ZonGuru

Sponsor for this episode

This episode brought to you by Quiet Light, a brokerage firm that wants to help you successfully sell your online business.

There is no wrong reason for selling your business. However, there is a right time and a right way. The team of leading entrepreneurs at Quiet Light wants to help you discover the right time and strategy for selling your business. They provide trustworthy advice, effective strategies, and honest valuations. So, your Quiet Light advisors aren’t your everyday brokers — they’re your partner and friend through every phase of the exit planning process.

If you’re new to the prospect of buying and selling, Quiet Light is here to support you. Their plethora of top-notch resources will provide everything you need to know about when and how to buy or sell an online business. Quiet Light offers high-quality videos, articles, podcasts, and guides to help you make the best decision for your online business.

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What are you waiting for? Quiet Light offers the best experience, strategies, and advice to make your exit successful. To learn more, go to quietlight.com, email [email protected], or call 800.746.5034 today.

Episode Transcript

Intro  0:07

Hey folks, it’s the Quiet Light Podcast where we share relentlessly honest insights, actionable tips and entrepreneurial stories that will help founders identify and reach their goals.

Pat Yates  0:32

Hello, and welcome to the Quiet Light Podcast. Again, I’m Pat Yates. Today we have a great conversation. I had a chance to see Henrik out at prosper out in Vegas, we always have a good time chatting, whenever I was saying, he’s a sourcing agent, monster. Man, this guy really has some knowledge. He’s with gembah.com, just one of the founders of gembah.com. And Gembah will help you research design source and manufacture your product. Some of the things we don’t talk about at Quiet Light a lot of times, we are talking Quiet Light, we talk landed, cost of goods sold, and then marketing and sales, Amazon all this. But there’s steps before that. And sometimes I think people may be a little intimidated by that process or may not really understand how it works. He talks a little bit about how sometimes it’s not easy to go to Alibaba and know who you’re looking at. So if you think you’re finding a manufacturer, many times you may not be, you may find it a middle person and your relationship may not be with directly with the factory that you’re working with. So I think that sometimes if you don’t know something, it’s better to reach out and see if you can get some information about and I think Henrik is going to be a great resource for that. So I’m anxious to talk to him here in a minute. But also wanted to make sure that I mentioned that if anyone is out there looking for information on their business, trying to get evaluation thinking about selling, obviously, that’s what we do a Quiet Light, it’s a weird business environment right now, a lot of people worry about interest rates have an issue sourcing, raising money, being able to look at whether they’re selling or not. Please understand at Quiet Light that you can always reach out to us. We love having conversations that are actionable for entrepreneurs, to maybe prepare you to exit your business. If you never need help from me. You can email me at [email protected]. Today, I’m excited about this Henrik’s an awesome dude. And he’s really got some great info. So let’s get right to it. Henrik, it’s great to have you in the Quiet Light Podcast today. How you doing?

Henrik Johansson  2:18

Thanks for having me Pat.

Pat Yates  2:20

Yep, it’s exciting to talk to you. I know we just saw each other prosper, we got a chance to talk a little bit, it’s great to always see you. And as we talked about it, we knew Gembah was going through a lot of different things, you were doing some new things, you had a lot of things to report. So we thought it’s a great time to get back on the podcast. So for our listeners out there that are all entrepreneurs, most likely and some are buyers, sellers, things like that, you’re gonna cross over that, everyone. So I’m really excited about that. Give us an overview of Gembah and what you guys do?

Henrik Johansson  2:48

Yeah, I think the simplest way to describe it is really that we help brands and sellers to develop new products, right. And at a more detailed level, like anywhere from back of a napkin sketch, if you have a product idea, all the way to finished product on the shelf. So all the steps from research, product validation, figuring out what features that you want to build into product, and to see what kind of market opportunity this what the competition looks like. And once you identify that you’re going to design, and we have a network of over 500 designers and engineers, so we connect them with the best people for that specific product. And then we also have thousands of factories in our network. So we take them through the sourcing and manufacturing piece to and it’s not a card. So if someone already have a product, and they just want help to go through sourcing manufacturing, they can do that. But most of our customers come in with a level a concept. And then we tell them through all the way to finish product.

