Declined Slice-N-Server Details: Cut The Cake Serve The Cake Slice-N-Server We first became aware of this product when the vice-president of an inventors' group presented it to us. One of the group's members had invented, patented, and licensed this product to a successful company in the real estate field that wanted to diversify into new areas.

This plastic injection-molded product was unique in its usefulness and simplicity. When held upright it functioned as a knife edge to slice something such as a cake; then, by slightly rotating the bottom of the product with the index finger, to where the bottom of the product rotated at a 90 degree angle, the user could pick up the piece of sliced cake with the Slice-And-Server and then serve the piece of cake to the plate. This was a very useful and handy kitchen aid.

Single cavity tooling had been made to manufacture the product, as well as some basic packaging for it. A production run had also been made, but the licensing company was not able to launch the product successfully. Because the company failed to meet the minimum sales requirements of the exclusive license agreement, the patent rights were cancelled, and the tooling ownership reverted to the inventor.

We then licensed the product and developed some preliminary sales tools of our own to further test-market the product. We wanted to sell it to people who already had related products, such as manufacturers and distributors of plastic housewares that sold in grocery stores, etc., who already had distribution, because the Slice-And-Server was not strong enough to be a "lead-in" product on its own.

Unfortunately for us, we discovered the hard way that the patent was not strong enough to protect the product. One of the companies we sent samples to had their lawyers and their patent attorney design a similar product to circumvent our licensed patent.

Our lesson learned: The product must have sufficient protection before we spend a sizeable amount of money to launch it.

General Notes:
*We only work with a very few, highly selected products at one time.
*There is no cost to the inventor unless we produce results!

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