Sofeast FAQs

China offers creators, entrepreneurs, and hardware startups the manufacturing infrastructure to handle new product manufacturing, but it’s the preparation and management of mass production that often leaves hardware startups & SMEs over-budget and running behind on delivery.

One only needs to visit Kickstarter or Indiegogo to see the abysmal proportion of projects that are not delivered on time due to unexpected problems and extra costs.

Inexperienced founders are overly optimistic about the capabilities of Chinese manufacturers and about the ‘readiness for production’ of their new product design.

99% of Chinese manufacturers want to go to mass production as soon as possible, even if this has relatively high-quality risks. They are consistently over-enthusiastic and tend to under-deliver on their promises.

Subsequently, hardware startups don’t see all the risks, don’t challenge predictions and reassurances, and don’t enlist the assistance of people who have done it before. They also have pressure to get first to market and increase the product ROI (Return on Investment) by an early introduction.

We’ve seen people in this position in our home city of Shenzhen and the rest of China get burnt too often, so this is why Sofeast’s production engineers and project managers specialize in new product introduction (NPI) and design for manufacturing (DFM).

First, you will need more than an idea. At the very least, get a first version of the design, as well as a general description (intended use, etc.) on paper.

Second, before sharing the design with anybody, make sure to have a solid agreement in place that targets all the usual risks (not your standard non-disclosure agreement).

Third, you might go in the wrong direction and spend many months working with the wrong type of suppliers and, in the end, get nowhere. Talk with a company like ours. We have worked with a number of people who were in your situation.

You may also like our guide to manufacturing a new product in China.

Yes, for several reasons.

Because you might need to make changes to your design to make it easy to manufacture in China or to have a chance at hitting your budget & timing targets.

👉 Our product engineers are ready to help if you need assistance with product design and development.

And because you need to know what type of supplier you should work with even before starting the search:

Yes. And this should be planned from the design stage. Many projects have gone very far into prototyping and even production, only to be dropped because they had to get back to square 1… a new iteration of the design that takes certification constraints into account.

We have experience with the most common types of certification for the US and Europe.

Learn more about certifications and compliance here: Compliance Testing Consulting

What we do most often is a hybrid approach:

Our liability is limited to the amount of fees you paid to us for the particular job that led to that issue.

The most important thing to focus on is to find ways to avoid such issues or to detect them through reviews and reliability testing. As a general rule, all design changes have to be approved by your side and their impact has to be evaluated with a proper testing plan.

You understand that, if we provide services for 1,000 USD, we can’t accept liability for 1 million USD. We are not aware of any company that accepts this level of risk. However, naturally, we will do the design work to correct any mistake for free.

You pay for that work and you own all the resulting deliverables.

The only exception is the templates we have developed over the years — you do not have the right to re-use them.

If you only have the design of your product and you still have all the development work ahead of you, you will generally need to go through these 6 NPI steps:

• 1. Defining specifications
• 2. Feasibility/proof of concept
• 3. Prototyping
• 4. Tooling
• 5. Pre-production prep
• 6. Production

We provide a comprehensive new product introduction framework and support throughout.

You can explore our NPI process in detail in this video walkthrough:

Not directly, however, we do have a list of partners including law firms and companies who specialize in Chinese business matters such as trademark registration whom we can put you in touch with.

Yes, we can.

We own a contract manufacturing subsidiary, Agilian Technology, near Hong Kong where we provide comprehensive assembly and manufacturing services.

If we’ve already worked with you on sourcing, product development, prototyping, etc, we can go on and manufacture many types of consumer and electromechanical products at Agilian.

You can also explore our various contract manufacturing solutions here.

No. We work on a purely on-demand basis.

You select which of our solutions you want to purchase, pay, and we do the work. We don’t do work in return for equity shares in hardware startups’ businesses.

Please note, any product IP generated belongs solely to you as you have paid for that. We do not retain your product IP after you have finished working with us.

If you need support to move your hardware startup and product idea forward in return for equity shares, finding an incubator or hardware accelerator could be the right move for you.

Yes, we can!

Our in-house R&D team has experience in designing and testing packaging.

We will either source the designed packaging from local manufacturers or may be able to manufacture it ourselves, too.

Packaging actually shouldn’t be an afterthought – it’s an important part of the new product launch project, as it both protects and advertises your product. With this in mind, we created this guide to common packaging types to help you decide what’s best for your products.

We employ a software engineer who can write the firmware for your product. However, when it comes to mobile apps for users, our customers usually take care of that development work.

This is a really difficult question to answer as every new product launch project is different, however, we’ll try to give you some ballpark figures.

• Engineering design: 15 days to 6 months
• Accelerated life testing on prototypes and iterations until a final approved prototype: 1 to 3 months
• Tooling fabrication: often around 6 weeks
• Pre-production preparation, including pilot run(s): 1 to 3 months
• Mass production (first batch): 1 to 3 months

Note: we typically help clients after the industrial design has been completed.

Sometimes the discussions about a new project between a new customer and Sofeast take many weeks. In cases like this, while we were waiting for clarifications on the scope of work etc. from a new customer, some other projects get confirmed and work starts on them. Therefore, to avoid over-committing and then under-delivering (asking a customer to keep waiting and waiting), we sometimes have to refuse the original project until such a time that more technical resources are once again available.
The Sofeast group is actively trying to hire more technical project managers to lessen the chances of such a refusal, by the way.

 A few points that could lead to difficulties in us taking on your R&D project

• Lots of email exchanges and calls are needed to confirm the scope of the next steps and plan to follow. 
• A customer has difficulties communicating directly with our team in China and requests to have senior managers involved in every discussion. Unfortunately, it’s just not realistic for our senior management team to be involved in every aspect of every project.
• The customer wants us to commit to getting to a certain deliverable while the design is far from mature, which means there are probably going to be a number of unforeseen challenges and it’s somewhat likely we’ll spend more resources than budgeted.
• Instead of going “agile” and going for small chunks of work and quick turnaround, the customer wants to go directly to a functional prototype. That means even more likelihood of unforeseen challenges that will creep in and cause us to spend many more resources than planned (and paid for). This type of “waterfall” approach tends to lead to long delays and to spending a lot more hours than planned.

We do not lock you into R&D projects by requiring a fixed price.

For the design phase, you can pay block by block, for example starting with a number of hours of industrial design work, seeing what we provide, and then, once you’re satisfied, paying for the following block of work, and so on.

Paying step-by-step or paying a fixed amount per week during the feasibility and early prototyping phases is usually the best approach for our clients as there is a lot of ‘discovery’ to be done at this stage.
Here are 2 reasons why paying for work in blocks and proceeding one step at a time is appropriate at this early stage of your project:

1. The cost of the materials needed for the prototypes is not known at this stage
2. The scope might change – this is very common, as the designs or the components we suggest might give you some new ideas. A new scope comes with a different workload.

At any point, as long as you have paid for everything we have done and all the expenses we have incurred (and that you know of) you can decide to stop the project, and the intellectual property of our work belongs to you alone as specified in our contract.

China offers creators, entrepreneurs, and hardware startups the manufacturing infrastructure to handle new product manufacturing, but it’s the preparation and management of mass production that often leaves hardware startups & SMEs over-budget and running behind on delivery.

One only needs to visit Kickstarter or Indiegogo to see the abysmal proportion of projects that are not delivered on time due to unexpected problems and extra costs.

Inexperienced founders are overly optimistic about the capabilities of Chinese manufacturers and about the ‘readiness for production’ of their new product design.

99% of Chinese manufacturers want to go to mass production as soon as possible, even if this has relatively high-quality risks. They are consistently over-enthusiastic and tend to under-deliver on their promises.

Subsequently, hardware startups don’t see all the risks, don’t challenge predictions and reassurances, and don’t enlist the assistance of people who have done it before. They also have pressure to get first to market and increase the product ROI (Return on Investment) by an early introduction.

We’ve seen people in this position in our home city of Shenzhen and the rest of China get burnt too often, so this is why Sofeast’s production engineers and project managers specialize in new product introduction (NPI) and design for manufacturing (DFM).

First, you will need more than an idea. At the very least, get a first version of the design, as well as a general description (intended use, etc.) on paper.

Second, before sharing the design with anybody, make sure to have a solid agreement in place that targets all the usual risks (not your standard non-disclosure agreement).

Third, you might go in the wrong direction and spend many months working with the wrong type of suppliers and, in the end, get nowhere. Talk with a company like ours. We have worked with a number of people who were in your situation.

You may also like our guide to manufacturing a new product in China.

Yes, for several reasons.

Because you might need to make changes to your design to make it easy to manufacture in China or to have a chance at hitting your budget & timing targets.

👉 Our product engineers are ready to help if you need assistance with product design and development.

And because you need to know what type of supplier you should work with even before starting the search:

Yes. And this should be planned from the design stage. Many projects have gone very far into prototyping and even production, only to be dropped because they had to get back to square 1… a new iteration of the design that takes certification constraints into account.

We have experience with the most common types of certification for the US and Europe.

Learn more about certifications and compliance here: Compliance Testing Consulting

What we do most often is a hybrid approach:

Our liability is limited to the amount of fees you paid to us for the particular job that led to that issue.

The most important thing to focus on is to find ways to avoid such issues or to detect them through reviews and reliability testing. As a general rule, all design changes have to be approved by your side and their impact has to be evaluated with a proper testing plan.

You understand that, if we provide services for 1,000 USD, we can’t accept liability for 1 million USD. We are not aware of any company that accepts this level of risk. However, naturally, we will do the design work to correct any mistake for free.

