Holiday tank decor?

[gilpi]

Um Shark Tank anyone? Lol I mean the show of course! It def sounds like a viable business but let me ask you this....Let's say you are successful, what would stop Marineland, Penn Plax, Petco or any other big decor manufacturer from doing the same thing and squashing you like the cockroach you are? (No offense but that's what you would be to them). Unless you can develop a patent of some sort, how could you prevent that?

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I don't know what kind of market there is for these things.
In all fairness, you never know till you try. Some do make it in "Shark Tank"

 

[tnfinfan]

It's true that you never really know until you try but you can make some reasonable assumptions based on history. It's just the nature of the business world that good ideas are quickly replicated (water changer, anyone?). Unless there is something to patent, your hope becomes to get in and make money fast before the knockoffs hit and undercut your pricing. Or, you go the other direction and try for artistic and high-end because then the knockoffs are just cheap imitations of the genuine product.

 

[Moleliminator]

The goal would be to make an attractive quality line of products that you could sell to these companies. I don't know this but I seriously doubt these companies make a quarter of what they sell in their stores. You would simply become a vendor. The developer that we are talking to said that it "may" be possible to protect them through some type of design patent but your still out 30K in design and prototyping before you could even consider that avenue. We are just trying to do the homework so we do exactly what tnfinfan said and make good decisions based on history and also make such a quality product that it wouldn't be worth trying to imitate. But in the end it's just as we all know, you never know until you try, and I'm not sure spending 110K plus is worth the risk.

 

[ArtistGardener]

I think the more casual fish keeper would be more likely to do the decorations. Or those that have a tank for their children. From the advanced fishkeeper, I don't think there would be much interest. Most keep their tanks as balanced as possible with the style they decide and adding something new, even just temporary, could mess with it.

You could try reaching out to someone that has a large audience base and see if they might help or give advice. Like Dustin's Fish Tanks on youtube. Don't know many others but it's an idea.

This pretty much says it all. I think the majority of people who would buy this are not aquarists--and aquarists are the people that tend to spend money repeatedly on their hobby. The people with a tank for their kids or who buy on impulse usually get tired of the upkeep very quickly (one of the reasons I see small-medium size tanks on Craiglist all time).