From Spark to Shelf: The Journey of Product Development at E-Stim Systems

Ever wondered about the secret sauce that turns a spark of an idea into a tangible, market-winning product? Wayne from E-Stim Systems is here to lift the veil on the alchemy of product development. From a simple scribble in his little black book to the thrill of seeing the final product on the shelves, Wayne walks us through the meticulous yet playful journey of innovation. He unveils how customer feedback, including those painful-to-hear critiques, serves as a cornerstone for the continual improvement of E-Stim gadgets. Tune in to learn how the voice of the consumer becomes the catalyst for our evolution, and how our three golden rules of development—enhance, serve, and profit—inform every decision, be it upgrading our Series 2b or choosing the next game-changer to launch.

You'll hear firsthand the trials and triumphs faced when bringing original designs to life, as we recounts the odyssey from brainstorming to 3D modeling, and from prototyping to the final reveal. Discover the sting of imitation and the passion that drives us to outpace copycats, ensuring that quality and originality remain the hallmarks of what we do. We share tales of learning from failure, the necessity of thorough testing, and the unexpected influence of product reviewers, proving that the path to perfection is paved with perseverance.

Finally, we pull back the curtain on a strategic approach to product launches and unwavering customer support. We're all about timing our releases with precision, guaranteeing we're fully stocked and ready to wow at just the right moment. 

We talk about emphasizes the importance of supporting and enhancing our existing lineup to keep even our oldest products from becoming yesterday's news, as well as providing insight into our decision to focus on in-house expertise over outsourcing design and highlights how every strategy we implement is designed to fortify company integrity and fortify the trust our customers have in us. 

Join us for an episode charged with tales of ingenuity, strategy, and a relentless pursuit of excellence in the electrifying world of product creation.

"I make sex toys" is a the personal podcast of Wayne Allen, the Director of E-Stim Systems. The content of these podcasts are not designed to be Explicit or Erotic but we may discuss adult topics and therefore these podcasts are not suitable for children or those of a nervous disposition. You have been warned.

If you are interested in E-Stim Systems the company, or any of our products, have a look at https://www.e-stim.me/buy

Chapters

• 0:00 Product Development Secrets Revealed
• 6:06 Product Development and Release Process
• 14:32 Product Development and Launch Strategy
• 18:23 Using Feedback to Improve Business

Transcript

Wayne: 0:00

Hello, it's Wayne here from E-Stim Systems, and today's topic on the podcast is how do we develop new products? So, developing new products, it's something that all companies do well, at least it's something that all companies should be doing. And the question I've always been asked is how do we come up with new products? And the simple answer is we think about them. The key for us is we play with our own products. We actually play with what we make, and one of the benefits of playing with what we make is we soon realize what works and what doesn't work. So we might have come up with the world's greatest electrode design and when we actually come to use it, it's not quite what we expected it to be, just doesn't work the way that we think it should work. So what do we do? And the answer is we modify it, we come up with a different design or we tweak the design to bring it more into our expectations. So the first thing is we play with our products. The second thing is we talk to our customers and we listen to our customers. Now a lot of people go no, you don't. I say these things and you just don't listen to us. And the reason for that a lot of the time is people don't realize how long it actually takes to do anything in business. Because we're running a business, we have to do the day-to-day production, we have to fulfill those orders, and it doesn't leave vast amounts of time to allow us to develop new products.

Wayne: 1:18

Whenever a customer says anything, we think about it. Sometimes we write it down. I do actually have my infamous little black book and if anyone who knows me will see me walking around a lot of the time with a black book, it's a notepad and the reason I carry a black book it allows me to write ideas down, to scribble designs, to just generally just have a memoir, to give me some ability to remember ideas that might crop up at any point, and not just whilst I'm running a business or whilst I'm talking to a customer. It might be we're in a restaurant and suddenly, ah, I've just had a thought. Or I go shopping and look at utensils and Tescos and suddenly go, oh, actually that could be utilised, or that idea or that design could be utilised in something that we make. So it goes into my little Mac book and it's probably the most valuable thing I actually own because it's got half my brain inside there. But the thing is we do listen to customers and we listen to customers in many ways. We listen to what people post on social media. We listen to what people post on forums. We listen to what people are telling us when we're having conversations on the phone.

