A Big Push to Get Going
By MARY BILLARD
SHANNON WHITEHEAD and Kristin Glenn became fast friends working in bars in Manly Beach, Australia, a post-college ramble, before eventually returning home to the United States to buckle down in the reality of the bad economy. “What are we going to do?” recalled Ms. Glenn, 26, with a playful bored-child’s plaintive emphasis on do.
During the summer of 2010, Ms. Whitehead, in Austin, Tex., and Ms. Glenn, in Denver, began seriously working on a prototype of their pipe dream, a functional, all-in-one adaptable garment for traveling. “Kristen started playing with a piece of fabric, staples and very minimal sewing skills, and we brought it to a seamstress in Denver and started editing it and seeing what could come out of it,” Ms. Glenn recalled.
Their creation? The Versalette by {r}evolution apparel, a convertible piece of cloth ingeniously engineered with the aid of buttons and drawstrings to be transformed with sleight-of-hand wizardry into a dress, shirt, scarf, purse — in fact, a total of over 20 different functionalities.
For financing, the partners turned to Kickstarter, the online fund-raising site for creative projects. Their video told the story of their desire to see change in the way clothes are made and consumed, to reduce the use of pesticides on cotton, harsh dyes and exploitive labor and still look good. A posted look book, the video and a downloadable PDF demonstrate the cunning variations, serving as a dresser’s manual.
The money poured in, blasting past their $20,000 goal to eventually reach $64,246 in the women’s self-designated 35-day offering. The 796 backers contributed anywhere from $5 for which they received a thank you video, to $500, scoring four Versalettes, a poster and a T-shirt. The sweet spot was $75, the threshold price at which the backers secured a Versalette. “It was ridiculous,” said Ms. Whitehead, 26. “I was refreshing 60 times a day probably.”
Since Kickstarter’s founding in April 2009, more than two million people have pledged over $250 million to projects in fields like art, film, technology, comics, games, fashion, food and publishing. Kickstarter takes 5 percent of the final amount of projects reaching their goal, and Amazon Payments processes the money and takes 3 percent to 5 percent. The projects must be fully financed to receive the pledged money. The average request is around $5,000. A staff member will view the submissions, offering mild feedback, like there should be a face in the video or the rewards don’t reflect the project. “We suggest they think in a different way,” said Yancey Strickler, one of the three founders of Kickstarter, which is based on the Lower East Side.
Mr. Strickler explained that there are two basic types of Kickstarter fashion projects, which have brought in $3.5 million since the site began. Versalette is an example of a transactional start, attracting a broader base of backers who are essentially buying the product. “There is the storefront creation where someone has made 10 prototypes and is using Kickstarter to say, ‘Hey, if we get $5,000 worth sold, we’ll make some more,’ ” he said in a recent phone interview.
Storefront projects tend to the inventive, like the JoeyBra, featuring a handy side pocket for iPhones or credit cards ($10,346 pledged), or niche, like the Shredly, a mountain bike apparel concern based in Aspen, Colo., acknowledging that women are “rad,” and are not into black, boring or baggy ($25,897).
The other model, which Mr. Strickler called the patronage model, is the couture or bespoke project. Couture rewards are personally designed T-shirts (T-shirts are big on Kickstarter) and face time with the designers or sketches. “The bespoke couture project is less a consumer creation, and contributions are more likely to come from people who love and care for that person,” Mr. Strickler said.
High-profile examples include the “Project Runway” alumni Olivier Green and Anthony Ryan Auld, who turned to Kickstarter to subsidize the creation of their Fall/Winter 2012/2013 creations.
Amber Jimenez, 30, is a fledgling designer who works out of a small apartment in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Arriving in New York from San Francisco in 2008, Ms. Jimenez was hired by the milliner Albertus Swanepoel. She also started Ambit, a small collection of minimal yet feminine romantic clothes, priced from $100 to $600. After one small collection, which was picked up at the avant-garde downtown store End of Century, she was encouraged though she also received a reality check. She sought to raise $6,800 on Kickstarter to make a Fall 2011 collection and show in a gallery.