You pay for that work and you own all the resulting deliverables.

The only exception is the templates we have developed over the years — you do not have the right to re-use them.

If you only have the design of your product and you still have all the development work ahead of you, you will generally need to go through these 6 NPI steps:

• 1. Defining specifications
• 2. Feasibility/proof of concept
• 3. Prototyping
• 4. Tooling
• 5. Pre-production prep
• 6. Production

We provide a comprehensive new product introduction framework and support throughout.

You can explore our NPI process in detail in this video walkthrough:

Not directly, however, we do have a list of partners including law firms and companies who specialize in Chinese business matters such as trademark registration whom we can put you in touch with.

Yes, we can.

We own a contract manufacturing subsidiary, Agilian Technology, near Hong Kong where we provide comprehensive assembly and manufacturing services.

If we’ve already worked with you on sourcing, product development, prototyping, etc, we can go on and manufacture many types of consumer and electromechanical products at Agilian.

You can also explore our various contract manufacturing solutions here.

No. We work on a purely on-demand basis.

You select which of our solutions you want to purchase, pay, and we do the work. We don’t do work in return for equity shares in hardware startups’ businesses.

Please note, any product IP generated belongs solely to you as you have paid for that. We do not retain your product IP after you have finished working with us.

If you need support to move your hardware startup and product idea forward in return for equity shares, finding an incubator or hardware accelerator could be the right move for you.

Yes, we can!

Our in-house R&D team has experience in designing and testing packaging.

We will either source the designed packaging from local manufacturers or may be able to manufacture it ourselves, too.

Packaging actually shouldn’t be an afterthought – it’s an important part of the new product launch project, as it both protects and advertises your product. With this in mind, we created this guide to common packaging types to help you decide what’s best for your products.

We employ a software engineer who can write the firmware for your product. However, when it comes to mobile apps for users, our customers usually take care of that development work.

This is a really difficult question to answer as every new product launch project is different, however, we’ll try to give you some ballpark figures.

• Engineering design: 15 days to 6 months
• Accelerated life testing on prototypes and iterations until a final approved prototype: 1 to 3 months
• Tooling fabrication: often around 6 weeks
• Pre-production preparation, including pilot run(s): 1 to 3 months
• Mass production (first batch): 1 to 3 months

Note: we typically help clients after the industrial design has been completed.

Sometimes the discussions about a new project between a new customer and Sofeast take many weeks. In cases like this, while we were waiting for clarifications on the scope of work etc. from a new customer, some other projects get confirmed and work starts on them. Therefore, to avoid over-committing and then under-delivering (asking a customer to keep waiting and waiting), we sometimes have to refuse the original project until such a time that more technical resources are once again available.
The Sofeast group is actively trying to hire more technical project managers to lessen the chances of such a refusal, by the way.

 A few points that could lead to difficulties in us taking on your R&D project

• Lots of email exchanges and calls are needed to confirm the scope of the next steps and plan to follow. 
• A customer has difficulties communicating directly with our team in China and requests to have senior managers involved in every discussion. Unfortunately, it’s just not realistic for our senior management team to be involved in every aspect of every project.
• The customer wants us to commit to getting to a certain deliverable while the design is far from mature, which means there are probably going to be a number of unforeseen challenges and it’s somewhat likely we’ll spend more resources than budgeted.
• Instead of going “agile” and going for small chunks of work and quick turnaround, the customer wants to go directly to a functional prototype. That means even more likelihood of unforeseen challenges that will creep in and cause us to spend many more resources than planned (and paid for). This type of “waterfall” approach tends to lead to long delays and to spending a lot more hours than planned.

We do not lock you into R&D projects by requiring a fixed price.

For the design phase, you can pay block by block, for example starting with a number of hours of industrial design work, seeing what we provide, and then, once you’re satisfied, paying for the following block of work, and so on.

Paying step-by-step or paying a fixed amount per week during the feasibility and early prototyping phases is usually the best approach for our clients as there is a lot of ‘discovery’ to be done at this stage.
Here are 2 reasons why paying for work in blocks and proceeding one step at a time is appropriate at this early stage of your project:

1. The cost of the materials needed for the prototypes is not known at this stage
2. The scope might change – this is very common, as the designs or the components we suggest might give you some new ideas. A new scope comes with a different workload.

At any point, as long as you have paid for everything we have done and all the expenses we have incurred (and that you know of) you can decide to stop the project, and the intellectual property of our work belongs to you alone as specified in our contract.

China offers creators, entrepreneurs, and hardware startups the manufacturing infrastructure to handle new product manufacturing, but it’s the preparation and management of mass production that often leaves hardware startups & SMEs over-budget and running behind on delivery.

One only needs to visit Kickstarter or Indiegogo to see the abysmal proportion of projects that are not delivered on time due to unexpected problems and extra costs.

Inexperienced founders are overly optimistic about the capabilities of Chinese manufacturers and about the ‘readiness for production’ of their new product design.

99% of Chinese manufacturers want to go to mass production as soon as possible, even if this has relatively high-quality risks. They are consistently over-enthusiastic and tend to under-deliver on their promises.

Subsequently, hardware startups don’t see all the risks, don’t challenge predictions and reassurances, and don’t enlist the assistance of people who have done it before. They also have pressure to get first to market and increase the product ROI (Return on Investment) by an early introduction.

We’ve seen people in this position in our home city of Shenzhen and the rest of China get burnt too often, so this is why Sofeast’s production engineers and project managers specialize in new product introduction (NPI) and design for manufacturing (DFM).

First, you will need more than an idea. At the very least, get a first version of the design, as well as a general description (intended use, etc.) on paper.

Second, before sharing the design with anybody, make sure to have a solid agreement in place that targets all the usual risks (not your standard non-disclosure agreement).

Third, you might go in the wrong direction and spend many months working with the wrong type of suppliers and, in the end, get nowhere. Talk with a company like ours. We have worked with a number of people who were in your situation.

You may also like our guide to manufacturing a new product in China.

Yes, for several reasons.

Because you might need to make changes to your design to make it easy to manufacture in China or to have a chance at hitting your budget & timing targets.

👉 Our product engineers are ready to help if you need assistance with product design and development.

And because you need to know what type of supplier you should work with even before starting the search:

Yes. And this should be planned from the design stage. Many projects have gone very far into prototyping and even production, only to be dropped because they had to get back to square 1… a new iteration of the design that takes certification constraints into account.

We have experience with the most common types of certification for the US and Europe.

Learn more about certifications and compliance here: Compliance Testing Consulting

What we do most often is a hybrid approach:

Our liability is limited to the amount of fees you paid to us for the particular job that led to that issue.

The most important thing to focus on is to find ways to avoid such issues or to detect them through reviews and reliability testing. As a general rule, all design changes have to be approved by your side and their impact has to be evaluated with a proper testing plan.

You understand that, if we provide services for 1,000 USD, we can’t accept liability for 1 million USD. We are not aware of any company that accepts this level of risk. However, naturally, we will do the design work to correct any mistake for free.

You pay for that work and you own all the resulting deliverables.

The only exception is the templates we have developed over the years — you do not have the right to re-use them.

If you only have the design of your product and you still have all the development work ahead of you, you will generally need to go through these 6 NPI steps:

• 1. Defining specifications
• 2. Feasibility/proof of concept
• 3. Prototyping
• 4. Tooling
• 5. Pre-production prep
• 6. Production

We provide a comprehensive new product introduction framework and support throughout.

You can explore our NPI process in detail in this video walkthrough:

Not directly, however, we do have a list of partners including law firms and companies who specialize in Chinese business matters such as trademark registration whom we can put you in touch with.

Yes, we can.

We own a contract manufacturing subsidiary, Agilian Technology, near Hong Kong where we provide comprehensive assembly and manufacturing services.

If we’ve already worked with you on sourcing, product development, prototyping, etc, we can go on and manufacture many types of consumer and electromechanical products at Agilian.

You can also explore our various contract manufacturing solutions here.

No. We work on a purely on-demand basis.

You select which of our solutions you want to purchase, pay, and we do the work. We don’t do work in return for equity shares in hardware startups’ businesses.

Please note, any product IP generated belongs solely to you as you have paid for that. We do not retain your product IP after you have finished working with us.

If you need support to move your hardware startup and product idea forward in return for equity shares, finding an incubator or hardware accelerator could be the right move for you.

Yes, we can!

Our in-house R&D team has experience in designing and testing packaging.

We will either source the designed packaging from local manufacturers or may be able to manufacture it ourselves, too.

Packaging actually shouldn’t be an afterthought – it’s an important part of the new product launch project, as it both protects and advertises your product. With this in mind, we created this guide to common packaging types to help you decide what’s best for your products.

We employ a software engineer who can write the firmware for your product. However, when it comes to mobile apps for users, our customers usually take care of that development work.

This is a really difficult question to answer as every new product launch project is different, however, we’ll try to give you some ballpark figures.

• Engineering design: 15 days to 6 months
• Accelerated life testing on prototypes and iterations until a final approved prototype: 1 to 3 months
• Tooling fabrication: often around 6 weeks
• Pre-production preparation, including pilot run(s): 1 to 3 months
• Mass production (first batch): 1 to 3 months

Note: we typically help clients after the industrial design has been completed.

Sometimes the discussions about a new project between a new customer and Sofeast take many weeks. In cases like this, while we were waiting for clarifications on the scope of work etc. from a new customer, some other projects get confirmed and work starts on them. Therefore, to avoid over-committing and then under-delivering (asking a customer to keep waiting and waiting), we sometimes have to refuse the original project until such a time that more technical resources are once again available.
The Sofeast group is actively trying to hire more technical project managers to lessen the chances of such a refusal, by the way.

