In my experience, few importers are able to find one or two homerun products that they can rely on to bring a steady, prosperous income indefinitely. This is assuming of course that your products don’t have patents that protect them from being imported by others.
Do a survey of a few products in your house and look at where they were made. You’ll find the very high tech products are made in countries like the USA, Japan, etc. and the simplest products are made in countries like China
Secret #8: Pick a Product That Isn’t Counterfeit/Trademarked/Patented
Hopefully this point makes sense without explanation but for some it may not. More over, it’s easy for even the most intellectual property conscious individual to run into problems when importing from China.
Do not import counterfeit products. This goes without saying. If there is a brand name attached to a product that you recognize in the west, i.e. Apple, Samsung, Gucci, Rolex, etc. then this product is almost certainly counterfeit. If you see a little ® or ™ sign beside a product, then it is trademarked and therefore a counterfeit product. Most individuals do not accidentally import branded products (but quite a few try to deliberately import such products) so hopefully this will not be an issue for you.
However, it is sometimes easy to accidentally import patented products, which are in essence counterfeit products. China takes intellectual property laws like patents quite a bit more liberally than we do in the West, which is probably no surprise to many. That aside, a patent valid in the USA or other country is not necessarily applicable in China, which muddies the water even further. A Supplier will not hesitate to sell you a product that is patented in your home country and more importantly, they won’t research whether a product is patented in your country. That’s your job.
Determining whether a product is patented is simple. Most patented products clearly say on the product packaging that they are patented. If you’ve seen many different brands of a particular product being sold in stores, then it probably is not patented. If a product has been around for a very long time (generally 20 years or more) then it probably isn’t patented. We recommend you to buy some long sleeve wedding dresses at http://www.dhgate.com/wholesale/long+sleeve+wedding+dresses.html.
In my experience, my company’s homerun products seem to have about 1-2 years before competition enters the market and brings our prices down considerably. Subsequently, I am constantly on the lookout for new products to be the next home run, or ways to improve our existing products that differentiate them from the competition.