“I had to be one of those fund-raiser people and call friends and say this is really important and blah, blah, blah,” said Ms. Jimenez, who did make her goal with $70 to spare. The money financed production at a fashion district factory. DailyCandy ran a flattering article on Ambit, mentioning the Kickstarter campaign. Soon after, the line was picked up by a store in Japan. Still fledgling, Ambit produced 100 pieces this spring, and is now self financing. “It shows you can move to New York and start from nothing,” Ms. Jimenez said.
When the neophyte designer Mandy Kordal, 25, moved to New York from Cincinnati in 2009, it was a soft landing. First, she was hired by Betsey Johnson and then moved on to Doo.Ri, where she designed the collection sweaters for the runway.
Ms. Kordal designs her patterns, featuring intricate detailing, and until recently hand-knit all the lightweight Japanese-inspired creations in her apartment in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Ms. Kordal bartered knitwear to a filmmaker friend who shot her fund-raising Kickstarter video. “It makes you really think how you want to present yourself and where you are going,” she said.
After reaching her $10,000 goal, Ms. Kordal started using a small knitwear factory in Queens to produce her line. “I’m really adamant about producing in the United States,” said Ms. Kordal, whose most recent temporary job was designing for Crewcuts, the J. Crew children’s line. “Knitwear is such a specific skill set: using the machinery; how to program the pattern. It’s important to keep that knowledge in the U.S.”
Continuum: Computational Couture’s stated goal was democratizing bespoke for the masses through interactive technologies. In the video, the designer Mary Huang explained an app that allows users to draw a dress, which is turned into a 3-D model and exported to a cutting pattern sized to their measurements. A posted prototype of a resulting dress, more art than garment, was a pattern of triangular pieces, perfect for the stylish futuristic denizens of the Capitol in “The Hunger Games.”
The proposal fell short of raising the $15,000 requested, drawing $8,749. Her partner, Jenna Fizel, an M.I.T.-trained architect who designs interactive museum exhibits at a firm in Cambridge, Mass., credits the exercise with bringing clarity to their next work, a cool-looking 3D printed bikini. The bikini top ($250 to $300) and custom-made choker ($55) are available on Shapeways.com. Undaunted, the partners are planning another Kickstarter project. “I like writing code, I like making interactive shapes, and I like thinking of how technologies impact what things are made of, I like bikinis,” Ms. Fizel said in a phone interview.
Ms. Whitehead and Ms. Glenn have become go-to gurus for tips on how to succeed on Kickstarter. The entrepreneurs credit their fund-raising success to blogging a year before their start to gain support. The two social-media-savvy women update on Facebook, Twitter and the {r}evolution apparel Web site every step, from sourcing the 100 percent recyclable fabric to shots of the workers at the North Carolina factory. They, along with two interns, are on a summer road trip in a mobile pop-up shop van from Vancouver to San Francisco, hoping to spark conversations about fashion and the environment. The journey will be documented in film and photos.
Kickstarter projects like Versalette are a window into the minutia of how things are actually made. “We are so used to the global supply chain, we don’t know how things are created,” Mr. Strickler of Kickstarter said. “They just arrive on our shelves.”
But getting financing is only one step in a long road. Ms. Glenn and Ms. Whitehead have had a couple of setbacks, including having to push back their April delivery date to backers. Organic cotton drawstrings were back ordered; they had to wait for available time at a sewing factory.
The partners were upfront about their missteps, admitting that they were babes in the woods. “And they also know that because we update so often, they know we are working our hardest to get them the best possible product we possibly can,” Ms. Glenn said. “You have backers, but they get your story and get what you are trying to do.”
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1.Have you ever had a creative idea you imagined launching and did not know how? Explain.
2.Go onto the Kickstarter website. Explain how you go about getting funding for a creative idea and write about it.
3.What did you think about the article? Did it show promise for a young creative entrepreneur? Explain.
