On May 19 2015, Angelica Sweeting launched a Kickstarter campaign for the Angelica Doll: a natural hair doll for young girls. The Angelica Doll is a beautiful 18-inch vinyl doll with facial features true to women of color and hair that can be washed and styled like natural hair. The mission behind this campaign is to create girl toys that nurture self-esteem and make girls with different skin tones and hair textures feel included.
Since launching, she has surpassed her $25,000 goal and has gone on to raise over $73,000 with over a week left until the end of the campaign. Recently I had the opportunity to speak with Sweeting about her Kickstarter success to find out why her campaign has done so well and to get some helpful tips for future project creators:
1. First, can you tell us a little about yourself and your project?
My name is Angelica Sweeting. I am twenty-seven, a wife and mother of two. I attended the University of Miami and have worked at a non-profit for the past four years. My project – The Angelica Doll was inspired by my oldest daughter who started to hate her natural hair and skin tone because it didn’t look like the dolls and characters she constantly sees on TV or in the store.
2. Did you consider any other crowdfunding platforms before choosing Kickstarter?
I did a lot of research on crowdfunding before launching our Kickstarter campaign. I looked for other successful crowdfunding campaigns with the same product category as ours (girl toys) and decided Kickstarter would be the best fit. The all-or-nothing aspect of Kickstarter can be a tad terrifying but the platform is well-known and is very user friendly.
3. I see your campaign was covered on BuzzFeed and Cosmopolitan, among others. What is your strategy for getting media attention?
Honestly, our strategy for media attention failed. I lined up at least three major publications and several bloggers to write about our project the day of the launch and none of those articles were ever posted. I think the key to media attention is having a good product and a strong following before the launch. Once one publication writes about it the rest of them tend to follow.
I spent at least 3 months prior to our launch building our social media presence and gaining our faithful foundation of people who were interested in our project and who would back our campaign first. I wanted to ensure our campaign would be successfully funded without any media attention.
4. Your Kickstarter has already raised more than twice your original goal of $25,000. How has this success affected your plans moving forward?
Well, first…I can breathe a sigh of relief and focus the remainder of our campaign on setting things up for mass production. I set the goal on Kickstarter as low as possible, so now I will be able to move things along quicker with production. We do not have to adjust our manufacturing plans yet due to high demand. The number of dolls that have been ordered through Kickstarter is still in our range for the first round of mass production. We aren’t using any fulfillment companies to ship rewards.
I didn’t want to over stretch myself with international shipping for this campaign. With the weight of our product, international shipping would have been very expensive at this point. Shipping is only available to US, UK, and Canada because of the fan base we had before our campaign launched.
International shipping can become quite overwhelming for crowdfunding campaigns if you don’t have the logistics and fulfillment in place internationally and that was something I didn’t want to take on yet. I wanted to focus on delivering a great product within the time frame that was given to our backers. Now that we have received an overwhelming amount of requests for international shipping, we can go ahead and put that system in place after our campaign is over.
5. Do you have any final advice for other creators launching their first Kickstarter campaign?
YES, take your time and prepare! There were times that I wanted to hurry up and launch the project before it was truly ready. The Soma Kickstarter hack article was my bible! I tried my best to follow this article step by step. I would encourage anyone to set up a landing page at least four months in advance to start collecting email addresses from potential backers who are interested in your project. It gave me a chance to keep potential backers interested in our project and they were ready to spread the word once we launched.
Conclusion
The Angelica Doll Kickstarter campaign is a great example of a project that was a first for the creator, but also a huge success. For many people, it can take more than one try to get their Kickstarter campaign fully funded; crowdfunding can definitely be a learning process. Angelica Sweeting shows us that with a lot of preparation, determination and a good product your Kickstarter campaign can take off and become even bigger than you imagine.
Some key takeaways from this interview are the importance of using the resources available. There are many articles online that can help guide you through the crowdfunding process, especially if you are new to it. We also have a comprehensive course detailing how to raise money on Kickstarter.
Taking the time to build a contact list and social media presence can help ensure that you have backers ready to support your campaign when it launches, which can help encourage the media to write about your project or help you get featured on the front page or as a Kickstarter Staff Pick.
For more help getting the word out about your Kickstarter campaign before launch, check out some of these tools to gather some support before you launch your project.