Wayne: 2:20

Sometimes it's a case of we're dealing with someone who's complaining about something. Now, complaints is a whole new area to play with and at some point in time I will do a podcast about dealing with complaints. But if you're in business, if you're creating anything whether it's a YouTube video or an electrode or anything people are going to complain. It's a fact of life. The only time people aren't going to complain is if only one person's ever bought it or one person's ever seen it, and then generally they're not going to complain because there's only one person there. But people will complain.

Wayne: 2:50

Now I look at complaints in several ways. The thing is, if someone's taking the time to complain, there is something wrong. It doesn't necessarily mean there is something wrong with the product or the service or depending on what they're complaining about, but it might be perception. So the fault, actually, if it is perception, the fault is down to you, because you haven't explained it enough to a customer to allow a customer to deal with their own expectations. So if they think it's going to do something and you haven't made it clear it doesn't do that and they then complain it doesn't do that something, then there's where the complaint is and there's where the reason for the complaint. So it's a case of we always listen to customers' complaints because after a while you start to get a feel for things, and when I say after a while we've been doing this for 20 years it's quite a lot of time to get a feel for things. Fundamentally, if people are complaining about something, potentially there is something wrong or there is something that can be changed to improve a product.

Wayne: 3:50

We actually have three rules. When it comes to designing and developing any product or making any changes within business, we have three rules. The first rule is does it improve the product? Is it going to make the product better in some way? Second rule is does it improve the service? Is it going to make the service better for a customer? And the third rule is does it improve the service? Is it going to make the service better for a customer? And the third rule is will it improve the bottom line? After all, we are a business. I employ 12 people. Now I have to ensure that I have a business that makes a profit, which allows us to pay the staff reasonably and also allows us to develop new ideas and invest in the business. I don't drive a Porsche. I drive a Peugeot. All the money that we have in the business is used to develop new ideas, new processes within the business. It's called investing in the business. So the key here is we listen to what customers tell us and then we utilize that to come up with new ideas or make changes to existing products. We change existing products from time to time and we don't broadcast it.

Wayne: 4:42

The series 2B, or the 2B for short, has had around about between 10 and 14 changes over its life, and most of these changes are internal. You can't really see them unless you really really want to look. There have been sockets that changed. We've changed the sockets to improve them, because the initial sockets they were great, but then we had issues with people breaking them more easily. So it was like we we need to fix this. We don't want people breaking sockets. We offer a lifetime guarantee. If you're breaking a socket, we've got to repair it. So if we put better sockets in. Oh guess what? We won't have to repair it. There are changes to PCBs because it allows us to improve the build process and therefore improve the build quality. When we first started out, the first 2Bs were all through-hole. Now we're surface mount and I think we're on a 14D because we name our board revisions. That, at the moment, is the current version and I'm not actually expecting any major changes on the 2B hardware at the moment. Who knows what will happen in the future, but we might. We'll come on to future designs in a moment.

Wayne: 5:41

The key here is we talk to people and we listen. Those ideas that people are coming up with, those comments, are going into a big pot which is mainly my brain and other people within the team's brains and thought processes. That's where new ideas come from. We also look to see what other people are doing. Let's face it, we're in an industry where we do have competition. It's always interesting to see what the competition are doing. That's always going to give us an opportunity to look at what they're doing and go. Can we improve on that?

