Within the first 3 days of their Kickstarter campaign, the Canadian fashion brand, Garçon Model managed to raise over 143% of their initial goal. They have gone on to raise more than $27,000 through their crowdfunding project and are still accepting pledges.
In my opinion, this campaign is a great example of creators involving their supporters, fans, and customers in the creative process. At the end of the campaign, backers will “be able to vote at the end of the campaign for the undies of their dreams (using an online poll tool) with the most popular styles and colors becoming a part of Garçon Model’s second collection.” Instead of merely raising money in order to manufacture a predetermined product, Garçon Model is putting the consumer in charge of some of the product development.
Having been featured in magazines and on websites like Men’sFitness, Esquire, and Fab, the team behind this project has seen some tremendous success and are willing to kick it forward to aspiring fashion entrepreneurs by answering some of your questions and mine regarding their Kickstarter fundraising process. You can see our interview below.
Did you expect to raise more than twice your fundraising goal? What do you attribute your success to?
We’re really thankful to all of our supporters and backers. We knew we had a great product to offer but we didn’t expect to reach our goal so rapidly after 3 days. The rewards are crucial. We tried to provide the best value to the backers as well as throwing in some fun ones like being included in our next photo-shoot or getting sneak previews of our upcoming campaign. Ultimately, you can really never know in advance how good or bad your campaign will perform, but it can be a great surprise and a thrilling experience.
What did you find to be most effective in marketing and promoting your campaign? How did you get such good PR coverage?
Promoting your campaign is one of the hardest aspects of doing a crowdfunding campaign. You definitely have to start with cultivating a fan base months, if not years in advance. The biggest mistake is to expect that people will just browse Kickstarter, see you, and just pledge. You have to bring in your own fans and backers mostly.
We did an experiment with Indiegogo and towards the last 2 weeks added our project to Indiegogo with absolutely no promotion on our side, and all we raised was $0. That goes to show that posting a project online does nothing if you do not bring in people.
We emailed a lot of journalist and bloggers as well, but got next to no return. I wouldn’t be surprised if those journalists were flooded with the same crowdfunding inquiry every day all year. In the end, it’s the journalists and bloggers that we had a close relationship with over our past year of being in business, that truly helped us rally people.
We were also contacted by numerous specialized crowdfunding services, and tried one, only to realize this was useless. All those people do is to mass email a list of journalists. Sometimes the list is outdated too. We also did use PR web with no result. So the big lesson here, is that your backers and supporters are the people you know already.
How many backers were family/friends vs. strangers?
Although you’re definitely hoping for friends and family at the very start to back your project, the goal is definitely to attract new backers outside your social network. If we were to give a rough percentage it would be 10% friends, 90 % external backers.
How did you go about estimating costs for your reward tier production?
Your best friend will be your Excel sheet. You have to be realistic about your project. Plug in every single cost. This forces you to look at your business in a practical way. You have to go the extra steps to check the shipping fees for each country you wish to offer shipping to.
We re-did our rewards level over and over, every time striving to make it simpler, cheaper, and tailored to what we thought backers would want. You definitely have to forget about the idea of making a profit here. The campaign is solely to get your minimum amount to get you the funds to make your idea come to life. If you can, try to offer free shipping, or at least reasonable international shipping. We posted a list of countries for which we knew we could afford free shipping. We tried to include as many countries and people as possible.
What was your biggest surprise in the campaign?
The biggest surprise is that this is hard work. We started months ahead of time, we re-did the video 5 times, we coordinated the PR with our journalist and blogger friends. We crafted the text and images to make the page the most compelling and eye catching. We asked for feedback from random people that had nothing to do with the project and took into account each and every single piece of feedback, even if that meant getting rid of things we cherished at the time.
What is life like post-Kickstarter?
As our kickstarter campaign is finishing off, we are working already on setting up the fulfillment services, preparing the goods, and making sure the experience for the backers is as smooth and enjoyable as possible. The way you handle your fulfillment phase is as crucial as the actual gaining backers process.
