In our last post I shared a notional timeline for getting your patent. If you took a look at the timeline and added up the average response dates, you would quickly realize that it may take over 3 years to get your idea patented!
Who can wait that long??
This is why you often see products in the market that say "patent pending". This allows you to enjoy the protections of your "in process" patent filing while the patent is not completely finalized. This is because the US uses a "first to file" model over a "first to use" model. Generally, if you get to the patent office first the patent (if awarded) is yours!
For this reason, we decided that for the first 10,000 SeaClutch units we would use the "patent pending" marker on the product.
Changing the patent pending to "patented" would be a mold change, which is very expensive! Our hope is that we will sell out the first production run, then we can change the mold to include the actual patent number.
As a side note, we now have a SeaClutch YouTube Channel, Twitter feed and an Instagram account. You can access all those through the icons at the top of the page.
As always, thanks for the support!