I have been around this sort of thing for years and had a couple of patents lodged here myself ...

Dunno about over your way , but I assume that the US is much the same as here as far as Patents go ...
To do it in a formal proper way ...you need to engage a Patent attorney (my brother in law was an Attorney with one of the biggest Patent Attorney companies here in Aus for over 30 years ) to do a search of the existing Patents to do with your product ...

If that comes up clean , then they will go through the BS stuff for you ...lodging and recording it where you want ....

Patents can be registered local to your country , European or World wide ..

It ain't cheap to do .... but if you are confident that your idea is worth it , you will have to be prepared to spend a few thousand buck to get started down that road ...

Allot of products are not patented for 2 main reasons ...they already exist in part or as a whole some where and in this case you would normally go to a manufacturer and get it assessed , costed, produced or if you can find a distributor that has connections in manufacturing you might save your self quite a few bucks ....

It is a long drawn out process and you will need to spend quite a bit of hard earned to do anything ...

All the dramas and costs associated with this type of thing are why allot of people just go and get there product manufactured in small quantities to test the market place before going full steam ahead ....I spose it depends how confident you feel about your product ??

good luck mate ...

 

Well Jp , thats why quite allot of people go through the patent process and risk the dollars that it costs to get it protected ...

A Patent Attorney is the safest way to go ....

If you go to ANY manufacturing business and get them to even only cost your product before it is fully covered , you might regret it mate ...that is the risk you take when not following ALL formal rules on this matter ...

I don't know of a risk free way to proceed ,without going through the leagal stuff first ...

 

Here in Aus , we have government run centers that help new inventors and people with products that they want sorted ready for manufacturing ...

Check through all your government agencies and make a few phone calls before you do anything mate ...

You may find an organization that helps new inventors or people with new product launches ...

Those groups are usually pretty safe as they are government funded and run .... not that any of us really trust the bloody government hey ....lolol

but its worth a shot ....

 

Sure , private product developers will and can do that , but be ware .... they will only give you a small percentage in return ... they take most of the money to develop and market the product ...
A quite common percentage that I have been quoted is over the 50% for them and less than 50 for me...

Mind you , 50%of something having them do most of the work is better than 0% of nothing because you cant afford to do it yourself ...

Again , quite allot of people have made chit loads of money using product developers while only earning a fraction of the total profits ...

You might want to at least get a Patent search done to see just how much your idea is going to be worth ...
If it is unique and patentable? , then you can ask for a bigger slice of the cake ....but if it has been done in part or full before , then they might not be willing to hand back as much ....