Pat Yates  3:48

That’s really awesome. I think that when we talked about the steps that go into this will go down pretty slowly. So let’s talk about the first. The first one is research, which gives me the most questions of any of them. Because like I know, people, you know, I’m not a professional internet guy. But I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express one time, I can go on there and search for products look for manufacturers overseas look for all kinds of places. But you really, Chuck always uses the term at Quiet Light, you don’t know what you don’t know. So sometimes it’s better to have good knowledge. Tell us about what kind of research needs to go into a product, whether it’s one that’s adding to your line or starting a new business?

Henrik Johansson  4:22

Yeah, I think that some of the most important thing is that you’re pursuing product opportunity. There’s a lot of opportunities out there, right. But to figure out, do I have the budget to compete in this product category? Right? So, there’s a lot of great tools like Helium 10, and Jungle Scout and ZonGuru and Data Dive and others that are good research tool. And that’s a great first step to research the product category that you’re in. But sometimes those tools can be pretty overwhelming too, that’s virtually an unlimited amount of data. So how do you figure out really, is this the right opportunity for you to make sure that you don’t go up against big brands like Nike or Under Armor or something like that, or other just well-funded Amazon sellers. So I think that there’s a couple of steps to that, right that first, if you have an existing opportunity, or an existing product idea, to use multiple tools to research it to see, what does the market opportunity there, and then what we often help with is to identify the features that you want to use to differentiate your product, in our experience, we’d love to hear if you’ve seen the same thing that, you know, a few years ago, before the pandemic, you could go on Amazon and find a under-marketed listing, right, something that didn’t have great reviews, or didn’t have an optimized listing. And then you could go find that product on Amazon and sell it and build a multimillion-dollar business, what we’re seeing is that opportunity has significantly shrunk or completely disappeared. So if you’re going to be successful today, we believe that you have to have differentiated product unique products that you are the only seller of that you can differentiate somehow. And I think the research stage is really we figure out, how can you make this product differentiated in a way that they’re actually demand for out there. So we help people look at ratings and reviews? For existing products, there are top sellers, we look at one-star review seven common five-star reviews in common to figure out what are the features that consumers are actually looking for in products. So you can help you to validate or invalidate an idea or a concept. And sometimes we help people come up with new concepts, because they see suddenly things that they didn’t expect. So it’s very data-driven. And the goal is always to come up with for the product opportunity that if you go forward and create that product it’s actually going to sell.

Pat Yates  6:45

Let me ask another question, a couple questions about research. I think a lot of times, let’s say it’s a brand new idea or concept, but you still don’t know a lot about it. When they come into you do you look at patents and trademarks and cross that and help them is that part of the process? Or they needed to go to an attorney to be able to do that as well?

Henrik Johansson  7:01

Yeah, great question. We get that question all the time. So we’re not patent attorneys. So we can provide legal advice. We do have several partners that we recommend. But typically what we do is part of this research is to identify competitive products, similar products and try to identify differentiation. So we would never recommend to a customer to go and create a product that looks exactly like something else, or has the exact features of another product. You know this better than me probably but Amazon typically only care about or help enforce design patents, they don’t get involved in utility patents, because it’s too complicated and not going to try to figure out if the product works the same or have the same inner component does another one. But yeah, so we always have them do the best research we can at sort of the design level. And if they believe that there are features that are unique, we recommend one of our legal partners that can help them find a design patent if they want to.

Pat Yates  8:04

That’s great. When I was reviewing gembah.com, I was taking a look at one page that had some bullet points on the benefits of joining and all of them semi-seemed like they were in the research and sort of planning area. Let me read those real quick launched new products faster, develop more relevant products, expand opportunities to upsell, increase margin profitability and stay ahead of competition. That’s five really important things all wrapped into one. And a lot of times people may underestimate which one of those is most important, or which are least and maybe they are all very important. Can you talk a little bit to say, for instance, like launch new products faster? If you’re six months faster than you’re in business six months before you could be on your own? Which one of these are the most important? Are they all sort of intermingled?

