Having raised over half a million dollars in 25 days on Kickstarter, Robot Turtles founder Dan Shapiro has been featured in major print and online publications, including the New York Times, NPR and Techcrunch. Not only did he soar past his $25,000 crowdfunding goal by more than 2500%, he also delivered the perks he promised to backers earlier than expected.

Where most Kickstarter creators struggle with shipping rewards out on time and dealing with unpredictable levels of demand, Shapiro was able to scale his original plan, execute on his vision, and successfully navigate the choppy waters of product fulfillment to both domestic and international backers.

In our interview with Shapiro, we’ve given you an inside view of a smash-hit six-figure Kickstarter project and how a small project turned into a thriving business.

How did you come up with the idea for Robot Turtles as a board game?

I was tired of kids’ board games that were thinly veiled luck or games of skill in which the kids were hopelessly outmatched. I wanted something that would afford real quality time with my then four-year-old twins. And I wanted some of that cool “A-ha!” discovery that is so fun to watch.

What was your kids’ initial reaction?

They got it immediately. Their first reaction was to tell me how I should improve it: “Daddy, I don’t like that wall. I want lasers!” or, “Daddy, I want to play more than just one card at a time!”

Why is it called “Robot Turtles?”

The game is very loosely based on a programming language called Logo that I learned in computer camp in the early 1980s. Logo features a turtle character that players, using the Logo programming language, send around the screen to draw pictures.

Why did you choose to crowdfund and who were you targeting? 

I could have self-funded a small print run, but then I’d be stuck with a thousand games in my garage. And if it turned out that nobody wanted the game, what then? Kickstarter was the best way to find out if people truly wanted the game to exist so I’d know if I was wasting my efforts before starting manufacturing.

What made your Kickstarter video a success?

I don’t really know, but I think it has to do with the concept more than the game. People never got to try the game before they pledged. It’s lots of fun, but they had no way of knowing that. I think the backers had an intuitive sense that this was something worthwhile.

Programming concepts like order of operations and decomposing complex actions are basic elements of thought—things that kids tend to be really good at. Why should they have to wait to learn to read to start exploring these skills? That resonated, and people got excited about seeing what a product like that could be.

I think crowdfunding campaigns work best when they describe something to the world that people want to exist. If it’s a good idea, people will get excited about it. It also helped to email, tweet, and post on Facebook to get the ball rolling.

Did anything happen during the crowdfunding phase that you didn’t anticipate? How did you respond?

I was bowled over by the enormous reception. It was fully funded in five hours and at four-times my goal in two days and then never stopped. From the moment it fully funded, I switched into overdrive reviewing all my production plans to see if they would hold up under the strain of a much larger order.

What challenges did the excessive funding present post-campaign?

Everyone’s expectations were high. I tried to be incredibly communicative, sharing pictures and updates, so everyone had 100% transparency. Ironically most overfunded crowdfunding campaigns are very late, but I shipped a smidge early. I think that bought me a lot of breathing room with my backers for the snags that did come up, such as lost packages.

How quickly did you shift to order fulfillment, and were you able to meet the holiday orders?

The manufacturing process started the day the Kickstarter campaign closed. I had a schedule with two weeks of buffer to get product to U.S. addresses in time for Christmas. I wound up getting it out about one week before Christmas. There were a few delays, but Delano Services, my manufacturer, stepped on the gas and made up the time by finishing early.

How did you get your first non-Kickstarter customers? 

I sold out the remaining inventory in a month or two through the product’s website: www.robotturtles.com.

Are you still printing copies of the game?

No, I’m done. But Thinkfun, an amazing manufacturer of kids’ board and educational games, has started. They’re producing a version of the game that’s very similar but with a few great improvements, such as shiny gold highlights on the pieces and a nicer box and manual. You can buy it now at Target and Amazon.

What happened post-Kickstarter with regard to operations, such as staffing, changes to tactics or strategy, struggles, and successes?