 A few points that could lead to difficulties in us taking on your R&D project

• Lots of email exchanges and calls are needed to confirm the scope of the next steps and plan to follow. 
• A customer has difficulties communicating directly with our team in China and requests to have senior managers involved in every discussion. Unfortunately, it’s just not realistic for our senior management team to be involved in every aspect of every project.
• The customer wants us to commit to getting to a certain deliverable while the design is far from mature, which means there are probably going to be a number of unforeseen challenges and it’s somewhat likely we’ll spend more resources than budgeted.
• Instead of going “agile” and going for small chunks of work and quick turnaround, the customer wants to go directly to a functional prototype. That means even more likelihood of unforeseen challenges that will creep in and cause us to spend many more resources than planned (and paid for). This type of “waterfall” approach tends to lead to long delays and to spending a lot more hours than planned.

We do not lock you into R&D projects by requiring a fixed price.

For the design phase, you can pay block by block, for example starting with a number of hours of industrial design work, seeing what we provide, and then, once you’re satisfied, paying for the following block of work, and so on.

Paying step-by-step or paying a fixed amount per week during the feasibility and early prototyping phases is usually the best approach for our clients as there is a lot of ‘discovery’ to be done at this stage.
Here are 2 reasons why paying for work in blocks and proceeding one step at a time is appropriate at this early stage of your project:

1. The cost of the materials needed for the prototypes is not known at this stage
2. The scope might change – this is very common, as the designs or the components we suggest might give you some new ideas. A new scope comes with a different workload.

At any point, as long as you have paid for everything we have done and all the expenses we have incurred (and that you know of) you can decide to stop the project, and the intellectual property of our work belongs to you alone as specified in our contract.

China offers creators, entrepreneurs, and hardware startups the manufacturing infrastructure to handle new product manufacturing, but it’s the preparation and management of mass production that often leaves hardware startups & SMEs over-budget and running behind on delivery.

One only needs to visit Kickstarter or Indiegogo to see the abysmal proportion of projects that are not delivered on time due to unexpected problems and extra costs.

Inexperienced founders are overly optimistic about the capabilities of Chinese manufacturers and about the ‘readiness for production’ of their new product design.

99% of Chinese manufacturers want to go to mass production as soon as possible, even if this has relatively high-quality risks. They are consistently over-enthusiastic and tend to under-deliver on their promises.

Subsequently, hardware startups don’t see all the risks, don’t challenge predictions and reassurances, and don’t enlist the assistance of people who have done it before. They also have pressure to get first to market and increase the product ROI (Return on Investment) by an early introduction.

We’ve seen people in this position in our home city of Shenzhen and the rest of China get burnt too often, so this is why Sofeast’s production engineers and project managers specialize in new product introduction (NPI) and design for manufacturing (DFM).

First, you will need more than an idea. At the very least, get a first version of the design, as well as a general description (intended use, etc.) on paper.

Second, before sharing the design with anybody, make sure to have a solid agreement in place that targets all the usual risks (not your standard non-disclosure agreement).

Third, you might go in the wrong direction and spend many months working with the wrong type of suppliers and, in the end, get nowhere. Talk with a company like ours. We have worked with a number of people who were in your situation.

You may also like our guide to manufacturing a new product in China.

Yes, for several reasons.

Because you might need to make changes to your design to make it easy to manufacture in China or to have a chance at hitting your budget & timing targets.

👉 Our product engineers are ready to help if you need assistance with product design and development.

And because you need to know what type of supplier you should work with even before starting the search:

Yes. And this should be planned from the design stage. Many projects have gone very far into prototyping and even production, only to be dropped because they had to get back to square 1… a new iteration of the design that takes certification constraints into account.

We have experience with the most common types of certification for the US and Europe.

Learn more about certifications and compliance here: Compliance Testing Consulting

What we do most often is a hybrid approach:

Our liability is limited to the amount of fees you paid to us for the particular job that led to that issue.

The most important thing to focus on is to find ways to avoid such issues or to detect them through reviews and reliability testing. As a general rule, all design changes have to be approved by your side and their impact has to be evaluated with a proper testing plan.

You understand that, if we provide services for 1,000 USD, we can’t accept liability for 1 million USD. We are not aware of any company that accepts this level of risk. However, naturally, we will do the design work to correct any mistake for free.

You pay for that work and you own all the resulting deliverables.

The only exception is the templates we have developed over the years — you do not have the right to re-use them.

If you only have the design of your product and you still have all the development work ahead of you, you will generally need to go through these 6 NPI steps:

• 1. Defining specifications
• 2. Feasibility/proof of concept
• 3. Prototyping
• 4. Tooling
• 5. Pre-production prep
• 6. Production

We provide a comprehensive new product introduction framework and support throughout.

You can explore our NPI process in detail in this video walkthrough:

Not directly, however, we do have a list of partners including law firms and companies who specialize in Chinese business matters such as trademark registration whom we can put you in touch with.

Yes, we can.

We own a contract manufacturing subsidiary, Agilian Technology, near Hong Kong where we provide comprehensive assembly and manufacturing services.

If we’ve already worked with you on sourcing, product development, prototyping, etc, we can go on and manufacture many types of consumer and electromechanical products at Agilian.

You can also explore our various contract manufacturing solutions here.

No. We work on a purely on-demand basis.

You select which of our solutions you want to purchase, pay, and we do the work. We don’t do work in return for equity shares in hardware startups’ businesses.

Please note, any product IP generated belongs solely to you as you have paid for that. We do not retain your product IP after you have finished working with us.

If you need support to move your hardware startup and product idea forward in return for equity shares, finding an incubator or hardware accelerator could be the right move for you.

Yes, we can!

Our in-house R&D team has experience in designing and testing packaging.

We will either source the designed packaging from local manufacturers or may be able to manufacture it ourselves, too.

Packaging actually shouldn’t be an afterthought – it’s an important part of the new product launch project, as it both protects and advertises your product. With this in mind, we created this guide to common packaging types to help you decide what’s best for your products.

We employ a software engineer who can write the firmware for your product. However, when it comes to mobile apps for users, our customers usually take care of that development work.

This is a really difficult question to answer as every new product launch project is different, however, we’ll try to give you some ballpark figures.

• Engineering design: 15 days to 6 months
• Accelerated life testing on prototypes and iterations until a final approved prototype: 1 to 3 months
• Tooling fabrication: often around 6 weeks
• Pre-production preparation, including pilot run(s): 1 to 3 months
• Mass production (first batch): 1 to 3 months

Note: we typically help clients after the industrial design has been completed.

Sometimes the discussions about a new project between a new customer and Sofeast take many weeks. In cases like this, while we were waiting for clarifications on the scope of work etc. from a new customer, some other projects get confirmed and work starts on them. Therefore, to avoid over-committing and then under-delivering (asking a customer to keep waiting and waiting), we sometimes have to refuse the original project until such a time that more technical resources are once again available.
The Sofeast group is actively trying to hire more technical project managers to lessen the chances of such a refusal, by the way.

 A few points that could lead to difficulties in us taking on your R&D project

• Lots of email exchanges and calls are needed to confirm the scope of the next steps and plan to follow. 
• A customer has difficulties communicating directly with our team in China and requests to have senior managers involved in every discussion. Unfortunately, it’s just not realistic for our senior management team to be involved in every aspect of every project.
• The customer wants us to commit to getting to a certain deliverable while the design is far from mature, which means there are probably going to be a number of unforeseen challenges and it’s somewhat likely we’ll spend more resources than budgeted.
• Instead of going “agile” and going for small chunks of work and quick turnaround, the customer wants to go directly to a functional prototype. That means even more likelihood of unforeseen challenges that will creep in and cause us to spend many more resources than planned (and paid for). This type of “waterfall” approach tends to lead to long delays and to spending a lot more hours than planned.

We do not lock you into R&D projects by requiring a fixed price.

For the design phase, you can pay block by block, for example starting with a number of hours of industrial design work, seeing what we provide, and then, once you’re satisfied, paying for the following block of work, and so on.

Paying step-by-step or paying a fixed amount per week during the feasibility and early prototyping phases is usually the best approach for our clients as there is a lot of ‘discovery’ to be done at this stage.
Here are 2 reasons why paying for work in blocks and proceeding one step at a time is appropriate at this early stage of your project:

1. The cost of the materials needed for the prototypes is not known at this stage
2. The scope might change – this is very common, as the designs or the components we suggest might give you some new ideas. A new scope comes with a different workload.

At any point, as long as you have paid for everything we have done and all the expenses we have incurred (and that you know of) you can decide to stop the project, and the intellectual property of our work belongs to you alone as specified in our contract.

China offers creators, entrepreneurs, and hardware startups the manufacturing infrastructure to handle new product manufacturing, but it’s the preparation and management of mass production that often leaves hardware startups & SMEs over-budget and running behind on delivery.

One only needs to visit Kickstarter or Indiegogo to see the abysmal proportion of projects that are not delivered on time due to unexpected problems and extra costs.

Inexperienced founders are overly optimistic about the capabilities of Chinese manufacturers and about the ‘readiness for production’ of their new product design.

99% of Chinese manufacturers want to go to mass production as soon as possible, even if this has relatively high-quality risks. They are consistently over-enthusiastic and tend to under-deliver on their promises.

Subsequently, hardware startups don’t see all the risks, don’t challenge predictions and reassurances, and don’t enlist the assistance of people who have done it before. They also have pressure to get first to market and increase the product ROI (Return on Investment) by an early introduction.