Wayne: 6:06

We try not to copy people. It's pointless copying people. We know there are people out there who copy us. Yes, I'm looking at you who managed to copy one of our electrodes and go, oh, it came out in the 1980s. No, it didn't. You copied our electrode design. It's really simple. You copied it. Please stop. It's really frustrating when we do all the work, we bring something to market and then someone comes along and goes, oh, copy it, and you do it badly as well. So please stop copying our products. We'll always look at what other people are doing and going. Could we create something that is better than what is currently on the market? Because, at the end of the day, I want to be the best. I want our company to produce the best products, the most liked products, the most useful products and have the best service as well, because that's how companies succeed and generally, I think we're doing reasonably well. The feedback we get from new products in fact, the feedback we get from all of our products is great. I love it and thank you. Please keep giving us that feedback.

Wayne: 6:59

The next stage is we come up with an idea and that idea will be discussed within a team, it will be discussed with our friends, it will be discussed with people outside who we trust, and we get feedback, and that then goes back into the design process and we then potentially at some point in time come up with something physical. Our design process because we run a manufacturing company and we have the manufacturing capacity in the workshops our design process is basically for an electrode, for instance, we'll go into Fusion, we'll do a 3D design, we'll do all the modelling. Potentially we'll 3D print it to get an idea of sizing. That's what we did with the rings most recently. Then we'll look at production. Production design is different to straight design, because one of the problems with 3D printing, for example, is you can 3D print most things. When you come to machine them in metal because that's what we do things get a little bit different. You can't produce everything in metal that you could using 3D. Completely different processes One's additive, one's subtractive. 3d printing you add material. Generally Machining you're taking material away, so you have to work in a different process and there's all limitations to what the machines can do, both in capacity and tooling and all sorts of things. But anyway, basically what we mean is we use 3D print to come up with basic concepts in terms of sizing and shape and then we'll look at going to the manufacturing process One of the massive points about having manufacturing in-house is I can literally go from my office and I can walk downstairs, load the code up on a machine, press the button and break the machine, and I've done that.

Wayne: 8:28

The first CNC lathe that we had was delivered in November one year, and this is a few years ago now because I think we've had about three since then. I was working on it over the Christmas break it was nearly New Year and I was hand coding some stuff because I do actually go down on the machines and I can operate the machines and I managed to run some two inch aluminium that's about 3000 RPM and I put a tool on a rapid straight through the middle of it. Now, those of you who are engineers will know what that means Basically. Basically, it means I took a spinny piece of metal and hit it with a large tool which damaged virtually everything. It tore the jaws out of the machine. The machine itself weighs two tons. It lifted up and went crashing to the ground because the torque of this rotational spindle being hit by another tool was massive and I actually knocked everything out of alignment. Apart from the tail stock and the reason I didn't lock the tail stock out of alignment. I wasn't using it at the time.

Wayne: 9:24

It got rather expensive and we had an engineer in after new year and I think it took them about three days to reset all the alignments. It was quite a big job. Nobody got fired because guess what? It was me. I'm going to be honest if an engineer did that, they wouldn't be fired. If they did it two or three times, I'd be, yeah, seriously hacked off and be worried about their jobs.

Wayne: 9:43

There's two types of engineers. There's those that have crashed a machine and those that are lying. But anyway, different story there. So we go downstairs and we'll actually put the metal on the machine and cut the machine. That will generate some prototypes. Normally we make more than one.

Wayne: 10:03

Because these are CNC, these are computer controlled machines, it's easier to make more than one. So we'll make a handful might even make 10, and we'll generate some prototypes and the prototypes then go for testing and we'll check those out and we'll talk to people and say what do you think and we'll get feedback back and the feedback might be positive and equally, the feedback might be negative. Point is, the feedback gives us an element of does this work? Doesn't it work? Okay, if it doesn't work, then we have to make changes and that then goes back into that process. We change the model. We might not 3D print at that point, depends what the changes are. But then it goes back into the machines. We produce more prototypes, they go out for testing and round and round and round in circles Prototyping and testing.