There’s not much to report. This is a one-man show with some amazing contractors helping out with design and support. I just worked like mad to get everything out for the holiday, breathed a big sigh of relief, and turned over manufacturing to Thinkfun who’s done a tremendous job with it.

When did you develop the e-book?

My friend, Brad O’Farrell, the creator of Story Wars, helped me write it during the campaign. Then the same designer who designed the game illustrated it after the campaign closed.

Did anything occur during the first year that you didn’t anticipate? How did you respond?

Just one huge hiccup: I was planning on using Amazon for fulfillment, but they miscommunicated about their ability to fulfill overseas orders. I was left with nearly 2,000 international game orders and no way to get them out for the holidays. Fulfillrite jumped in and saved my bacon—sitting on the phone with me until the late hours in order to get the process squared away and rushing the packages out the door. I would have been in deep trouble without their help.

What are your plans going forward?

I’m working on a book about startup CEOs for O’Reilly Media and enjoying the Seattle season.

To read more about what it’s like to launch and run a successful crowdfunding campaign, be sure to check out the rest of interviews in this series LINK.

The game is very loosely based on a programming language called Logo that I learned in computer camp in the early 1980s. Logo features a turtle character that players, using the Logo programming language, send around the screen to draw pictures.

Six-figure crowdfunders Ricky Choi & Phil Moldavski raised almost 400% of their Kickstarter goal with the vision to redefine our relationships with our sock drawers. Their mission was to bring colorful and premium socks to the marketplace at an affordable price, which they’ve since accomplished by actively selling Nice Laundry socks on their website.

However, as with all overnight successes, this dream took immense planning and dedication from day one. Below, we’ve included our discussion with the team, where they detail how they were able to raise $119,321 from 2,000+ backers in the span of 40 days.

They also gave us a ‘look under the hood’ of the project, sharing why they decided to launch a crowdfunding campaign, how they validated their business assumptions, and how they’ve managed to scale the project after experiencing high order volumes.

How did you come up with idea to redo men’s sock drawers?

Ricky Choi: I met [co-founder Phil Moldavski] when we both worked at Living Social, and I noticed that he was very well dressed, but every day he would wear these white athletic socks with his dark dress shoes.

It just wasn’t giving him the look that I knew he was going for. I’ve always been a sock guy. As soon as I felt like I knew Phil well enough, I suggested that he buy a pair of socks—a colorful, dressy, more refined pair—which he did. He ordered a pair online, wore them to work, got a ton of compliments, and loved how they made him feel. But when he got home, he threw them in the wash and didn’t see them again for another two weeks until they came back through the wash.

He wanted every single pair in his sock drawer to be a go-to pair of socks. So he spent weeks and hundreds and hundreds of dollars refreshing his sock drawer with high-quality, colorful, fashionable socks. It was kind of at that point that he said, “Hey, this refreshing your sock drawer is such a great experience but there’s no current solution that allows you to do it for a reasonable price.” [Thus, Nice Laundry] was born from a personal pain point.

How did you turn that into a business and why did you decide to crowdfund it?

RC: Coming from the startup world, we’re all about testing and minimum viable products. Therefore, we weren’t going to go raise $500,000 to test this unproven concept.

Our first step was to call all of our friends and family and pitch them on the idea. We asked them what was their relationship with their sock drawer. Are there some socks that they always wear first? Are there some socks that are always left over [after doing laundry]? How many socks have missing pairs? How many have holes in them, etc.

After walking them through these questions, we realized almost everyone has a terrible experience with their sock drawer. Next, we went to Macys, Nordstrom and all the bargain basements. We would just hang out by the sock displays and wait for people to come up to buy socks and kind of walk them through that same set of questions to get a little bit of objective feedback. We quickly realized that this strained sock drawer relationship was a common experience.