We’ve seen people in this position in our home city of Shenzhen and the rest of China get burnt too often, so this is why Sofeast’s production engineers and project managers specialize in new product introduction (NPI) and design for manufacturing (DFM).

First, you will need more than an idea. At the very least, get a first version of the design, as well as a general description (intended use, etc.) on paper.

Second, before sharing the design with anybody, make sure to have a solid agreement in place that targets all the usual risks (not your standard non-disclosure agreement).

Third, you might go in the wrong direction and spend many months working with the wrong type of suppliers and, in the end, get nowhere. Talk with a company like ours. We have worked with a number of people who were in your situation.

You may also like our guide to manufacturing a new product in China.

Yes, for several reasons.

Because you might need to make changes to your design to make it easy to manufacture in China or to have a chance at hitting your budget & timing targets.

👉 Our product engineers are ready to help if you need assistance with product design and development.

And because you need to know what type of supplier you should work with even before starting the search:

Yes. And this should be planned from the design stage. Many projects have gone very far into prototyping and even production, only to be dropped because they had to get back to square 1… a new iteration of the design that takes certification constraints into account.

We have experience with the most common types of certification for the US and Europe.

Learn more about certifications and compliance here: Compliance Testing Consulting

What we do most often is a hybrid approach:

Our liability is limited to the amount of fees you paid to us for the particular job that led to that issue.

The most important thing to focus on is to find ways to avoid such issues or to detect them through reviews and reliability testing. As a general rule, all design changes have to be approved by your side and their impact has to be evaluated with a proper testing plan.

You understand that, if we provide services for 1,000 USD, we can’t accept liability for 1 million USD. We are not aware of any company that accepts this level of risk. However, naturally, we will do the design work to correct any mistake for free.

You pay for that work and you own all the resulting deliverables.

The only exception is the templates we have developed over the years — you do not have the right to re-use them.

If you only have the design of your product and you still have all the development work ahead of you, you will generally need to go through these 6 NPI steps:

• 1. Defining specifications
• 2. Feasibility/proof of concept
• 3. Prototyping
• 4. Tooling
• 5. Pre-production prep
• 6. Production

We provide a comprehensive new product introduction framework and support throughout.

You can explore our NPI process in detail in this video walkthrough:

Not directly, however, we do have a list of partners including law firms and companies who specialize in Chinese business matters such as trademark registration whom we can put you in touch with.

Yes, we can.

We own a contract manufacturing subsidiary, Agilian Technology, near Hong Kong where we provide comprehensive assembly and manufacturing services.

If we’ve already worked with you on sourcing, product development, prototyping, etc, we can go on and manufacture many types of consumer and electromechanical products at Agilian.

You can also explore our various contract manufacturing solutions here.

No. We work on a purely on-demand basis.

You select which of our solutions you want to purchase, pay, and we do the work. We don’t do work in return for equity shares in hardware startups’ businesses.

Please note, any product IP generated belongs solely to you as you have paid for that. We do not retain your product IP after you have finished working with us.

If you need support to move your hardware startup and product idea forward in return for equity shares, finding an incubator or hardware accelerator could be the right move for you.

Yes, we can!

Our in-house R&D team has experience in designing and testing packaging.

We will either source the designed packaging from local manufacturers or may be able to manufacture it ourselves, too.

Packaging actually shouldn’t be an afterthought – it’s an important part of the new product launch project, as it both protects and advertises your product. With this in mind, we created this guide to common packaging types to help you decide what’s best for your products.

We employ a software engineer who can write the firmware for your product. However, when it comes to mobile apps for users, our customers usually take care of that development work.

This is a really difficult question to answer as every new product launch project is different, however, we’ll try to give you some ballpark figures.

• Engineering design: 15 days to 6 months
• Accelerated life testing on prototypes and iterations until a final approved prototype: 1 to 3 months
• Tooling fabrication: often around 6 weeks
• Pre-production preparation, including pilot run(s): 1 to 3 months
• Mass production (first batch): 1 to 3 months

Note: we typically help clients after the industrial design has been completed.

Sometimes the discussions about a new project between a new customer and Sofeast take many weeks. In cases like this, while we were waiting for clarifications on the scope of work etc. from a new customer, some other projects get confirmed and work starts on them. Therefore, to avoid over-committing and then under-delivering (asking a customer to keep waiting and waiting), we sometimes have to refuse the original project until such a time that more technical resources are once again available.
The Sofeast group is actively trying to hire more technical project managers to lessen the chances of such a refusal, by the way.

 A few points that could lead to difficulties in us taking on your R&D project

• Lots of email exchanges and calls are needed to confirm the scope of the next steps and plan to follow. 
• A customer has difficulties communicating directly with our team in China and requests to have senior managers involved in every discussion. Unfortunately, it’s just not realistic for our senior management team to be involved in every aspect of every project.
• The customer wants us to commit to getting to a certain deliverable while the design is far from mature, which means there are probably going to be a number of unforeseen challenges and it’s somewhat likely we’ll spend more resources than budgeted.
• Instead of going “agile” and going for small chunks of work and quick turnaround, the customer wants to go directly to a functional prototype. That means even more likelihood of unforeseen challenges that will creep in and cause us to spend many more resources than planned (and paid for). This type of “waterfall” approach tends to lead to long delays and to spending a lot more hours than planned.

We do not lock you into R&D projects by requiring a fixed price.

For the design phase, you can pay block by block, for example starting with a number of hours of industrial design work, seeing what we provide, and then, once you’re satisfied, paying for the following block of work, and so on.

Paying step-by-step or paying a fixed amount per week during the feasibility and early prototyping phases is usually the best approach for our clients as there is a lot of ‘discovery’ to be done at this stage.
Here are 2 reasons why paying for work in blocks and proceeding one step at a time is appropriate at this early stage of your project:

1. The cost of the materials needed for the prototypes is not known at this stage
2. The scope might change – this is very common, as the designs or the components we suggest might give you some new ideas. A new scope comes with a different workload.

At any point, as long as you have paid for everything we have done and all the expenses we have incurred (and that you know of) you can decide to stop the project, and the intellectual property of our work belongs to you alone as specified in our contract.

China offers creators, entrepreneurs, and hardware startups the manufacturing infrastructure to handle new product manufacturing, but it’s the preparation and management of mass production that often leaves hardware startups & SMEs over-budget and running behind on delivery.

One only needs to visit Kickstarter or Indiegogo to see the abysmal proportion of projects that are not delivered on time due to unexpected problems and extra costs.

Inexperienced founders are overly optimistic about the capabilities of Chinese manufacturers and about the ‘readiness for production’ of their new product design.

99% of Chinese manufacturers want to go to mass production as soon as possible, even if this has relatively high-quality risks. They are consistently over-enthusiastic and tend to under-deliver on their promises.

Subsequently, hardware startups don’t see all the risks, don’t challenge predictions and reassurances, and don’t enlist the assistance of people who have done it before. They also have pressure to get first to market and increase the product ROI (Return on Investment) by an early introduction.

We’ve seen people in this position in our home city of Shenzhen and the rest of China get burnt too often, so this is why Sofeast’s production engineers and project managers specialize in new product introduction (NPI) and design for manufacturing (DFM).

First, you will need more than an idea. At the very least, get a first version of the design, as well as a general description (intended use, etc.) on paper.

Second, before sharing the design with anybody, make sure to have a solid agreement in place that targets all the usual risks (not your standard non-disclosure agreement).

Third, you might go in the wrong direction and spend many months working with the wrong type of suppliers and, in the end, get nowhere. Talk with a company like ours. We have worked with a number of people who were in your situation.

You may also like our guide to manufacturing a new product in China.

Yes, for several reasons.

Because you might need to make changes to your design to make it easy to manufacture in China or to have a chance at hitting your budget & timing targets.

👉 Our product engineers are ready to help if you need assistance with product design and development.

And because you need to know what type of supplier you should work with even before starting the search:

Yes. And this should be planned from the design stage. Many projects have gone very far into prototyping and even production, only to be dropped because they had to get back to square 1… a new iteration of the design that takes certification constraints into account.

We have experience with the most common types of certification for the US and Europe.

Learn more about certifications and compliance here: Compliance Testing Consulting

What we do most often is a hybrid approach:

Our liability is limited to the amount of fees you paid to us for the particular job that led to that issue.

The most important thing to focus on is to find ways to avoid such issues or to detect them through reviews and reliability testing. As a general rule, all design changes have to be approved by your side and their impact has to be evaluated with a proper testing plan.

You understand that, if we provide services for 1,000 USD, we can’t accept liability for 1 million USD. We are not aware of any company that accepts this level of risk. However, naturally, we will do the design work to correct any mistake for free.

You pay for that work and you own all the resulting deliverables.

The only exception is the templates we have developed over the years — you do not have the right to re-use them.

If you only have the design of your product and you still have all the development work ahead of you, you will generally need to go through these 6 NPI steps:

• 1. Defining specifications
• 2. Feasibility/proof of concept
• 3. Prototyping
• 4. Tooling
• 5. Pre-production prep
• 6. Production

We provide a comprehensive new product introduction framework and support throughout.

You can explore our NPI process in detail in this video walkthrough:

Not directly, however, we do have a list of partners including law firms and companies who specialize in Chinese business matters such as trademark registration whom we can put you in touch with.

Yes, we can.

We own a contract manufacturing subsidiary, Agilian Technology, near Hong Kong where we provide comprehensive assembly and manufacturing services.

If we’ve already worked with you on sourcing, product development, prototyping, etc, we can go on and manufacture many types of consumer and electromechanical products at Agilian.