Wayne: 10:35

That process normally takes between three and six months. Sometimes it takes longer. Sometimes we just don't get to the stage where we're completely happy with the product before we release it, and we do not release a product unless we are happy with it. I don't know why people think that we're going to release a product that just isn't ready. Other manufacturers might do that, we don't. So three to six months of testing, then it will get to the stage where we're reasonably happy with this. That's when we start to spread things out a little bit more. That's when we might start talking to reviewers and start putting devices out to them, when we have people reviewing our products.

Wayne: 11:06

First thing is we do not pay anyone to review our products. There are a few people who we will supply products to because they have written open and honest reviews. We do not control any reviews. We do ask if people are doing reviews. We'd love to see the review before you actually publish it. We're not going to sit there going. You cannot publish that. Sometimes and it has happened in the past, so I wouldn't say sometimes it's quite unusual, but it has happened in the past where people have published a review and they've missed something or something has been said which we're looking at and go I'm not quite sure that's right. And we've gone back to them and said can you just clarify what you've written there? Reviewers write their own reviews.

Wayne: 11:54

Now, if we're passing products out for people to review as part of our testing process, then generally they're not going to publish their feedback at that point because it's feedback about a new product, it's under an NDA generally and it's there to give us third-party ideas as to what is working, what isn't working. So that's the next process. Any feedback from that is then incorporated into the project. We make more changes. Hopefully you're seeing this process that just goes round and round and round, which is basically we make something, we test it, we listen for feedback, we change it, we make something, we test it, we listen for feedback, and we just keep going on and on and on. Eventually, at some point in time, we reach the point where we're like, yeah, we are happy with this product, we are now going to release this product. Then we go into the process of we now have to make the product, because we have to make enough to be able to sell it at the point which we release it.

Wayne: 12:35

I really hate it when companies release new products and then you have to wait three months before you can get it. So we invest in our product and we produce the products and we put them on our shelf in the stock room. That's the point. We're actually launching the product for you to purchase, and then it's fingers crossed because hopefully we've got a product that people really like. And that's one thing you can never really control. You spend all that time developing a new product and it's like I really hope this is gonna go well. Touch wood.

Wayne: 13:02

Every time we've released a new product, it's gone well. We released the rings and it went ballistic. I really really mean ballistic. We misanticipated the number of ring sets that people were buying by a large factor. We were running shifts, we were running overtime. It was manic. So the next time we produce new products, we're already going to take that into consideration and we're already going to start producing them way before we actually release them. It's a good position to be in, but it was a bit manic for quite a while.

Wayne: 13:34

Now, something we don't do in relation to releasing new products is we will never tell you about new products until they're ready to release, and this is something that one, it seems to get other companies really confused, because I know a Eastim company, who happens to be based in China, who is about to release a new product and people are still waiting for it. In fact, there's another company in the US who have been waiting to release a product for, I think, about three years now, and I believe people have actually paid for these products, but they still haven't got them. How can you run a business releasing a product, expecting people to pay for a product and then not coming up with the goods? It's just bad business. Shouldn't be doing it, guys. And anyone who's paying money to a company that doesn't actually have the product on the shelf, why All you're going to do is pay their financing to develop the product and then you might not get anything. I mean, this is crowdfunding gone wrong, so it's something we don't do.

Wayne: 14:32

We do not discuss new products until we're ready to launch them. This sometimes causes a bit of angst in our customers because they start sitting there going well, I didn't know the new box was coming out, and the answer to that is not until the point we actually release it. But we do not generally create things that are suddenly going to be superseded by something else. If we're going to produce a new box, it tends to have a crossover point. Say, for instance, we're going to come up with a new product, the new 2B, as an example.

Wayne: 14:59

I'm not saying whether we are doing a new 2B or not doing a new 2B. What's going to happen to the old one? The answer is it's still going to be around for quite a while and we're still going to support it, and not only support it. We will still continue to improve it, because that's what we do. We're not suddenly going to turn around and go oh, the new one's out, forget it, you're not going to get any support for the old one. No, we don't work that way. It's just wrong. It's bad business.

