"Sketch to consumer availability in the appliance industry can take 3-5 years.   UL, CSA, and EU regulations are part of the time burn.  There are large amounts of tooling that needs to be designed, soft tooled, hard tooled once the design is finalized.  I previously worked in the packaging industry where we could be in production in 12 weeks with new products. The extreme variation in timelines is something that I always stress with ID Students."