Then, we took out a little bit of an ad spend with Google Adwords, using keywords such as “colorful socks,” “affordable socks,” and “dress socks” and drove people to a landing page with very simple value propositions: refresh your sock drawer in a few clicks, recycle all of your old socks, affordable pricing, high quality. We were capturing a very high percentage of emails, which told us this is an idea that we could definitely communicate online. The next step was a Kickstarter campaign to see if we could convince people on a larger scale since there was relatively low risk on our part and no upfront investment except for a little bit of a budget for a video.

Who were you targeting?

RC: Our target was fresh college graduates and people starting to get serious about their career or professional track. This sense of starting fresh is something that was definitely appealing to that demographic.

The other chunk of our demographic was an older crowd. I think it’s an easy way for the Baby Boomer generation to stay hip as workplace attire is becoming more casual. Whereas they used to wear a tie to showcase their character and personality, ties are not being worn anymore on a daily basis. What better way to replace a tie than with a stylish pair of socks?!

The bulk of our customers are men. About 20% of our customers are women and half of them are gifting to significant others or friends while the other half are actually buying them for themselves.

When did you realize this campaign was going to be bigger than the anticipated $30K?

RC: On launch day. At the time, we broke the record for the most backers on opening day for a fashion Kickstarter project, acquiring nearly 200 backers. We had a steady stream of backers throughout the course of the campaign. Given the fact that we had sold almost 30,000 pairs of socks through Kickstarter to over 2,000 customers, it was at that point that we thought this could potentially scale into a real business because there’s enough demand.

Fundamentally, you can have a great product and you can have a great market, but if you don’t have a product-market fit, you don’t really have anything. And that was the biggest question. We know we can make good socks. We know people like good socks out there. But, the way we’re merchandising these socks, the price-point, the look, feel and style – is that a fit for the audience that we can easily reach online? That was the biggest unknown and I think Kickstarter did a great job of helping us answer that question.

When did you start scaling?

RC: That’s always the question, right? Toward the end of our campaign as we were getting ready to place our order with our manufacturer, we were unprepared for the sheer volume. I mean 30,000 pairs of socks, that’s a 40 foot container! We had anticipated filling all of our own orders. That’s when we realized we’re going to need to bring in some outside help for sure. That’s when we contacted Fulfillrite to be our order fulfillment partner.

We fulfilled the Kickstarter orders at the end of July and delivered them on time to the day. About a week later, we launched our website to the public and again we were a little bit unprepared because, almost unbeknownst to us, we had landed in the Wall Street Journal’s Off-Duty section as their ‘Steal of the Week.’ We were unprepared for the volume. Our phones were ringing off the hook. It’s been a trial by fire as far as how to scale. I think that’s the nature of startups—you don’t scale until you have to because resources are tight. You don’t want to over-engineer solutions for a problem that you don’t have.

How did you manage that process?

RC: It wasn’t anything that impressive that we did in order to cope with the demand. We had a chat function on our website. We created a 1-800 number and had it funneled to my co-founder’s phone. He kept getting calls while he was on the phone with customers so we funneled it to my number. Eventually we had to bring in an extra friend. Our goal was to create as many channels as possible for our customers to reach us. There were times where I would be chatting with four customers online while responding to email while also talking on the phone with customers.

Did you do anything during that period that didn’t work?

RC: It’s not so much that it didn’t work. Our goal was to hand-sign cards for our first 10,000 orders, which we did, and that quickly became very tough to continue to do. We ended up signing 20,000 cards because we ordered too many cards and we said, we have them, we might as well sign them. I’d like to think that we added that personal touch for some of the early adopters of our business.

At the beginning, you just have to a lot of things manually. We initially had a promo code for a bonus pair of socks. We then had to manually go through the orders to see if they had applied the promo code and add it to their order. Over time we’ve leveraged software to help us automate.

Do you have any tips for vetting external partners?

