What is a prototype?

Usually, products that have just been developed or designed need to be prototyped. Prototypes are the first step to verify the feasibility of products. They are the most direct and effective way to find out the defects, deficiencies, and drawbacks of the designed products, so as to make targeted improvements to the defects until the deficiencies cannot be found from individual prototypes. At this point, it is usually necessary to conduct a small amount of trial production to find out the deficiencies in the batch for improvement. Designed products are generally not perfect, or even unusable. If they are directly produced, they will all be scrapped once there are defects, which greatly wastes manpower, material resources and time. Prototypes are generally a small number of samples with a short production cycle and less loss of manpower and material resources. They can quickly find out the deficiencies of product design and then improve them, providing sufficient basis for product finalization and mass production.

"Prototype" is a local industry term, and the professional term is called: "sample, verification piece, sample, proportional model, etc." In layman's terms, it is a small number of verification samples manufactured before the product is finalized.

For products that require mold production, a prototype is one or more functional samples made based on the product appearance drawing or structure drawing without opening a mold, which are used to check the rationality of the appearance or structure.