Over the past few days I’ve done market research on three different projects, but the third one, which I began today, brought a new factor into perspective: safety regulations. My research began with looking to see if there were any other products being sold like the one Forthright was thinking about creating. I found one almost immediately, but there was a problem. It wasn’t UL listed. UL stands for Underwriters Laboratories, a safety certification company. They make standard safety regulations that products need to abide by to be sold in large quantities in the US. The product I had found was sold by a company based in China and didn’t have the certification needed for what it does. As Bryan explained to me, it could be bought by individual consumers for personal use, but, for example, Forthright would not be able to buy many of them and incorporate it into the production of one of their own products. What followed was a lot of searching through safety standards and trying to figure out why I couldn’t find what I wanted with the correct safety listing. The safety aspect introduced a whole new piece to the puzzle that is learning about a new product area, and it’s one that’s filled with hundreds of pages of information to understand, showing just how involved the task of developing a new product can be.
