Hi Christin and Welcome to Edison Nation!
We cannot as a company provide legal guidance on the patenting process.
To secure a patent, an invention must fulfill three requirements: it needs to have novelty, utility and be non-obvious.
1) Novelty: The invention must be a new or novel idea. If it has been publicly disclosed, used or sold for more than one year before the date of application, the invention cannot be patented.
2) Utility: To be patented, it must also be useful. The invention must offer a benefit to society and perform the described function.
3) Non-obvious: To be patentable, the invention must not only be novel, but also non-obvious. Changing the size, materials or other obvious alterations on an existing product or patent are normally not patentable.
Because of these three requirements, it's smart to conduct various searches for existing products or disclosures of ideas like yours. If you find something similar to your idea, you must be able to communicate why yours is different. It's very rare to come across an idea that is completely 'new'. Usually an invention is an improvement on one or more products.
Here are our favorite go-to websites that we use to find existing products and ideas:
www.google.com/patents
www.uspto.gov
www.amazon.com
Doing this research ahead of time will help to guide you on your path to success, and help our review team to evaluate your idea even faster.
To learn more about intellectual property evaluation, check out this blog post!