After you finish developing ideas on your own, it's time to put them all together into a single document that you can send to manufacturers that you want to work with. This document is called a product specification sheet, and is essentially a document that explains your product, what it does, how it does what it does, the different components necessary to make it, and a visual of what it looks like. Think of it like a blueprint to build a house, except this time it's a product that you've been crafting, and a manufacturer is the builder that you hire to make your vision into a physical product.
It's also helpful to have this one sheet to keep yourself organized and remember the things that you order, so as to not have any miscommunications in the future. When working with vendors overseas, it is common to miscommunicate due to the language barriers. So this document is a good reference to point to when things mess up. The things that you put in the sheet will vary depending on the type of product that you're ordering.
But at its minimum, it should have product description, use case, required components, materials and colors, and packaging specifications. After I have the sheet, I would go to the vendor and communicate everything that I have on the spec sheet to them. In the beginning, you can use the same manufacturer to source all the components for your product. For example, when I created [INAUDIBLE] lashes, the lash supplier only specializes in making the lashes itself, so they will need to source the plastic casing and the packaging for us.
When manufacturers have to source from external vendors, they will mark up the price to generate a profit for themselves. But when you first start, I would only recommend going through the same supplier for all the components, because typically, these suppliers have existing pricing of these vendors, so it'll be a lot cheaper for you when you're ordering in a low volume. Once you get into a higher volume order, you can actually separate these components in order by yourself.
So I would order the casing, and the packaging, and the lashes from three different suppliers. After speaking with the manufacturer and showing them the product spec sheet, my final step is to get a digital rendering done for my product. I use Photoshop to try to make a visual of what my product will look like. And depending on my marketing strategy, I may use the digital rending to generate brand awareness, or use it to start the presale of the product.
For some products, there may already be existing markup templates available on the internet, so try that a bit at first before you hire a graphic designer to create the digital rendering for you.