An increasing number of our smaller and individual clients are using crowd funding to get their ideas from a design into production, production usually being the most expensive bit of the exercise.
So what is crowd funding?
Crowd funding is an online tool for exposing your design to a large number of potential investors, and raising the capital to implement it from a large number of low risk modest investors rather than trying to raise a large amount of funding from a single investor.
Design driven projects are ideal for attracting funding through pledges of investment or pre-orders of your product; which can be used cover upfront investment such as production.
Through crowd funding sites such as KICK STARTER, indiegogo, gofundme,Croudfunder and Pozible the $ value of crowd funding is roughly doubling every year; for 2015 it is expected to exceed US$10 Billion.
One of our clients is Carolyn and her product Mobee. Carolyn observed a need for a more stylish personal shopping trolley and found that a more stylish product would be accepted by a wider market and in more applications. We worked with Carolyn to develop her ideas and produce a realistic production prototype, so investors could see what they were investing in and production documentation so she could get accurate production and unit costing that would enable her to pitch for crowd funding. Check out Mobee at http://www.themobee.com/
