Quirky Social Crowd Making Products
By Azam on October 3, 2011
Quirky is a very smart business model that engages the crowd to produce products that other may want. Quirky takes advantage of the community based development of product to test, produce, and market. Besides selling directly to consumers the company has tied up with Home Shopping Network, BedBathBeyond, and others.
The nice idea of Quirky is that users can also submit invent ideas that can get selected and manufactured for profit. The individual submitting the idea will have the team help develop and manufacture which is time consuming and very involved process that could hinder an inexperienced individual from selling in the market. Quirky also has the ability to market directly form the site and through retail channels that would more increase sales opportunity.
Ben Kaufman is known as the guy behind Mophie, the Burlington, Vermont-based iPhone accessory maker that claimed $1 million in revenue in 2006.
But as he learned more and more from firsthand visits to outsourced manufacturers in China, Kaufman realized that he didn’t have to design the products himself. Instead, he told Inc. magazine in 2007, he planned to “turn Mophie into a community-based product-development company” that let anyone submit a design. Winning designs would be built by Kaufman’s outsourced network.
Quirky, founded a year ago and headquartered in New York City, does what it calls social product development. Aspiring product designers pay $99 per idea to submit their product designs for group evaluation. Quirky maintains a community of people who are paid to influence product designs. Those who do get a cut of eventual sales. The $99 fee guarantees that “it’s either going to get your product developed, or you’ll get a 45-page stack from us explaining what type of people like your product.”
The company has built and sold gadgets ranging from rain water collector, to a portable nightlight for children, to a luggage tag that weighs the suitcase to see if it fits carry-on restrictions. Because of the Mophie connection, Kaufman gets lots of submissions for Apple accessories. “The iPad case we launched is killing it,” he told me in a phone interview.
Currently, he said, “1 in about 35 ideas right now gets designed. Of the 1 in 35, about 25 to 30 percent of them meet the presale threshold.”
Kaufman’s strength seems to be his willingness to let others be the star designers and inventors. “When you drill down to what this business is,” he said, “it’s an operational powerhouse.”
Quirky closed a $6 million A round of funding led by RRE Ventures. Village Ventures, Lowercase Capital and Contour Venture Partners also pitched in. That brings total funding to around $7.5 million.
Tags : , Ben Kaufman, Crowd sourcing, Morphie, Products, Quirky, Social