Who will buy my designs?

How do I quickly and easily find companies on the web that want and will buy my designs?

• As a Fine Artist I occasionally get hit by inspiration and come up with designs for certain products e.g shoes (sneakers), watches etc. I have recently been wanting to sell these and clear up my mind for more creativity but when I look for related companies online all I get are links to their job opportunities and working attatchments. I do not want a career or any attatchment work, I just want to be able to sell these one-off designs easily and quickly. Is there any way to do that? Can someone help me?

• Answer:

  It's often times difficult to sell a product idea to a company based solely off of a sketch - even if the idea is a great idea. Let's first take a step back and put ourselves in the position of a business development manager or product manager at, say, a shoe company.  A talented artist comes in with some sexy sketches for a great design.  Our job is to bring new products to market as fast and as cheaply as possible.  Why pay that artist for the design when we can just make it on our own?  I am not going to comment on the ethical issues in play here.  I'm simply asking the question.  And I've sat in on corporate meetings with individual inventors or designers where this exact question was asked once that individual left the room.  Most companies have the resources to quickly copy an idea once they've seen it.  What about protecting your designs with patents?  Unfortunately, our patent system in the U.S. is horribly unorganized and broken.  Design patents can be extremely difficult to defend in a court of law, and our legal system makes it costly, stressful and time consuming for individuals to defend their ideas and designs against large corporations.  Winning a patent case is often about having enough money to stay in court a long time and see the process through. That being said, if you have a design or an idea that has some very unique aspects, filing a provisional, design or utility patent is a good place to start if you feel strongly about the value of the idea.  Utility patents (novel ideas for how something functions) are often more valuable because they are easier to defend and harder to sidestep.  For instance, in one of the situations I referred to above, the corporation decided to pay the inventor a large flat fee sum for his idea because their legal department felt it was too risky to try to sidestep the utility patents that the individual had pending.  Remember, while many corporations have expensive lawyers on retainer that are just waiting to be utilized, they also have a lot of money underneath the mattresses that can be lost if the decision goes against them.  So the lawyers will err on the side of caution. Another form of protection is a Non-Disclosure Agreement.  It's not going to stop a corporation from producing your idea on their own if they really want to, but it does help prevent knowledge or documentation of your idea from being disseminated to third parties.  So, let's say you have a patent pending or decide to just roll the dice and want to go show off your design to someone in hopes of seeing some return on investment without any legal protection.  How do you go about it? First, you obviously need to locate the corporations that are the most likely to be interested in your idea.  It probably goes without saying that the most likely candidates to offer you compensation for your idea are the corporations that develop products for the market you have created a design for - i.e. if you have a shoe design: Adidas, Nike, Sketchers, Puma, etc.  Sometimes there are outlier companies that are looking to break into a market with a compelling initial offering.  Research the major players in the market, but don't ignore the smaller, more hungry companies.  Those companies are more likely to be looking for new ideas that differentiate them from the competition and help them stand out in the marketplace.  And they often have less internal resources to copy and reproduce a design, making it more likely that they may make you an offer for your design.  Smaller companies are also easier to approach and secure meetings with. Second, you need to locate the proper people to talk to within your target companies.  It would be nice to have an "in" - someone you already know at the company, because that's how something like this usually gets done - but short of that, I would do Google and LinkedIn searches and look for Business Development or Product Manager personnel.  Look for people that have some outward facing responsibilities or roles in developing external partnerships.  Call them or email them and simply explain what you have and what you are looking to do.  Many times they are going to want to see some example of what you have prior to a face to face meeting, and this becomes a tricky proposition because you really want to be able to protect your idea and not simply pull the pin on the grenade and launch it over the internet - but you still have to qualify yourself in some fashion.  This is where stamping CONFIDENTIAL all over your drawings and having an NDA in place can afford you a little protection. Third, you try to get a face-to-face meetings with the proper personnel at these companies.  Many companies have personnel whose responsibilities include exploring for new ideas from outside creative talent.  But be prepared to really sell your idea.  And be prepared to be asked to do more work.  The people you will meet with have more than likely seen hundreds of designs and ideas - what makes your design unique? One of the main reasons it can be difficult to get companies to compensate you for a design based solely on a sketch is that many people simply cannot fully visualize a design or grasp the value of an idea from just a sketch.  Creatives often forget that many people simply do not have the ability to use their imagination to fill in the visual voids.  And even the best sketches have visual voids and information left unaddressed.  This is why you often see creatives pantomiming at meetings - they're trying to explain the nuances of a design or how something works that is not fully explained in a drawing.  Although it isn't always necessary, having a physical prototype of your design often greatly increases your chances of selling a design.  Almost all of the individual creatives or inventors that I know who have been compensated for their ideas had a physical prototype to go with 2D visuals.  If you can convince a company to compensate you for your idea, you will generally be given one of two options: either a flat fee offer to purchase the rights to the idea or a royalty deal for the rights to the idea.  The pros and cons and details of each of these types of deals could take an entire book to cover and may be covered in another Quora answer that has already been written, but I would definitely recommend getting advice from someone who has been through the process before agreeing to anything because there are numerous ways to get fleeced with these deals. Hope this helps.  Best of luck.