A supplier quote lands in your inbox....
So you sit on it. You ask two people. You sit on it over the weekend.
You signed off on bigger numbers than this in your old work without blinking. That money belonged to a company.
This money has your family's name on it.
And underneath the quote are a dozen costs nobody put in it. The mould. The safety testing, priced per material and per colour. The tracking label and the age warning on the box. The sample round after the first one comes back wrong.
OR YOU ARE EARLIER THAN THAT....
No quote has arrived yet.
You have the idea. Drawings, maybe a version you made yourself at the kitchen table. Nothing is committed. Nothing has been paid for.
Then someone asks what it will cost to make.
You do not have a number. Not even a rough one. You have carried this product around for months, and the first question anyone asks is the one you cannot answer.
Thinking about a product idea is free, but starting it comes at a cost.
The spending starts earlier than most founders expect. Category research. The three products a parent buys instead of yours, bought and taken apart. A freedom-to-operate search, so you find out now whether someone already holds the patent. A concept brief a designer can actually work from. A safety and standards check, done before you design rather than after.
None of that is the expensive part.
Three colours instead of one is three sets of print tooling and three rounds of testing, because every colour is tested separately. A battery turns your product into an electronics project with its own certification. A fabric choice sets a flammability test in motion. Today those are lines on a drawing. A year from now they are separate invoices.
An app gets patched on a Tuesday. A baby, toddler or mom product gets poured into a mould.
By the time you find the problem it has been made hundreds or thousand times and loaded into a container. A round of samples that turn out not to be final runs into the thousands.
Testing a children's or mom's product is not optional and it is not cheap, and it is paid before you have sold a single unit.
Those numbers are not decided at the factory.
They are decided months earlier, by what you knew when you said yes.
Three Excel-based tools that turn your product decisions into numbers you can work with.
Your true cost price. Your full development budget. A realistic schedule from idea to launch.
Every tool opens with the same three tabs, so you make the choice once and use the same one in all three files.
1. Molded and hard goods. Plastic, silicone, wood or metal. Toys, feeding, bath, nursery, teethers.
2. Textile and sewn. Fabric, filling, straps. Sleep sacks, swaddles, carriers, bedding, plush, nursing, apparel.
3. Electronic and connected. Anything that plugs into the mains, sits on a charging base or runs on batteries. Monitors, sound machines, night lights, pumps, bottle warmers, sterilizers.
If it plugs in, charges or takes batteries, use tab 3. Mostly fabric, tab 2. Everything else, tab 1
The lines nobody prices
- CPSIA and the Children's Product Certificate.
- Lead and phthalates.
- ASTM F963, and the product-specific standards for carriers, bassinets and sleep.
- Flammability for textiles.
- For anything that plugs in or charges, FCC, mains and adapter safety, battery testing and the EU low voltage rules.
You will see them before you commit.
Product Cost and Margin Calculator
So you can:
- see your full cost structure on one page
- run margin scenarios at different prices and order quantities
- set a retail price you can defend
- sit in a supplier conversation knowing what a fair quote looks like
Know your real cost before development starts.
Product Development Budget Planner
This planner puts them on one page, phase by phase, with your estimate next to what you actually spent. Research and concept. Design and engineering. Prototypes and samples, including the round you did not plan for. Tooling and set-up. Testing and certification. Packaging, artwork and required labelling. First production run, freight and launch. Contingency.
You end up with a real number for what it takes to develop and launch this product, and a clear view of where the money is at risk.
Know what the whole thing costs before you start spending
Product Development Timeline Planner
So you can:
- build a timeline that holds
- see a slipping date while it is still cheap to fix
- align designers, suppliers and your launch team on the same plan
- tell your team what happens next without repeating yourself
See the whole schedule, in the right order.
Here's what changes.....
Right now a single supplier choice can cost you three weeks. You circle it. You re-ask everyone. You sit on it, afraid to get it wrong.
With the numbers in front of you, the same call takes ten minutes.
You check it against your plan. You decide. You tell your team. You get on with your day.
Same brain. Same decision. The difference is the map.
GET THE TOOLKIT $39
You're in the right place!
you are developing one specific product for babies, toddlers or moms
you are about to spend money on samples, tooling or testing
quotes are coming in and you have no way to check them
you want to run the numbers yourself, rather than hand them to someone else
The Product CEO Toolkit is For You If:
you want the work done for you
you are weighing up whether to build a physical product at all, and have not picked one
This is NOT For You If:
- Product Cost and Margin Calculator
- Product Development Budget Planner
- Product Development Timeline Planner
- All three built in three tabs, so they match how your product is made
- A PDF walkthrough of all three, so you complete them for your own product instead of staring at an empty spreadsheet
What you get
$39. One payment
You get immediate access. The tools appear in your personal library and your login details arrive by email, so you can start today.
I'm Marie-Louise Anthonissen
For 25 years I ran international product development at Bosch and at Philips Baby Care, including a baby monitor line from idea to mass production. Multi-million-euro portfolios, suppliers across Asia, certification programmes, launches in Europe, the US and Asia.
These are the tools I used to do it. The maths does not change with company size. What changes is which lines matter, and in this category the lines that break budgets are moulds, sample rounds, safety testing and packaging that has to carry warnings.
So every line is written for the way a baby, toddler or mom product actually gets made and paid for.
So… Any Questions? Here Are Some Frequently Asked Questions.
No. You type into the white cells. Everything else calculates itself. The video walks you through all three files.
Pick the tab that matches how it is made, not what it is called. If it plugs in, charges or takes batteries, use tab 3, even if it is mostly fabric. The build method drives the cost and the certification, so that is what the tabs follow.
That is the moment it is most useful. Put the quote into the cost calculator and you will see what it does and does not cover, and what your margin looks like once the costs around it are added in.
It will tell you what your product costs to make and land, and what your margin is at any price you enter. You set the price. You will be setting it against a number instead of a feeling.
No. The free live training covers the six phases and the milestone that stops money moving too early. The Toolkit is the numbers underneath it. You can do either one first.