Shipto..
I have been there and done that!
I answered an ad in a prominent engineering magazine in the late eighties for Rank Hovis Flour co where they had problems with 50Kg flour bags and sealing them where they would not come apart through vigorous shipping, plus they needed to be swung 90 degrees and shoved down a chute, I designed and built a bag stitcher and oreinter for them on the promise my machines would be installed in every mill in the UK…. They lied, they reversed engineered and had someone else do it.
Simular thing happened with a electric coil manufacturer in Wales where they made a layered leaf two piece coil design and wanted to crimp a built in dove tail joint and have them squeezed together at such a force it did not disturb the current flowing through it after joining, I built the machine in my shop and assembled it on my kitchen table, I took it to the meeting to show them and never heard a word again, I found out their own shop copied the design.
Moral of this story… keep your thoughts and designs to yourself …. There gonna steal it.
Patents don’t mean nothing to you, they are not in place for you, they are there for two reasons, the government keeps tabs on what's being designed and they get first dibs and industry gets second, they see the submittals. You don’t have enough money to patent; you don’t have the resources to inforce it. People have to realize having a patent in England just covers England, you need patents in every country to protect your product, that’s if you have the legal wherewithal at your disposal.
Your problem my friend is not the design, nor the product, your problem is not what you think it is, your dilemma is marketing, marketing a design to a manufacturer who under license will make your design, sell and distribute while slicing you off a percentage over a given length of time, this is ten times easier to keep under control from a legal origin with the added benefit of no capital outlay to you.
Not knowing your design, I don’t need too, my advice is just the idea may be sufficient to make a sale… Moral of the story is you're in the sales business my friend.
Hope this helps.
Anthony