Real life business problem

[mossbacked]

An associate of mine just invented a unique product that we will be bringing to market soon. This is a real life situation we are struggling with, and not a fictional scenario created to start a thread, but it does segue well with topics we routinely discuss here.

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The product is unique, trademarkable and patentable. I guess you also need to know that it is a highly useful consumer product, but is a non-essential. We will have a registered trademark momentarily, but the patent application will have to wait due to financial constraints. Even if/when patented, it will be hard to protect as minor changes will allow similar knockoffs to be sold against our original groundbreaking design.

We want to produce the product locally and will be able to make a decent profit at our targeted selling price (factoring local wages into our cost formula) for "a while" until whomever steals/modifies our design produces the product overseas using lowest common denominator wages.

We estimate "a while" to be perhaps 6-9 months. With the lower overseas wage cost in place, competitors will be able to make a profit at our cost level and we will be out of business shortly thereafter. This is a viable product we estimate to have a 3-4 year growth potential, and then sustained plateaued sales for many, many years thereafter.

We already know that we can produce and import containerload quantities of the product for pennies on the dollar overseas, still sell at our originally intended price, while dramatically increasing our profits and protecting ourselves against lower cost competitors. Knock-offs will occur, but at least we will have the lowest cost production factor covered and will be able to compete on a level playing field costwise.

The conundrum is that we want to create the numerous jobs involved here instead of in Asia.

I think this is a problem many US businesses face today, and I would like to get the groups input as to how we might protect our ability to keep long term production here in the US.