You can also explore our various contract manufacturing solutions here.

No. We work on a purely on-demand basis.

You select which of our solutions you want to purchase, pay, and we do the work. We don’t do work in return for equity shares in hardware startups’ businesses.

Please note, any product IP generated belongs solely to you as you have paid for that. We do not retain your product IP after you have finished working with us.

If you need support to move your hardware startup and product idea forward in return for equity shares, finding an incubator or hardware accelerator could be the right move for you.

Yes, we can!

Our in-house R&D team has experience in designing and testing packaging.

We will either source the designed packaging from local manufacturers or may be able to manufacture it ourselves, too.

Packaging actually shouldn’t be an afterthought – it’s an important part of the new product launch project, as it both protects and advertises your product. With this in mind, we created this guide to common packaging types to help you decide what’s best for your products.

We employ a software engineer who can write the firmware for your product. However, when it comes to mobile apps for users, our customers usually take care of that development work.

This is a really difficult question to answer as every new product launch project is different, however, we’ll try to give you some ballpark figures.

• Engineering design: 15 days to 6 months
• Accelerated life testing on prototypes and iterations until a final approved prototype: 1 to 3 months
• Tooling fabrication: often around 6 weeks
• Pre-production preparation, including pilot run(s): 1 to 3 months
• Mass production (first batch): 1 to 3 months

Note: we typically help clients after the industrial design has been completed.

Sometimes the discussions about a new project between a new customer and Sofeast take many weeks. In cases like this, while we were waiting for clarifications on the scope of work etc. from a new customer, some other projects get confirmed and work starts on them. Therefore, to avoid over-committing and then under-delivering (asking a customer to keep waiting and waiting), we sometimes have to refuse the original project until such a time that more technical resources are once again available.
The Sofeast group is actively trying to hire more technical project managers to lessen the chances of such a refusal, by the way.

 A few points that could lead to difficulties in us taking on your R&D project

• Lots of email exchanges and calls are needed to confirm the scope of the next steps and plan to follow. 
• A customer has difficulties communicating directly with our team in China and requests to have senior managers involved in every discussion. Unfortunately, it’s just not realistic for our senior management team to be involved in every aspect of every project.
• The customer wants us to commit to getting to a certain deliverable while the design is far from mature, which means there are probably going to be a number of unforeseen challenges and it’s somewhat likely we’ll spend more resources than budgeted.
• Instead of going “agile” and going for small chunks of work and quick turnaround, the customer wants to go directly to a functional prototype. That means even more likelihood of unforeseen challenges that will creep in and cause us to spend many more resources than planned (and paid for). This type of “waterfall” approach tends to lead to long delays and to spending a lot more hours than planned.

We do not lock you into R&D projects by requiring a fixed price.

For the design phase, you can pay block by block, for example starting with a number of hours of industrial design work, seeing what we provide, and then, once you’re satisfied, paying for the following block of work, and so on.

Paying step-by-step or paying a fixed amount per week during the feasibility and early prototyping phases is usually the best approach for our clients as there is a lot of ‘discovery’ to be done at this stage.
Here are 2 reasons why paying for work in blocks and proceeding one step at a time is appropriate at this early stage of your project:

1. The cost of the materials needed for the prototypes is not known at this stage
2. The scope might change – this is very common, as the designs or the components we suggest might give you some new ideas. A new scope comes with a different workload.

At any point, as long as you have paid for everything we have done and all the expenses we have incurred (and that you know of) you can decide to stop the project, and the intellectual property of our work belongs to you alone as specified in our contract.

China offers creators, entrepreneurs, and hardware startups the manufacturing infrastructure to handle new product manufacturing, but it’s the preparation and management of mass production that often leaves hardware startups & SMEs over-budget and running behind on delivery.

One only needs to visit Kickstarter or Indiegogo to see the abysmal proportion of projects that are not delivered on time due to unexpected problems and extra costs.

Inexperienced founders are overly optimistic about the capabilities of Chinese manufacturers and about the ‘readiness for production’ of their new product design.

99% of Chinese manufacturers want to go to mass production as soon as possible, even if this has relatively high-quality risks. They are consistently over-enthusiastic and tend to under-deliver on their promises.

Subsequently, hardware startups don’t see all the risks, don’t challenge predictions and reassurances, and don’t enlist the assistance of people who have done it before. They also have pressure to get first to market and increase the product ROI (Return on Investment) by an early introduction.

We’ve seen people in this position in our home city of Shenzhen and the rest of China get burnt too often, so this is why Sofeast’s production engineers and project managers specialize in new product introduction (NPI) and design for manufacturing (DFM).

First, you will need more than an idea. At the very least, get a first version of the design, as well as a general description (intended use, etc.) on paper.

Second, before sharing the design with anybody, make sure to have a solid agreement in place that targets all the usual risks (not your standard non-disclosure agreement).

Third, you might go in the wrong direction and spend many months working with the wrong type of suppliers and, in the end, get nowhere. Talk with a company like ours. We have worked with a number of people who were in your situation.

You may also like our guide to manufacturing a new product in China.

Yes, for several reasons.

Because you might need to make changes to your design to make it easy to manufacture in China or to have a chance at hitting your budget & timing targets.

👉 Our product engineers are ready to help if you need assistance with product design and development.

And because you need to know what type of supplier you should work with even before starting the search:

Yes. And this should be planned from the design stage. Many projects have gone very far into prototyping and even production, only to be dropped because they had to get back to square 1… a new iteration of the design that takes certification constraints into account.

We have experience with the most common types of certification for the US and Europe.

Learn more about certifications and compliance here: Compliance Testing Consulting

What we do most often is a hybrid approach:

Our liability is limited to the amount of fees you paid to us for the particular job that led to that issue.

The most important thing to focus on is to find ways to avoid such issues or to detect them through reviews and reliability testing. As a general rule, all design changes have to be approved by your side and their impact has to be evaluated with a proper testing plan.

You understand that, if we provide services for 1,000 USD, we can’t accept liability for 1 million USD. We are not aware of any company that accepts this level of risk. However, naturally, we will do the design work to correct any mistake for free.

You pay for that work and you own all the resulting deliverables.

The only exception is the templates we have developed over the years — you do not have the right to re-use them.

If you only have the design of your product and you still have all the development work ahead of you, you will generally need to go through these 6 NPI steps:

• 1. Defining specifications
• 2. Feasibility/proof of concept
• 3. Prototyping
• 4. Tooling
• 5. Pre-production prep
• 6. Production

We provide a comprehensive new product introduction framework and support throughout.

You can explore our NPI process in detail in this video walkthrough:

Not directly, however, we do have a list of partners including law firms and companies who specialize in Chinese business matters such as trademark registration whom we can put you in touch with.

Yes, we can.

We own a contract manufacturing subsidiary, Agilian Technology, near Hong Kong where we provide comprehensive assembly and manufacturing services.

If we’ve already worked with you on sourcing, product development, prototyping, etc, we can go on and manufacture many types of consumer and electromechanical products at Agilian.

You can also explore our various contract manufacturing solutions here.

No. We work on a purely on-demand basis.

You select which of our solutions you want to purchase, pay, and we do the work. We don’t do work in return for equity shares in hardware startups’ businesses.

Please note, any product IP generated belongs solely to you as you have paid for that. We do not retain your product IP after you have finished working with us.

If you need support to move your hardware startup and product idea forward in return for equity shares, finding an incubator or hardware accelerator could be the right move for you.

Yes, we can!

Our in-house R&D team has experience in designing and testing packaging.

We will either source the designed packaging from local manufacturers or may be able to manufacture it ourselves, too.

Packaging actually shouldn’t be an afterthought – it’s an important part of the new product launch project, as it both protects and advertises your product. With this in mind, we created this guide to common packaging types to help you decide what’s best for your products.

We employ a software engineer who can write the firmware for your product. However, when it comes to mobile apps for users, our customers usually take care of that development work.

This is a really difficult question to answer as every new product launch project is different, however, we’ll try to give you some ballpark figures.

• Engineering design: 15 days to 6 months
• Accelerated life testing on prototypes and iterations until a final approved prototype: 1 to 3 months
• Tooling fabrication: often around 6 weeks
• Pre-production preparation, including pilot run(s): 1 to 3 months
• Mass production (first batch): 1 to 3 months

Note: we typically help clients after the industrial design has been completed.

Sometimes the discussions about a new project between a new customer and Sofeast take many weeks. In cases like this, while we were waiting for clarifications on the scope of work etc. from a new customer, some other projects get confirmed and work starts on them. Therefore, to avoid over-committing and then under-delivering (asking a customer to keep waiting and waiting), we sometimes have to refuse the original project until such a time that more technical resources are once again available.
The Sofeast group is actively trying to hire more technical project managers to lessen the chances of such a refusal, by the way.

 A few points that could lead to difficulties in us taking on your R&D project

• Lots of email exchanges and calls are needed to confirm the scope of the next steps and plan to follow. 
• A customer has difficulties communicating directly with our team in China and requests to have senior managers involved in every discussion. Unfortunately, it’s just not realistic for our senior management team to be involved in every aspect of every project.
• The customer wants us to commit to getting to a certain deliverable while the design is far from mature, which means there are probably going to be a number of unforeseen challenges and it’s somewhat likely we’ll spend more resources than budgeted.
• Instead of going “agile” and going for small chunks of work and quick turnaround, the customer wants to go directly to a functional prototype. That means even more likelihood of unforeseen challenges that will creep in and cause us to spend many more resources than planned (and paid for). This type of “waterfall” approach tends to lead to long delays and to spending a lot more hours than planned.