Henrik Johansson  8:47

Yeah, great question. I think they’re all intermingled to some extent, right? Yeah, you can launch a product faster, which is great. But the two points just like if that’s not a unique product, it’s just a copycat or someone else, it doesn’t matter. So I think you kind of have to get every face of this right, which is why it’s so complex, and why so many people fail in the process, I think that you have to make sure that you’re just like if you’re building a house or building a software program, to make sure that you have your focus in the right area up front saves you a lot of headache later on the progress in the process. So if you pick a product that’s highly competitive, you pick a product is really complex and is going to be very expensive to make, those are things that are going to hurt you downstream. So I think that that’s one of the key values that Gembah really provides is that we have all these four components research, design, sourcing and manufacturing under one umbrella so that as soon as we started research, we start talking to factories, we start talking to designers so that you can look at all the different aspects of the product and its profitability and how much it’s going to cost at the same time so that you don’t do them sequentially. You know, one thing we see a lot is people go to, some fancy product design agency, and they come up with beautiful pictures and drawings of products. It’s like, wow, they’re super excited. And then they come to us and we start talking to factories, and factories, like we can’t make that thing or it’s going to cost you $100,000 In tooling to make it and your unit cost is going to be 40 bucks when they think it should be $20. Right. So to me, you have to look at all those components and they’re intertwined. Yeah, that’s my long-winded answer to your question.

Pat Yates  10:35

Oh, that’s a great answer. Because I think part of the issue when people are either developing new products inside their business or have never developed a product, there’s a lot of anxiety to that, because you have so many steps of quality and manufacturing in how you compartmentalize that sometimes says whether the business can actually get off the ground, because some people they give up if they’re frustrated enough. So let’s talk a little bit about the second part. So you’ve done the research, you’ve figured it out, we’ve talked with Henrik he’s got us in a position, we know what the product is, but hey, we need to design it now. Maybe there’s some widgets to it that we need either print with do other things. Tell us a little bit about how that intertwines with Gembah as well.

Henrik Johansson  11:13

Yeah, absolutely. So first, we have a large network of designers, experts. So it’s industrial designers, electrical engineers, mechanical engineers. So whatever project comes in, whether it’s set headphones, and inflatable pen or bicycle helmet, we generally have a designer or engineer in our network that have worked on that specific product. And that has huge value to the customer to the brand, because there’s a lot of designers and engineers out there. But if they haven’t worked specifically with the type of product you’re trying to create, their value is going to be limited, right? Do you want to work with someone if you’re making headphones, you want to work with someone I work at Bose you making a vacuum cleaner, you want to have someone that worked at Dyson, that can really come in with expertise and decades of expertise that you can get. So I think that’s key working with the right people, then I’d say the other piece is DFM design for manufacturing. Like I mentioned before, a lot of folks come up with created designs, and then that can’t be manufactured, at least not affordably. And now with mid-journey and other tools like that, it’s very, very easy to come up with cool product, images, but they’re not truly product designs, right, you can bring that image to a factory, and they may try to work with you and try to make it real. But that’s a really risky path to take, right? They don’t know how the factory is going to interpret what you’re bringing them. So it’s become really easy to create product imagery. But that doesn’t mean that that’s a product design, you really need the full design spec for the factory to be able to quote towards your product. And then I think in addition to that, then design for manufacturing, we always start talking to the factories through the design process. Because I think one of the biggest mistake you can make, I mean, unless you have a true innovation, a brand new idea, something that’s never been made before, then then you probably don’t have any other option, then go through a traditional sort of product design phase. But I’d say most Amazon sellers, are satisfied with an incremental improvement to an existing product. And if that’s what you’re doing, I think you should always go start talking to factories during the design phase, right? Because starting rather than starting with a blank canvas, you can start with what’s possible, what’s being done today, and then talk to the factories about okay, here’s my idea. And compare that to what’s feasible what they can do today. And in collaboration with a designer in the factory, you can typically in a much shorter timeframe come up with a unique differentiated product, that’s a variation of an existing product. And that’s going to make it much faster and less risky to bring that product to market.

Pat Yates  13:58

That’s a great point, because I think and we’ll move on a little bit, but some of the steps you can do concurrently. So if people think, well, it’s a start stop, it’s really not like that because you’re going through design process and conceptual idea, you probably have access to a lot of vendors and that have done something similar maybe if it’s like injection molding let’s use as an example you might have a place that’s done that before that you can work on that is that typically how this works, that once you get the idea things move a little quicker and all segments?