RC: The only vendors that we really work with are Fulfillrite for order fulfillment, our vendors overseas and our expeditors—literally the people who will freight the stuff over from overseas. We do the design, marketing, and coding in-house. But as far as external vendors—especially at the beginning when you need to be flexible—it comes down to the person. Having access and a direct line of communication is the most important thing at the beginning—it’s more important than cost. After that, it’s who is going to best fit your needs.

Have you had to cut a vendor?

RC: Knock on wood, we haven’t had to do that so far.

Have you had any major surprises—good or bad—throughout this process?

RC: Obviously there are nice surprises. Today I was out in New York City and I counted four people wearing our socks. Seeing your stuff in public is always great validation. As far as anything unexpected, we were taking things day by day, so there weren’t any huge surprises. But you think about how many socks we’re bringing in at a given time and how much inventory costs and shipping costs and it all seems like a fairly simple equation, but there’s hidden costs all over the place. Things definitely start to add up.

In a world where you’re selling a lot and you’re getting sales notifications every minute, it’s really easy to lose track of the baseline fact that you’re trying to build a business. The goal isn’t to sell a lot of socks. It’s to build a sustainable business—one that is profitable and one where, after paying everyone, you’re still profitable. And we’ve done a good job of that. It’s just been surprising that as you scale and you grow, these marginal and incremental costs keep adding up. So it’s important to stay on top of it.

How do you keep your team on the same page in understanding that?

RC: We have all sorts of dashboards and do tons of reporting. We track in real-time our revenue, visitors, shipping cost, and product cost. We have a monitor up on the wall that tracks all that kind of stuff. Every week, we do a one-hour metrics session where we go over our website traffic, conversion rate, CPAs and customer lifetime values. We also track different cohorts of customers. For example, comparing customers over time that we acquired with a certain promotion versus customers that we acquired during the same time but not through the promotion. It’s just consistently staying on top of metrics over time.

What’s next for Nice Laundry?

RC: We’re building a neat model here. As we grow and scale, whether there is a real business here is always the question. We’re focused on socks right now and figuring out that as a category. Once we feel like we’re doing a good job with socks, we may look at another category and apply the same model. But as to what that next category is, I have no idea today. In the next year we’ll probably start slowly figuring that out.

Just over a year after their Kickstarter campaign, Nice Laundry has continued to grow and has been featured in Fast Company, Mashable, The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Uncrate and Thrillist.

To read more about what it’s like to launch and run a successful crowdfunding campaign, be sure to check out the rest of interviews in this series LINK.

To bring color and premium socks to the marketplace, at an affordable price. They have been working to redefine our relationships with our sock drawers!

Eric Heins is the founder of Corter Leather and Cloth. After raising over $58,000 on Kickstarter for his Bottlehook Bottle Opener, he has built a successful leather goods company that has been featured in the pages of Real Simple, GQ, and Esquire Magazine amongst other print and online publications.
Having started the company in college and still in his 20s, entrepreneur and leather smith Eric Heins is a great example of how the American dream lives on and how it can be accessed through a new method – crowdfunding.
We had the chance to sit down with Heins, a Fulfillrite customer, who shed some light on what it takes to launch a successful Kickstarter campaign.

How did you come up with the idea for Corter Leather?

Eric Heins: I’m a leather smith and in college I started making wallets in my dorm room because I couldn’t afford to buy one. I put pictures of the wallet online and a bunch of other kids wanted one, too. Corter Leather was slowly born. I continued the business after graduating in 2009 with a degree in graphic design and at that time switched to doing one-off custom work.

Why did you decide to crowd-fund the launch of your bottle opener?

[In 2012], I injured my hand and was in an air cast for six weeks. I couldn’t work and I had the idea for a hook with a bottle opener. That’s pretty much it—I made a left-handed sketch, and thought ‘I have six weeks to kill.’ I only put it on Kickstarter for 17 days because I wanted to get it to market really quickly.

You raised more money on Kickstarter than anticipated. What was your reaction?

