22: Why Young Entrepreneurs Should Be Asking Themselves These Questions - with Matthew Bordy

Meet Matthew:He’s a serial entrepreneur and product development professional. He use to manage the design team for Office Max and all their private labels. Now, he has owned his own product development firm called Prototype since 2013. He’s headquartered in Fort Lauderdale. He runs a one-of-a-kind development firm that supports inventors, entrepreneurs, and large brands with designing prototyping engineering, and manufacturing. His mission is to make ideas into reality.Kris: Where did the mission to make ideas into reality come from?Matthew: So it really started when I was a child, and I wasn't sure which direction I would go into, but I was an entrepreneur as a kid selling bubble gum out of my walker and always coming up with ideas, and I always wanted to bring ideas to life. So I always was wondering, where can I do that? And a lot of my professors go into business school, and then I found a career in product design and industrial design, and it really comes back to I think everybody had this where they're like, oh, they see a product on TV or they're in Walmart and they look at something, they said, oh, I thought of that. I thought of that product idea. And so what's amazing about what we do here at Prototype House and other industrial designers is we help entrepreneurs and people take that AHA moment and bring it to life. So that is our mission to create really great experiences for people while they're using those products. So it could be a medical device, it could be a new toy for kids, but it's really bringing that AHA moment to life.Erin: What is your company tinkering with right now?Matthew: So currently we're tinkering with some new dermatology tools and aesthetic tools, which is pretty exciting for me. I love the medical space just because it's always evolving, and I listen to a lot of Ted Talks and things in the medical space. But I have some products here. You can't see them, but some are larger brands, and some are from just entrepreneurs. So here's a cool product. It's called Zippy Cap. It's made here in the US. And what's cool about it is it's a keychain straw. So you always have a straw with you, and it works with any water bottle. So you just pop it open, uncap your water bottle, and drop the straw in and you're ready to go. And you twist it. And then you have a straw and you can go ahead and drink. And it's a local entrepreneur. He is based in New York. And what's amazing is he found us online and was able to develop his invention from just a napkin sketch all the way to production while we were here in Florida. And we never met in person, but he's now on the market and he really wanted to manufacture here in the US. And we're able to make that happen for him. So it's amazing.Lori: Where are your clients usually getting these things manufactured?Matthew: So this is a really tough question because most of our clients, would love to manufacture here in the US. And I was in DC recently talking to our lawmakers and different people in Congress to try to figure out if can we bring more manufacturing on a smaller scale for our entrepreneurs and startups. And right now it's really not possible, to be honest with you. For most of our products, it's very difficult. So most of our manufacturing happens overseas or a mixture of both. So we've been doing some hybrid models where we get our tooling done in China. And then we can get our injection molding done here and then packaging gets imported somewhere else and we do some packaging and assembly, but for the most part, it's still overseas based on cost and labor. And also the big interesting thing is there is a lot of injection molding shops all over our country. They're amazing, but they turn down small production runs because a lot of our entrepreneurs when they first get...