We do not lock you into R&D projects by requiring a fixed price.

For the design phase, you can pay block by block, for example starting with a number of hours of industrial design work, seeing what we provide, and then, once you’re satisfied, paying for the following block of work, and so on.

Paying step-by-step or paying a fixed amount per week during the feasibility and early prototyping phases is usually the best approach for our clients as there is a lot of ‘discovery’ to be done at this stage.
Here are 2 reasons why paying for work in blocks and proceeding one step at a time is appropriate at this early stage of your project:

1. The cost of the materials needed for the prototypes is not known at this stage
2. The scope might change – this is very common, as the designs or the components we suggest might give you some new ideas. A new scope comes with a different workload.

At any point, as long as you have paid for everything we have done and all the expenses we have incurred (and that you know of) you can decide to stop the project, and the intellectual property of our work belongs to you alone as specified in our contract.

China offers creators, entrepreneurs, and hardware startups the manufacturing infrastructure to handle new product manufacturing, but it’s the preparation and management of mass production that often leaves hardware startups & SMEs over-budget and running behind on delivery.

One only needs to visit Kickstarter or Indiegogo to see the abysmal proportion of projects that are not delivered on time due to unexpected problems and extra costs.

Inexperienced founders are overly optimistic about the capabilities of Chinese manufacturers and about the ‘readiness for production’ of their new product design.

99% of Chinese manufacturers want to go to mass production as soon as possible, even if this has relatively high-quality risks. They are consistently over-enthusiastic and tend to under-deliver on their promises.

Subsequently, hardware startups don’t see all the risks, don’t challenge predictions and reassurances, and don’t enlist the assistance of people who have done it before. They also have pressure to get first to market and increase the product ROI (Return on Investment) by an early introduction.

We’ve seen people in this position in our home city of Shenzhen and the rest of China get burnt too often, so this is why Sofeast’s production engineers and project managers specialize in new product introduction (NPI) and design for manufacturing (DFM).

First, you will need more than an idea. At the very least, get a first version of the design, as well as a general description (intended use, etc.) on paper.

Second, before sharing the design with anybody, make sure to have a solid agreement in place that targets all the usual risks (not your standard non-disclosure agreement).

Third, you might go in the wrong direction and spend many months working with the wrong type of suppliers and, in the end, get nowhere. Talk with a company like ours. We have worked with a number of people who were in your situation.

You may also like our guide to manufacturing a new product in China.

Yes, for several reasons.

Because you might need to make changes to your design to make it easy to manufacture in China or to have a chance at hitting your budget & timing targets.

👉 Our product engineers are ready to help if you need assistance with product design and development.

And because you need to know what type of supplier you should work with even before starting the search:

Yes. And this should be planned from the design stage. Many projects have gone very far into prototyping and even production, only to be dropped because they had to get back to square 1… a new iteration of the design that takes certification constraints into account.

We have experience with the most common types of certification for the US and Europe.

Learn more about certifications and compliance here: Compliance Testing Consulting

What we do most often is a hybrid approach:

Our liability is limited to the amount of fees you paid to us for the particular job that led to that issue.

The most important thing to focus on is to find ways to avoid such issues or to detect them through reviews and reliability testing. As a general rule, all design changes have to be approved by your side and their impact has to be evaluated with a proper testing plan.

You understand that, if we provide services for 1,000 USD, we can’t accept liability for 1 million USD. We are not aware of any company that accepts this level of risk. However, naturally, we will do the design work to correct any mistake for free.

You pay for that work and you own all the resulting deliverables.

The only exception is the templates we have developed over the years — you do not have the right to re-use them.

If you only have the design of your product and you still have all the development work ahead of you, you will generally need to go through these 6 NPI steps:

• 1. Defining specifications
• 2. Feasibility/proof of concept
• 3. Prototyping
• 4. Tooling
• 5. Pre-production prep
• 6. Production

We provide a comprehensive new product introduction framework and support throughout.

You can explore our NPI process in detail in this video walkthrough:

Not directly, however, we do have a list of partners including law firms and companies who specialize in Chinese business matters such as trademark registration whom we can put you in touch with.

Yes, we can.

We own a contract manufacturing subsidiary, Agilian Technology, near Hong Kong where we provide comprehensive assembly and manufacturing services.

If we’ve already worked with you on sourcing, product development, prototyping, etc, we can go on and manufacture many types of consumer and electromechanical products at Agilian.

You can also explore our various contract manufacturing solutions here.

No. We work on a purely on-demand basis.

You select which of our solutions you want to purchase, pay, and we do the work. We don’t do work in return for equity shares in hardware startups’ businesses.

Please note, any product IP generated belongs solely to you as you have paid for that. We do not retain your product IP after you have finished working with us.

If you need support to move your hardware startup and product idea forward in return for equity shares, finding an incubator or hardware accelerator could be the right move for you.

Yes, we can!

Our in-house R&D team has experience in designing and testing packaging.

We will either source the designed packaging from local manufacturers or may be able to manufacture it ourselves, too.

Packaging actually shouldn’t be an afterthought – it’s an important part of the new product launch project, as it both protects and advertises your product. With this in mind, we created this guide to common packaging types to help you decide what’s best for your products.

We employ a software engineer who can write the firmware for your product. However, when it comes to mobile apps for users, our customers usually take care of that development work.

This is a really difficult question to answer as every new product launch project is different, however, we’ll try to give you some ballpark figures.

• Engineering design: 15 days to 6 months
• Accelerated life testing on prototypes and iterations until a final approved prototype: 1 to 3 months
• Tooling fabrication: often around 6 weeks
• Pre-production preparation, including pilot run(s): 1 to 3 months
• Mass production (first batch): 1 to 3 months

Note: we typically help clients after the industrial design has been completed.

Sometimes the discussions about a new project between a new customer and Sofeast take many weeks. In cases like this, while we were waiting for clarifications on the scope of work etc. from a new customer, some other projects get confirmed and work starts on them. Therefore, to avoid over-committing and then under-delivering (asking a customer to keep waiting and waiting), we sometimes have to refuse the original project until such a time that more technical resources are once again available.
The Sofeast group is actively trying to hire more technical project managers to lessen the chances of such a refusal, by the way.

 A few points that could lead to difficulties in us taking on your R&D project

• Lots of email exchanges and calls are needed to confirm the scope of the next steps and plan to follow. 
• A customer has difficulties communicating directly with our team in China and requests to have senior managers involved in every discussion. Unfortunately, it’s just not realistic for our senior management team to be involved in every aspect of every project.
• The customer wants us to commit to getting to a certain deliverable while the design is far from mature, which means there are probably going to be a number of unforeseen challenges and it’s somewhat likely we’ll spend more resources than budgeted.
• Instead of going “agile” and going for small chunks of work and quick turnaround, the customer wants to go directly to a functional prototype. That means even more likelihood of unforeseen challenges that will creep in and cause us to spend many more resources than planned (and paid for). This type of “waterfall” approach tends to lead to long delays and to spending a lot more hours than planned.

We do not lock you into R&D projects by requiring a fixed price.

For the design phase, you can pay block by block, for example starting with a number of hours of industrial design work, seeing what we provide, and then, once you’re satisfied, paying for the following block of work, and so on.

Paying step-by-step or paying a fixed amount per week during the feasibility and early prototyping phases is usually the best approach for our clients as there is a lot of ‘discovery’ to be done at this stage.
Here are 2 reasons why paying for work in blocks and proceeding one step at a time is appropriate at this early stage of your project:

1. The cost of the materials needed for the prototypes is not known at this stage
2. The scope might change – this is very common, as the designs or the components we suggest might give you some new ideas. A new scope comes with a different workload.

At any point, as long as you have paid for everything we have done and all the expenses we have incurred (and that you know of) you can decide to stop the project, and the intellectual property of our work belongs to you alone as specified in our contract.

China offers creators, entrepreneurs, and hardware startups the manufacturing infrastructure to handle new product manufacturing, but it’s the preparation and management of mass production that often leaves hardware startups & SMEs over-budget and running behind on delivery.

One only needs to visit Kickstarter or Indiegogo to see the abysmal proportion of projects that are not delivered on time due to unexpected problems and extra costs.

Inexperienced founders are overly optimistic about the capabilities of Chinese manufacturers and about the ‘readiness for production’ of their new product design.

99% of Chinese manufacturers want to go to mass production as soon as possible, even if this has relatively high-quality risks. They are consistently over-enthusiastic and tend to under-deliver on their promises.

Subsequently, hardware startups don’t see all the risks, don’t challenge predictions and reassurances, and don’t enlist the assistance of people who have done it before. They also have pressure to get first to market and increase the product ROI (Return on Investment) by an early introduction.

We’ve seen people in this position in our home city of Shenzhen and the rest of China get burnt too often, so this is why Sofeast’s production engineers and project managers specialize in new product introduction (NPI) and design for manufacturing (DFM).

First, you will need more than an idea. At the very least, get a first version of the design, as well as a general description (intended use, etc.) on paper.

Second, before sharing the design with anybody, make sure to have a solid agreement in place that targets all the usual risks (not your standard non-disclosure agreement).

Third, you might go in the wrong direction and spend many months working with the wrong type of suppliers and, in the end, get nowhere. Talk with a company like ours. We have worked with a number of people who were in your situation.

You may also like our guide to manufacturing a new product in China.

Yes, for several reasons.

Because you might need to make changes to your design to make it easy to manufacture in China or to have a chance at hitting your budget & timing targets.

👉 Our product engineers are ready to help if you need assistance with product design and development.