EH: I was excited. I was also kind of scared out of my mind because that was a lot [of volume] at that point. I had one other product, a leather guitar pick, that had done similarly in sales to the bottle opener –an overnight success type thing – and I could make the guitar pick, but we were hand-shipping 400 or 500 pieces at a time. To ship that product, I had to hire friends to address and package envelopes.
[With the bottle opener], I was more prepared. We raised a lot of money through the Kickstarter campaign, but it was only about 1,200 orders and I had shipped about 3,000 orders the year before with the guitar pick, just from my own business, so I knew I could do it. It was going to be a couple of months of really hard work but I was happy to do it because I was proud that the product was received the way it was. Plus, it’s a really simple product. [Besides the hook], there were only two other parts we needed: the leather tab which we made in-house and the O ring, which I worked with a metal smith in Montana. He got everything made super-fast. We delivered on time and there were no real hang-ups.

Following the Kickstarter campaign, how long did it take to scale Corter Leather to meet needs of another high demand product?

EH: It didn’t take that long actually. We had a 100,000-piece mold made so our fabricator could make as many bottlehooks as we needed. That was in July of 2012. Fulfillrite had contacted me to use its fulfillment services. Once I had Fulfillrite established as my order fulfillment partner, I knew I could produce as much product as I could sell.
Fulfillment was about 80 percent of my job before. [With Fulfillrite], I had 80 percent of my time free to make more products. It was liberating because now I had time to do what I wanted to do and I didn’t have to do as much housekeeping. We shut down the website after Christmas in 2012 and I redesigned it. In March 2013 we launched the new website with new products. I hired my first full-time employee in April of this year, so I was still doing it myself for another 18 months after the re-launch.
The challenging part came after that, when I had to scale the entire company, because I just didn’t have the experience. I was 25 years old, a couple of years out of college and with no business degree. I did a lot of my own research on how ecommerce can be optimized. We’re in a unique position because we’re not selling a digital product. We manufacture our products as we’re selling them, which is kind of rare these days. A lot of the challenges were with balancing workload.

Can you give an example?

EH: I realized after the fact that I did a lot of stuff right. I was lucky to have already set up my brand. What you don’t realize with Kickstarter is that if you make it to a top position [on the home page], it’s not the press you get that takes over your sales but rather it’s the organic traffic from Kickstarter. I had my website set up, so I had a place for that traffic to go. But if I had a brand new product—no website, no brand, no anything—I could have easily become that one thing that someone found on Kickstarter and now can’t find.
It’s very important to have a place to send traffic, even if it’s just a Facebook page or an Instagram account. The most valuable aspect of Kickstarter wasn’t necessarily the funding—it was the exposure. It brought us out of our niche.

How did your use of social media factor in?

EH: That’s how the campaign gained traction. We were mentioned in blogs and I showed our design and fabrication process on our social media accounts. I posted pictures of the sketches and pictures of the prototypes so people knew that a new product was coming. In some instances, a company with no presence can put up a product and people will find it. But if you’re trying to fund a designed line and you don’t have a presence, you have to tell people about it. They’re not just going to go to Kickstarter and find it.

So it’s about building up a brand.

EH: Don’t look at what you’re doing as launching one product. You’re launching [your brand] to the world. It’s like meeting someone and not having a business card on you—you can say that you’ll give the card to them the next time you see them, because it’s going to be a lot harder to find each other. You have to have the bare-bones structure of whatever you’re launching and make it available for people to at least bookmark.

How did you get your post-Kickstarter customers?

