Are Your Designs Hot or Not?
Wednesday, January 5th, 2011 at 7:54 pm
Posted by Jenny
Are your designs hot or not? A question that all good designers ask themselves in some form or another. But how do you really know? The ultimate test is whether your products sell, but at the early prototype stage, how do you know whether to put your designs into production?
Whether production means a third party manufacturer or just you in your back bedroom, frantically assembling, sewing or knitting after 8 hours at the office, it can be a time consuming, expensive and wasteful process if the items don’t sell. Wouldn’t it be good to receive feedback before production?
CraftNation has come up with an interesting solution. Combining feedback, group buying, pre-ordering and a designer location map they aim to shake-up traditional approaches to manufacturing. Inspired by buyer urgency and bulk orders generated by successful business models like Groupon, CraftNation features one product on the homepage daily. Voted by the community as the most desirable from a series of designs uploaded by CraftNation ‘Co-Makers’ the Daily Gift Deal is available to buy for 24hrs only.
Louise Campbell, founder of CraftNation.com explains, “Making products that are un-desired and do not sell is un-sustainable from a financial as well as an ecological point of view, they become instant waste.”
Making goods to order isn’t in itself a new concept, particularly for makers who go through lengthy processes and use high value raw materials. However, the additional exposure and access to votes and feedback that CraftNation provides is certainly something worth considering. And as well as appearing on the home page of the site, the daily offer is emailed to CraftNation’s exclusive mailing list. It’s an interesting model and I’ll be following their progress with interest.
To upload your products to the showcase or to checkout the daily offer offer go to www.craftnation.com.