And because you need to know what type of supplier you should work with even before starting the search:

Yes. And this should be planned from the design stage. Many projects have gone very far into prototyping and even production, only to be dropped because they had to get back to square 1… a new iteration of the design that takes certification constraints into account.

We have experience with the most common types of certification for the US and Europe.

Learn more about certifications and compliance here: Compliance Testing Consulting

What we do most often is a hybrid approach:

Our liability is limited to the amount of fees you paid to us for the particular job that led to that issue.

The most important thing to focus on is to find ways to avoid such issues or to detect them through reviews and reliability testing. As a general rule, all design changes have to be approved by your side and their impact has to be evaluated with a proper testing plan.

You understand that, if we provide services for 1,000 USD, we can’t accept liability for 1 million USD. We are not aware of any company that accepts this level of risk. However, naturally, we will do the design work to correct any mistake for free.

You pay for that work and you own all the resulting deliverables.

The only exception is the templates we have developed over the years — you do not have the right to re-use them.

If you only have the design of your product and you still have all the development work ahead of you, you will generally need to go through these 6 NPI steps:

• 1. Defining specifications
• 2. Feasibility/proof of concept
• 3. Prototyping
• 4. Tooling
• 5. Pre-production prep
• 6. Production

We provide a comprehensive new product introduction framework and support throughout.

You can explore our NPI process in detail in this video walkthrough:

Not directly, however, we do have a list of partners including law firms and companies who specialize in Chinese business matters such as trademark registration whom we can put you in touch with.

Yes, we can.

We own a contract manufacturing subsidiary, Agilian Technology, near Hong Kong where we provide comprehensive assembly and manufacturing services.

If we’ve already worked with you on sourcing, product development, prototyping, etc, we can go on and manufacture many types of consumer and electromechanical products at Agilian.

You can also explore our various contract manufacturing solutions here.

No. We work on a purely on-demand basis.

You select which of our solutions you want to purchase, pay, and we do the work. We don’t do work in return for equity shares in hardware startups’ businesses.

Please note, any product IP generated belongs solely to you as you have paid for that. We do not retain your product IP after you have finished working with us.

If you need support to move your hardware startup and product idea forward in return for equity shares, finding an incubator or hardware accelerator could be the right move for you.

Yes, we can!

Our in-house R&D team has experience in designing and testing packaging.

We will either source the designed packaging from local manufacturers or may be able to manufacture it ourselves, too.

Packaging actually shouldn’t be an afterthought – it’s an important part of the new product launch project, as it both protects and advertises your product. With this in mind, we created this guide to common packaging types to help you decide what’s best for your products.

We employ a software engineer who can write the firmware for your product. However, when it comes to mobile apps for users, our customers usually take care of that development work.

This is a really difficult question to answer as every new product launch project is different, however, we’ll try to give you some ballpark figures.

• Engineering design: 15 days to 6 months
• Accelerated life testing on prototypes and iterations until a final approved prototype: 1 to 3 months
• Tooling fabrication: often around 6 weeks
• Pre-production preparation, including pilot run(s): 1 to 3 months
• Mass production (first batch): 1 to 3 months

Note: we typically help clients after the industrial design has been completed.

Sometimes the discussions about a new project between a new customer and Sofeast take many weeks. In cases like this, while we were waiting for clarifications on the scope of work etc. from a new customer, some other projects get confirmed and work starts on them. Therefore, to avoid over-committing and then under-delivering (asking a customer to keep waiting and waiting), we sometimes have to refuse the original project until such a time that more technical resources are once again available.
The Sofeast group is actively trying to hire more technical project managers to lessen the chances of such a refusal, by the way.

 A few points that could lead to difficulties in us taking on your R&D project

• Lots of email exchanges and calls are needed to confirm the scope of the next steps and plan to follow. 
• A customer has difficulties communicating directly with our team in China and requests to have senior managers involved in every discussion. Unfortunately, it’s just not realistic for our senior management team to be involved in every aspect of every project.
• The customer wants us to commit to getting to a certain deliverable while the design is far from mature, which means there are probably going to be a number of unforeseen challenges and it’s somewhat likely we’ll spend more resources than budgeted.
• Instead of going “agile” and going for small chunks of work and quick turnaround, the customer wants to go directly to a functional prototype. That means even more likelihood of unforeseen challenges that will creep in and cause us to spend many more resources than planned (and paid for). This type of “waterfall” approach tends to lead to long delays and to spending a lot more hours than planned.

We do not lock you into R&D projects by requiring a fixed price.

For the design phase, you can pay block by block, for example starting with a number of hours of industrial design work, seeing what we provide, and then, once you’re satisfied, paying for the following block of work, and so on.

Paying step-by-step or paying a fixed amount per week during the feasibility and early prototyping phases is usually the best approach for our clients as there is a lot of ‘discovery’ to be done at this stage.
Here are 2 reasons why paying for work in blocks and proceeding one step at a time is appropriate at this early stage of your project:

1. The cost of the materials needed for the prototypes is not known at this stage
2. The scope might change – this is very common, as the designs or the components we suggest might give you some new ideas. A new scope comes with a different workload.

At any point, as long as you have paid for everything we have done and all the expenses we have incurred (and that you know of) you can decide to stop the project, and the intellectual property of our work belongs to you alone as specified in our contract.

China offers creators, entrepreneurs, and hardware startups the manufacturing infrastructure to handle new product manufacturing, but it’s the preparation and management of mass production that often leaves hardware startups & SMEs over-budget and running behind on delivery.

One only needs to visit Kickstarter or Indiegogo to see the abysmal proportion of projects that are not delivered on time due to unexpected problems and extra costs.

Inexperienced founders are overly optimistic about the capabilities of Chinese manufacturers and about the ‘readiness for production’ of their new product design.

99% of Chinese manufacturers want to go to mass production as soon as possible, even if this has relatively high-quality risks. They are consistently over-enthusiastic and tend to under-deliver on their promises.

Subsequently, hardware startups don’t see all the risks, don’t challenge predictions and reassurances, and don’t enlist the assistance of people who have done it before. They also have pressure to get first to market and increase the product ROI (Return on Investment) by an early introduction.

We’ve seen people in this position in our home city of Shenzhen and the rest of China get burnt too often, so this is why Sofeast’s production engineers and project managers specialize in new product introduction (NPI) and design for manufacturing (DFM).

First, you will need more than an idea. At the very least, get a first version of the design, as well as a general description (intended use, etc.) on paper.

Second, before sharing the design with anybody, make sure to have a solid agreement in place that targets all the usual risks (not your standard non-disclosure agreement).

Third, you might go in the wrong direction and spend many months working with the wrong type of suppliers and, in the end, get nowhere. Talk with a company like ours. We have worked with a number of people who were in your situation.

You may also like our guide to manufacturing a new product in China.

Yes, for several reasons.

Because you might need to make changes to your design to make it easy to manufacture in China or to have a chance at hitting your budget & timing targets.

👉 Our product engineers are ready to help if you need assistance with product design and development.

And because you need to know what type of supplier you should work with even before starting the search:

Yes. And this should be planned from the design stage. Many projects have gone very far into prototyping and even production, only to be dropped because they had to get back to square 1… a new iteration of the design that takes certification constraints into account.

We have experience with the most common types of certification for the US and Europe.

Learn more about certifications and compliance here: Compliance Testing Consulting

What we do most often is a hybrid approach:

Our liability is limited to the amount of fees you paid to us for the particular job that led to that issue.

The most important thing to focus on is to find ways to avoid such issues or to detect them through reviews and reliability testing. As a general rule, all design changes have to be approved by your side and their impact has to be evaluated with a proper testing plan.

You understand that, if we provide services for 1,000 USD, we can’t accept liability for 1 million USD. We are not aware of any company that accepts this level of risk. However, naturally, we will do the design work to correct any mistake for free.

You pay for that work and you own all the resulting deliverables.

The only exception is the templates we have developed over the years — you do not have the right to re-use them.

If you only have the design of your product and you still have all the development work ahead of you, you will generally need to go through these 6 NPI steps:

• 1. Defining specifications
• 2. Feasibility/proof of concept
• 3. Prototyping
• 4. Tooling
• 5. Pre-production prep
• 6. Production

We provide a comprehensive new product introduction framework and support throughout.

You can explore our NPI process in detail in this video walkthrough:

Not directly, however, we do have a list of partners including law firms and companies who specialize in Chinese business matters such as trademark registration whom we can put you in touch with.

Yes, we can.

We own a contract manufacturing subsidiary, Agilian Technology, near Hong Kong where we provide comprehensive assembly and manufacturing services.

If we’ve already worked with you on sourcing, product development, prototyping, etc, we can go on and manufacture many types of consumer and electromechanical products at Agilian.

You can also explore our various contract manufacturing solutions here.

No. We work on a purely on-demand basis.

You select which of our solutions you want to purchase, pay, and we do the work. We don’t do work in return for equity shares in hardware startups’ businesses.

Please note, any product IP generated belongs solely to you as you have paid for that. We do not retain your product IP after you have finished working with us.

If you need support to move your hardware startup and product idea forward in return for equity shares, finding an incubator or hardware accelerator could be the right move for you.

Yes, we can!

Our in-house R&D team has experience in designing and testing packaging.

We will either source the designed packaging from local manufacturers or may be able to manufacture it ourselves, too.

Packaging actually shouldn’t be an afterthought – it’s an important part of the new product launch project, as it both protects and advertises your product. With this in mind, we created this guide to common packaging types to help you decide what’s best for your products.

We employ a software engineer who can write the firmware for your product. However, when it comes to mobile apps for users, our customers usually take care of that development work.