Henrik Johansson  14:27

100% It’s like the bundle saves you money, right and saves you time because if you just do one step at a time, you did sign an isolation from sourcing and then you pause and then you start going out sourcing and then went on sourcing your paths again, it is much more cost-efficient and I think less risky, if all the steps are intertwined, right, you said it’s an iterative process and that you have some flexibility which I think most sellers have that they’re really trying to add a new revenue stream to their, to their company right to their brand. It’s not that they needed to look exactly this way. But they want a product that kind of does this thing, right? They may have an insulated drinking cup. And they figured out that people are scared of burning their tongue. So they want to create a temperature gauge on it right? This orange doesn’t have to be there. It hasn’t been they’ve they’re not like they know 100% The feature, they know a few things that they want to change. And if you can go to the right factory that have the right capabilities and share your vision, share what’s immutable, it has to be and the chair was flexible, then we found that the right factor partners, you can significantly reduce the time and cost to get to market by collaborating with them during the design phase.

Pat Yates  15:50

That’s really interesting. So I just have a question, or most of your clients that come in, out of 100, what percentage already have a business and they’re looking to expand it and what portion are, hey, I’m a new startup. And I got to start from zero.

Henrik Johansson  16:05

Yeah, I’d say 80%, 90% of our customers already have an existing business. Now, maybe 30% of our leads. But we try to help as many as possible, but we get a lot of leads to come to us for help. But they have almost no budget and unfortunate thing is like, we can make it less expensive and faster to bring a product to market. Unless you have 10 grand or something, then you probably shouldn’t try to start a practices, right, you got to have at least 10 grand or so for product development. And then of course, you need to have enough funding to place your first purchase order and stand up the business and marketing expenses such and there’s definitely a lot. We get hundreds of inbound requests every month of people that want to start a business just don’t have any money at all. Go ahead, sir.

Pat Yates  17:01

Let me expand on that as well. Let’s say someone already has an existing business, they have, let’s say 50 items, and they sell on Amazon and it’s all focused on the baby. I’m just gonna make a baby. If they call you up, Henrik, can they sit down, do you have suggestions? I noticed on your site, you have some items, but it’s probably limited in some sources. Maybe if someone’s thinking, hey, I have to expand, I don’t know how to start, is it better to come in and talk about that, and then you help lead them to things that might be good that you know in the market?

Henrik Johansson  17:27

Yeah, we get a lot of both. So you bring up the marketplace that we lead, we just launched it last year. So one thing that happened during the pandemic, or after the pandemic was that we realized we had built this engine, we have built this research engine that can help identify new product opportunities by sifting through all the data and pull out features that consumers are asking for. So pre-pandemic, we just basically waited for brands to come to us with ideas, and we help them implement them. But what we launched it last year is the world’s first future product marketplace, which basically takes these ideas that we’ve identified and put them on the marketplace, you can go to brand.gembah.com to check it out. And there we have a selection of different ideas. Like you said, it’s in our most common categories like pet and baby and toys and sports and outdoors, home and kitchen. And brands can come in and browse that. And if they see something they like, they can just purchase that concept right away. And we will provide the CAD and an introduction to factories. Or they can be seen to as a lot of people come in to look in the marketplace, they get inspired. And then they just submit a custom product request, they may see something they like but it’s not exactly what they’re looking for. And then it turns into more of a traditional product. So going back to your original question, I’d say most people have some idea of what they want to create. But we also do get folks to come in and say, hey, I don’t know what to launch next helped me figure out what to do next. And we can help with both.

Pat Yates  19:01

Man, that’s amazing. Because that gives people sort of a free roll to come in and say hey, how can my business improve. And if there’s nothing there, then nothing gained. But it you may find some things out that are pretty amazing. So let’s move on to the third part. So sourcing a lot of people think, I have an iPhone, I got the internet. Now I can source anything. I just bought a factory. But a lot of times again, they don’t know what they don’t know. So when it comes down to sourcing and I know manufacturing is the fourth and maybe it ties in but how the sourcing really tie into this and why is it important to come in and talk to you guys about this?

