What's Going to Fly on Kickstarter These Days, and Why?

What's Going to Fly on Kickstarter These Days, and Why?:

Dan Goldstein's cardboard molding method

Randy Ganacias with his 3D-printing set-up in the background

The Kickstarter rendering ban may have washed out a generation of would-be products, and quite a few failures, but talented designers continue to get projects funded by working with what they've got.

Industrial-design-related Kickstarter pitches from one year ago will look very different from the ones we'll see a year in the future. By looking at the most recent Kickstarter product design successes in the low-target price range, it's not difficult to see what people are willing to get behind. Here's two of recent note:

San-Francisco-based designer Dan Goldstein's RE-PLY Chair handily attained his $10,000 goal while still at the halfway mark.


In our opinion, here are some of Goldstein's success points:

- He uses a readily-available material, cardboard.

- He states he's been working on the chair for six years, and backs that up with documentation on his pitch page, which contains photographs of his prototyping process.

- The chair works. The pitch video shows the product in use, driving home the notion that this is a real product.




(more...)