This is a really difficult question to answer as every new product launch project is different, however, we’ll try to give you some ballpark figures.

• Engineering design: 15 days to 6 months
• Accelerated life testing on prototypes and iterations until a final approved prototype: 1 to 3 months
• Tooling fabrication: often around 6 weeks
• Pre-production preparation, including pilot run(s): 1 to 3 months
• Mass production (first batch): 1 to 3 months

Note: we typically help clients after the industrial design has been completed.

Sometimes the discussions about a new project between a new customer and Sofeast take many weeks. In cases like this, while we were waiting for clarifications on the scope of work etc. from a new customer, some other projects get confirmed and work starts on them. Therefore, to avoid over-committing and then under-delivering (asking a customer to keep waiting and waiting), we sometimes have to refuse the original project until such a time that more technical resources are once again available.
The Sofeast group is actively trying to hire more technical project managers to lessen the chances of such a refusal, by the way.

 A few points that could lead to difficulties in us taking on your R&D project

• Lots of email exchanges and calls are needed to confirm the scope of the next steps and plan to follow. 
• A customer has difficulties communicating directly with our team in China and requests to have senior managers involved in every discussion. Unfortunately, it’s just not realistic for our senior management team to be involved in every aspect of every project.
• The customer wants us to commit to getting to a certain deliverable while the design is far from mature, which means there are probably going to be a number of unforeseen challenges and it’s somewhat likely we’ll spend more resources than budgeted.
• Instead of going “agile” and going for small chunks of work and quick turnaround, the customer wants to go directly to a functional prototype. That means even more likelihood of unforeseen challenges that will creep in and cause us to spend many more resources than planned (and paid for). This type of “waterfall” approach tends to lead to long delays and to spending a lot more hours than planned.

We do not lock you into R&D projects by requiring a fixed price.

For the design phase, you can pay block by block, for example starting with a number of hours of industrial design work, seeing what we provide, and then, once you’re satisfied, paying for the following block of work, and so on.

Paying step-by-step or paying a fixed amount per week during the feasibility and early prototyping phases is usually the best approach for our clients as there is a lot of ‘discovery’ to be done at this stage.
Here are 2 reasons why paying for work in blocks and proceeding one step at a time is appropriate at this early stage of your project:

1. The cost of the materials needed for the prototypes is not known at this stage
2. The scope might change – this is very common, as the designs or the components we suggest might give you some new ideas. A new scope comes with a different workload.

At any point, as long as you have paid for everything we have done and all the expenses we have incurred (and that you know of) you can decide to stop the project, and the intellectual property of our work belongs to you alone as specified in our contract.

China offers creators, entrepreneurs, and hardware startups the manufacturing infrastructure to handle new product manufacturing, but it’s the preparation and management of mass production that often leaves hardware startups & SMEs over-budget and running behind on delivery.

One only needs to visit Kickstarter or Indiegogo to see the abysmal proportion of projects that are not delivered on time due to unexpected problems and extra costs.

Inexperienced founders are overly optimistic about the capabilities of Chinese manufacturers and about the ‘readiness for production’ of their new product design.

99% of Chinese manufacturers want to go to mass production as soon as possible, even if this has relatively high-quality risks. They are consistently over-enthusiastic and tend to under-deliver on their promises.

Subsequently, hardware startups don’t see all the risks, don’t challenge predictions and reassurances, and don’t enlist the assistance of people who have done it before. They also have pressure to get first to market and increase the product ROI (Return on Investment) by an early introduction.

We’ve seen people in this position in our home city of Shenzhen and the rest of China get burnt too often, so this is why Sofeast’s production engineers and project managers specialize in new product introduction (NPI) and design for manufacturing (DFM).

First, you will need more than an idea. At the very least, get a first version of the design, as well as a general description (intended use, etc.) on paper.

Second, before sharing the design with anybody, make sure to have a solid agreement in place that targets all the usual risks (not your standard non-disclosure agreement).

Third, you might go in the wrong direction and spend many months working with the wrong type of suppliers and, in the end, get nowhere. Talk with a company like ours. We have worked with a number of people who were in your situation.

You may also like our guide to manufacturing a new product in China.

Yes, for several reasons.

Because you might need to make changes to your design to make it easy to manufacture in China or to have a chance at hitting your budget & timing targets.

👉 Our product engineers are ready to help if you need assistance with product design and development.

And because you need to know what type of supplier you should work with even before starting the search:

Yes. And this should be planned from the design stage. Many projects have gone very far into prototyping and even production, only to be dropped because they had to get back to square 1… a new iteration of the design that takes certification constraints into account.

We have experience with the most common types of certification for the US and Europe.

Learn more about certifications and compliance here: Compliance Testing Consulting

What we do most often is a hybrid approach:

Our liability is limited to the amount of fees you paid to us for the particular job that led to that issue.

The most important thing to focus on is to find ways to avoid such issues or to detect them through reviews and reliability testing. As a general rule, all design changes have to be approved by your side and their impact has to be evaluated with a proper testing plan.

You understand that, if we provide services for 1,000 USD, we can’t accept liability for 1 million USD. We are not aware of any company that accepts this level of risk. However, naturally, we will do the design work to correct any mistake for free.

You pay for that work and you own all the resulting deliverables.

The only exception is the templates we have developed over the years — you do not have the right to re-use them.

If you only have the design of your product and you still have all the development work ahead of you, you will generally need to go through these 6 NPI steps:

• 1. Defining specifications
• 2. Feasibility/proof of concept
• 3. Prototyping
• 4. Tooling
• 5. Pre-production prep
• 6. Production

We provide a comprehensive new product introduction framework and support throughout.

You can explore our NPI process in detail in this video walkthrough:

Not directly, however, we do have a list of partners including law firms and companies who specialize in Chinese business matters such as trademark registration whom we can put you in touch with.

Yes, we can.

We own a contract manufacturing subsidiary, Agilian Technology, near Hong Kong where we provide comprehensive assembly and manufacturing services.

If we’ve already worked with you on sourcing, product development, prototyping, etc, we can go on and manufacture many types of consumer and electromechanical products at Agilian.

You can also explore our various contract manufacturing solutions here.

No. We work on a purely on-demand basis.

You select which of our solutions you want to purchase, pay, and we do the work. We don’t do work in return for equity shares in hardware startups’ businesses.

Please note, any product IP generated belongs solely to you as you have paid for that. We do not retain your product IP after you have finished working with us.

If you need support to move your hardware startup and product idea forward in return for equity shares, finding an incubator or hardware accelerator could be the right move for you.

Yes, we can!

Our in-house R&D team has experience in designing and testing packaging.

We will either source the designed packaging from local manufacturers or may be able to manufacture it ourselves, too.

Packaging actually shouldn’t be an afterthought – it’s an important part of the new product launch project, as it both protects and advertises your product. With this in mind, we created this guide to common packaging types to help you decide what’s best for your products.

We employ a software engineer who can write the firmware for your product. However, when it comes to mobile apps for users, our customers usually take care of that development work.

This is a really difficult question to answer as every new product launch project is different, however, we’ll try to give you some ballpark figures.

• Engineering design: 15 days to 6 months
• Accelerated life testing on prototypes and iterations until a final approved prototype: 1 to 3 months
• Tooling fabrication: often around 6 weeks
• Pre-production preparation, including pilot run(s): 1 to 3 months
• Mass production (first batch): 1 to 3 months

Note: we typically help clients after the industrial design has been completed.

Sometimes the discussions about a new project between a new customer and Sofeast take many weeks. In cases like this, while we were waiting for clarifications on the scope of work etc. from a new customer, some other projects get confirmed and work starts on them. Therefore, to avoid over-committing and then under-delivering (asking a customer to keep waiting and waiting), we sometimes have to refuse the original project until such a time that more technical resources are once again available.
The Sofeast group is actively trying to hire more technical project managers to lessen the chances of such a refusal, by the way.

 A few points that could lead to difficulties in us taking on your R&D project

• Lots of email exchanges and calls are needed to confirm the scope of the next steps and plan to follow. 
• A customer has difficulties communicating directly with our team in China and requests to have senior managers involved in every discussion. Unfortunately, it’s just not realistic for our senior management team to be involved in every aspect of every project.
• The customer wants us to commit to getting to a certain deliverable while the design is far from mature, which means there are probably going to be a number of unforeseen challenges and it’s somewhat likely we’ll spend more resources than budgeted.
• Instead of going “agile” and going for small chunks of work and quick turnaround, the customer wants to go directly to a functional prototype. That means even more likelihood of unforeseen challenges that will creep in and cause us to spend many more resources than planned (and paid for). This type of “waterfall” approach tends to lead to long delays and to spending a lot more hours than planned.

We do not lock you into R&D projects by requiring a fixed price.

For the design phase, you can pay block by block, for example starting with a number of hours of industrial design work, seeing what we provide, and then, once you’re satisfied, paying for the following block of work, and so on.

Paying step-by-step or paying a fixed amount per week during the feasibility and early prototyping phases is usually the best approach for our clients as there is a lot of ‘discovery’ to be done at this stage.
Here are 2 reasons why paying for work in blocks and proceeding one step at a time is appropriate at this early stage of your project:

1. The cost of the materials needed for the prototypes is not known at this stage
2. The scope might change – this is very common, as the designs or the components we suggest might give you some new ideas. A new scope comes with a different workload.

At any point, as long as you have paid for everything we have done and all the expenses we have incurred (and that you know of) you can decide to stop the project, and the intellectual property of our work belongs to you alone as specified in our contract.