Henrik Johansson  19:32

Yeah, I mean, you’re 100% right. It is not hard today to find a factory that can create something right. I think that the hard part is to finding the right factory to work with. Like anybody can go on Alibaba and find the factory you can search for the type of product you’re making. I think the problem with Alibaba is often that a minority of the vendors or suppliers that are listed on Alibaba are not actual factories. A lot of them are middlemen, trading companies. Some of them are just scammers, right that list other people’s products. So it’s unless you’re experienced, a lot of people are experienced, so they can manage that jungle themselves. But if you’re not experienced, we recommend that you hire someone that can help you find the right factory to vet the right factory, to make sure they’re socially compliant, that they don’t have child labor, slave labor. And Pat, I’m sure you’ve traveled over there too. Sometimes, folks even have showcase factories, if you come over and visit, they have one really nice factory that’s clean and the machinery is new. And then when you leave, they sent it off to Vietnam or some other place, a lower-cost country. So you really have to validate everything over there and make sure that the factory is who they say they are that the products are made in the factory. And it’s somebody that you can trust that had been around for years, ideally decades to have made similar products. And we always, for all our factories, we have feet on the street, we have a team in China, we have a team in India, we have individuals and several other countries. So before we go into actual production on any products, we have people in that country going to visit the factory to ensure that they meet the standards that they’ve said that they do, and that you are actually there to see that the products are made in that factory.

Pat Yates  21:27

That’s great. Let me ask you a different question on the manufacturing, let’s say there’s a solopreneur out there that has had products and sells and has one manufacturer, which means you’re only one catastrophic event from having no manufacturers, do you suggest that people even if they have great manufacturing, everything’s to be great right now that they come to talk to you. So it’s not only a secondary check of what they’re actually getting, but also maybe have potentially a fallback in kind of that situation. And maybe you blend that manufacturing to make sure exactly where it’s at. Because sometimes you may feel very comfortable, you’re in a great place, but you may not know that you aren’t. So have you experienced that as well?

Henrik Johansson  22:05

Yeah, 100%, we help a lot of customers, either relocate their supply chain, or augment and diversify the supply chain. That’s been a trend. A lot of folks, because of the geopolitical climate, the tariffs and such, is, there’s definitely been a trend folks moving away from China, more and more, try to find different locations. As you know, it’s not easy to do for all types of products, there are certain areas where China is still, you know, by far the best location, that we see a trend of particular folks in America, trying to get out of China where they can or tried to diversify from China. And especially since recently one of our presidential candidates have mentioned that he’s going to raise tariffs to 60% on anything that comes out of China, we’ve seen a pretty dramatic upswing in requests, because brands are looking at and say, well, if there’s 60% tariff on my business, how am I going to survive? I can’t continue to do that. So we’re getting a lot of requests right now, if people are trying to find alternative sourcing regions outside of China.

Pat Yates  23:15

Yeah, I definitely know that’s a move. And I think a lot of people don’t realize that especially like injection molding, smooth things, people are trying to move some manufactured in Mexico, sometimes you get that in the United States really quickly. I did a couple of trips to Mexico for the Mexico show when they were talking about manufacturing spent a lot of time there. Are there specific areas of the country that you work in? Or do you look pretty broad all across the world for any kind of manufacturing?

Henrik Johansson  23:40

Yeah, we look pretty broad, but we were definitely our strongest, how bizarre are China and India and then I’d say the second tier is Mexico, Vietnam, Thailand, Colombia. We have a handful of countries where we have local folks too, but China and India are still the biggest, like you said Mexico has. I think a lot of people have tried Mexico. And we do have quite a lot of projects down there. But it hasn’t been I’d say most customers have struggled to shift there because like, at least today, the Mexican factories are not really set up to serve as a US Small Business the way the China is, right? Often, they don’t have catalogs, they don’t have customer service reps that speak English. They don’t have websites. So I think it’s one thing if you are a larger company or midsize company and you have, you place million dollar purchase orders, then I think Mexico can be a valid alternative, but typically, they’re not going to mess with solopreneur that is trying to place an MOQ of $25,000. Right. Give them a hard time finding a factory in Mexico that’s gonna want to work with you.

Pat Yates  24:50

Yeah, that’s great. I mean, I think that when you tie all these things together, I think a lot of people look at this and they may be intimidated by the process because it seems like you’re getting someone involved in the middle of your manufacturing and development process, some people may be intimidated by the cost to do that. Can you talk a little bit about how Gembah structures that? I’m sure it’s something that a lot, you’re gonna gain a lot more than you’re going to spin in a lot of ways, but maybe on the surface, people may not understand that.