Wayne: 15:23

Any new product that's going to come out, there's going to be a crossover. Yes, there is going to be a point where a new product comes out and you've just bought the current one. Unfortunately, there's not a lot I can do about that. It's just the way things work. When you're developing anything, at some point in time, the day before you've released it, somebody's bought something and the day after you released it they're like oh, I could have bought the new one, you didn't tell me. And the answer is no. We do not tell people about things in advance. When I say tell people about products in advance, clearly we already are, because we're telling reviewers, we're telling testing, but for the general population, we're not going to launch a product until it is ready for you to buy. When you see the fact that we're bringing out a new X, you might get a couple of days notice because we're going to start putting about it on social media.

Wayne: 16:04

And there are certain times of the year where we tend to launch products, like shows, because shows are always an opportunity to showcase new things. That's the whole point of doing shows. So if we launch a new product, it is going to be available for you to buy, subject to the usual stock things like that. One of the problems we have when we launch new products, despite the fact we still push to get the manufacturing up before we launch it. Every single time we've launched a new product, we've run out of stock because the number of people who want the new product has gone nuts. The Ring's classic case for us it was manic, I already mentioned that but we don't launch products until they're ready and we don't launch products until we can actually supply them. When do we launch new products? Well, shows are quite a good time to launch new products. That's all I'm going to say on that one.

Wayne: 16:48

Something that's interrelated to this is do we do custom designs? And the answer is no, we don't do custom designs anymore. I know there have been cases in the past where we have done specialist one-offs, but generally we don't because we just don't have the time. This whole process of designing something, developing, testing, developing, testing it just takes too long to do it for a one-off, so we don't do one-offs. The other thing we don't do is we don't use design companies to design our products.

Wayne: 17:16

Now there is another well-known company who, if they're listening to this podcast, you really need to stop using that company for your designs. Why do you need to stop using that company for your designs? Well, because at least one of your designs they published before you did. They put it on their website, which was a really great idea. So, if you're going to use a design company to design your products, what did the design company know about Eastin? What did the design company know about how to use your products? They're just a design company. They make things look pretty. What do they do? What do they know? They're a design company. They design lots of things. So how does a hairbrush equate to an e-stim electrode? Who knows? Ask? The design company Doesn't work for us.

Wayne: 17:55

I'm sorry. I can't understand why you would use a design company for that sort of thing. It's just me, I suppose. Anyway, I think that's probably me rabbiting on enough about how we design things. There's probably going to be lots and lots of questions about how we design stuff. I mean, the obvious question is is something new coming out?

Wayne: 18:12

My answer to that is listen to the podcast. I'm not saying anything yet. Thanks for listening. Hopefully you find this interesting and informative.

Wayne: 18:23

It's certainly useful for us to do these podcasts because, again, we get feedback from customers and it allows us to listen to what people are thinking about what we're doing. They're thinking about our products and we feed that back into the matrix of how do we improve our products? And we try to improve our products all of the time. We don't just stop and go. It works. It's selling lots. There's always this question can we improve it? Can we make it better? The three roles I mentioned. We do genuinely use those in the business for virtually everything we do, whether it's buying a new machine, creating new products, changing stockists for toilet rolls Actually, no, we don't do it for toilet rolls, but you get the idea. Does it improve the product? Does it improve the service? Does it improve the bottom line? If you get two out of those three, we're probably going to do it. If you get three out of three. My question then is why aren't we doing it already? That's the way of doing business. So that's about it. Thanks for listening.

Wayne: 19:18

I'm Wayne, I'm the MD of E-Stim Systems and, yes, I make sex toys. If you're listening us on Spotify or Apple, please give us a review. Click the old star buttons. You know how these things work. I'm still learning about how to do podcasts and hopefully this has been informative and interesting and fun. But whatever you do, please be safe and have fun. Bye.