Henrik Johansson  25:15

Yeah, it’s a great question. So number one, we’re completely transparent in everything that we do. Our customers talk directly to designers, they talk directly to the factories, when the factory quotes something back, we share those quotes. All of your listeners may not be aware, but often when you work with a sourcing agent, they are sitting between the customer and the factory and the basic quoting one price, and you don’t really know what their cost is, right? So they can have a 10% markup, or they can have a 50% markup, you wouldn’t know because the sourcing agents is not typically transparent. We’re 100% transparent, we charge fees for our services. But they’re very affordable. On the design side, we put a small markup on the designers and engineers fees. And once we get into supply chain, we assign a virtual supply chain team in whatever location is. So you get a fractional compliance person, logistics person QC person, product safety testing. So it’s a very cost-effective solution that brings together multiple categories of expertise. So that is really a more cost-effective solution. If you’re just trying to hire one guy in China or one guy in India. Or just try to do it yourself, right? To be able to have a team of experts that’s working on your behalf is completely transparent about what’s going on in the factory is really pretty powerful. And we have a software platform too, so that our customers, whenever production around this is done, whenever we do QC, all those QC files, test reports, everything is uploaded into the platform. So they can log in and look at it and say, oh, I had a production run last night. Here’s how it went. Here’s what the error reports QC reports. And it’s almost like they were there on the factory floor themselves.

Pat Yates  27:16

Yeah, that’s great. So again, we’re talking with Henrik Johansson with Gembah. I know that you have a lot of clients you work with. We talked and you said you do anything from small micro people that are startup up to large businesses. Tell us about the best client for you guys. And maybe it’s about anybody?

Henrik Johansson  27:33

Yeah, it’s a great question. And like I said before, I think we’re very cost-effective solution. But there’s still costs associated, right? If you don’t have at least 10 grand or so to spend on this, then one, I don’t think Gembah is the right solution to maybe you should look at more, other solutions than developing your own products. There are different ways to go to do ecommerce. But I’d say our ICP our ideal customer profiles, sort of a million in revenue and above, all the way up to 50 100 million ours most of our customers I say is in the one to 20 million in revenues. They have multiple SKUs. Our top categories are sports and outdoors, Home and Kitchen, pet Bamyan toy, and that covers a lot of different types of products. Typical customer has, like I said earlier, they’re already selling something. So they kind of figured out the sales motion. They’re good ecommerce folks, but they probably don’t have internal engineers, designers and supply chain experts maybe. And in some case, like you and I talked about earlier, some of our bigger customers, they may have designers and engineers, but maybe not in all product categories. So we’re working with a famous kitchenware brand. There’s a celebrity chef that’s their spokesperson. And they’re making pots and pans. They don’t need gambits help with pots and pans because they’ve been doing that forever. But they wanted to create a new sophisticated kitchen accessory machine that required electrical and mechanical engineering. So they came to Gembah for that, because they didn’t want to have to go through the hiring process of bringing in the expertise internally. Because it wasn’t sort of their main business, but they came to us, we put in the best people we could find in the world and doing it and they’re about to launch that product now. So that’s sort of if you’re a different types of companies that engage with us and why?

Pat Yates  29:33

That’s a great answer. I think it leaves people sort of wide open. I think that many people sit around and have these ideas. Like I want to make this product. I’ve said it 100 times, if I’ve made all the products I’ve thought of I’d be like way ahead of people because I had some pretty good ideas that I just sort of left sitting on the floor. I mean, if people are going through this process if they just want to go through an idea with you, I mean, is that okay to call and talk with some of your people and say hey, I just thought about this, but I don’t Know how to start? Is that a good place to start? Like you mentioned, there’s a certain amount of dollars you need to spend. But sometimes people don’t know the scope of what they’re doing. So how do you address that?

Henrik Johansson  30:09

Yeah, 100% I mean, we recommend anybody, you can go to gembah.com, and the homepage that says, Get a quote, you click that button, and there’s a few questions that you can go through. And we will help direct you in the right direction, we may not be able to help 100% of the folks that come in. But once they answer those questions, we’ll come back with a recommendation to say, here’s how we think we can help. If we can’t help, then we’ll be frank about that. That’s something we learned the hard way for the first years of a business, for a while, we said yes to everything, because we wanted to grow fast, but then your eyes that if somebody’s coming in and want to bug zapping drone or something, some products that you’ve never worked on before, it’s like, that may not be the right thing for us, right. So we make the best recommendations with a client in mind and try to direct them in the right, for the right path for them. And for somebody may need to go through a 50,000 or design project, if they have a really innovative, unique idea that they could patent right? Many customers come in, and we say, yeah, that looks like what we call D2M direct to manufacturing, where we will do some design research, work with them, but then pretty quickly go to the factories and see what’s possible. And when we do that, in general, we can significantly reduce the time, cost and risk of bringing your product to market. So instead of taking nine to 12 months and 50 grand, you can get it done in three to four months and have a product on a shelf much faster, for a much lower cost.

Pat Yates  31:41

That’s great. So I don’t think in the scope, one thing we didn’t talk about that kind of sticks out of my mind, and maybe this isn’t something you will necessarily do. One of the things I think people may struggle with is packaging and things like that they may use to market their business, let’s say that go into the manufacturing, like as an example there, you might want to put your brand name on the outside of the box, you may want to sticker on there, you may want to do a clear packaging on some of your things. Is that something that you all help with? Or you just maybe have consultants that you can point them to?

Henrik Johansson  32:10

Yeah, absolutely. Since we operate as a marketplace, even the designers and engineers and the factories are not Gembah employees. And similar in our expert category, we have package design, we have, you know, like we talked about legal before. We have branding partners, so we can help with all this. It’s not again, my tech company is doing it. But we have vetted partners that we worked with before. And I mean, it’s a really good point, I think we make an effort to make sure every proposal we create, we say, this is what we do, there are things that you should do that are not included in this proposal to just, particularly for folks that are doing this for the first time. We point out that you have to make sure you do these things, the packaging, the branding, the compliance, all these things that they’re not included in our fees, but we can always help recommend someone that can help with that.

Pat Yates  33:00

That’s a great service. Because I think a lot of times people think well I know everything I need to do, but there’s always something new and sometimes in manufacturing, you even have requirements that people won’t realize and hopefully you guys help them get past that. It’s been an amazing conversation. I would encourage anyone that’s thinking about even maybe even a product you have the successful that we’ve known another alliteration, another manufacturer, a way of doing business that you guys may have real interest in. So Henrik, if people wanted to reach out to you and talk to you about Gembah, how do they get ahold of you?

Henrik Johansson  33:30

Yeah, my email is [email protected]. And I’m sure it’s at the bottom of the podcast list too. But feel free to email me. I love talking to entrepreneurs, and product innovators, it’s one of my favorite things to do. And you can also just go on the website, browse around and click and get a quote will ask you a few questions that will connect you with an expert that can help make a recommendation. And like we said earlier, we’re super transparent, we’re not going to try to take your money and trick you into anything, right we can help you, we’ll give you a proposal within 48 hours and let you know what it would cost and if you don’t want to move forward to Gembah then there’s no fees required at all, we’re just here we’re trying to help entrepreneurs solopreneurs to turn innovation into real products and be more successful.

Pat Yates  34:29

That’s a Quiet Light philosophy too, we want to add value wherever we can and every time you and I talk I get passionate about that I think you guys do such an amazing job because I think it’s difficult for people to realize they think about how am I going to operate Amazon? How am I gonna advertise? They think all post transaction of manufacturing, that’s where their mind goes. But before that, you can find ways for pennies, dimes, quarters and dollars to leak out the door. And then bad situations that could have interrupt your supply chain. So I think it’s important to talk to someone like that. I really appreciate you coming on the Quiet Light Podcast today. I think if anybody’s out there, please reach out to Gembah talk about your product, see if they can improve it help you manufacture. You’re a friend of Quiet Light. We’re always appreciative of your time. Thank you for being here, Henrik.

Henrik Johansson  35:11

Thanks Pat. Appreciate it. Have a great day.

Outro  35:16

Today’s podcast was produced by Rise25 and the Quiet Light content team. If you have a suggestion for a future podcast, subject or guest, email us at [email protected]. Be sure to follow us on YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram, and subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next week.