EH: After the Kickstarter, we immediately put the bottle opener up for sale and put the link to the website on the Kickstarter page. But as far as the company was concerned, we kept going where we left off. My hand healed, and I started making my wallets again.
A lot of people from Kickstarter actually had no idea that I was a leather smith until they went to Corter Leather’s website. I put the money from Kickstarter back into the business to make new metal pieces to expand the line. The funding allowed me to take more steps [with the business] and to make cooler stuff.
I design all my products and I use their popularity as a barometer of sorts. If a product doesn’t sell, that means it’s not good enough. So, I take it off the market, re-design it, and put it back in my line.
I don’t want to be white noise. I want to make things that people need and that aren’t readily available. I don’t email bloggers, I don’t do any of that stuff. Over the years, I’ve gotten enough press that people follow me, which is the way I want my business to be run.

What’s next?

We’re moving into some bigger pieces now, including full-sized and snap wallets. I’m also launching another company called The Albatross Brand, which is machine-sewn leather. It’s going to be a truly direct-to-consumer wholesale leather goods company.
We’re not saying, ‘Our competitors offer them for $100 and we make ours for $60.’ We’re saying, ‘We make this wallet for $19 and sell it to you for $38.

Is there a meaning behind your new brand name, The Albatross Brand?

Yes. In Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the albatross was an ode of good fortune to anyone that embraced it and fed it and let it sit on its ship, and it was an omen of bad luck for those who tried to kill it. So that’s pretty much what we’re trying to do: To bring really good, high-quality products to kids that might not be able to afford the handmade stuff and, for anyone that tries to kill us, we’re going to try to bring them down. That’s the whole mantra behind it.

You’re launching The Albatross Brand on Kickstarter. Why are you returning to crowdfunding?

Because it’s a totally different entity. Corter is growing so fast that it has capital and I don’t want to take capital away from the business to put into another one. That’s the number one reason. The number two, and most important reason, is one of the things that I like the most about Kickstarter. I don’t want to spend time on something that people don’t want. When you put a product on Kickstarter and you tell people about it, they have the ability to say yes, I think this should exist, or no, I don’t think this should exist.
Corter Leather started in a dorm room and is now expanding into new product lines after having raised over $58K on their initial Kickstarter campaign. Every item they sell is handmade, down to the last stitch, and the company is completely solar powered.

To read more about what it’s like to launch and run a successful crowdfunding campaign, be sure to check out the rest of interviews in this series LINK.

Yes. In Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the albatross was an ode of good fortune to anyone that embraced it and fed it and let it sit on its ship, and it was an omen of bad luck for those who tried to kill it. So that’s pretty much what we’re trying to do: To bring really good, high-quality products to kids that might not be able to afford the handmade stuff and, for anyone that tries to kill us, we’re going to try to bring them down. That’s the whole mantra behind it.

The Nifty MiniDrive is a rare example of a Kickstarter campaign that raised over 3000% of their original $11,000 crowdfunding goal. In a span of just 28 days, the project attracted pledges from 9,805 backers, totaling $384,319 funds raised. The Nifty MiniDrive is an easy to use MicroSD card adapter that sits flush inside the MacBook and uses a microSD card to upgrade the amount of storage on your computer by up to 128GB.

How did you come up with the idea for the Nifty MiniDrive?

My co-founder, Piers Ridyard, had just bought a MacBook Air, and after quickly running out of space on it was looking for way to increase the storage on it. Without wanting to go down the route of bulky, external harddrives, he went to the Apple store and asked if they could upgrade the storage on it. He was told this was something they could not do, and that if he tried to do it himself it would void the warranty.. Most people would have given up at that point; but being the kind of guy that Piers is, he decided to actually invent a solution to his problem which ultimately became the Nifty MiniDrive.

Why do you think you were successful on Kickstarter?

Before launching on Kickstarter we actually ran an unsuccessful Indiegogo campaign. It was unsuccessful in that we got absolutely nowhere near our funding goal, but perversely this failure was one of the biggest factors in our Kickstarter success. Not only did it allow us to hone some of the flaws in the original idea, but most importantly it exposed us to a core group of early adopters who were already experiencing the problem we were trying to solve.

When we launched on Kickstarter our Indiegogo supporters were the first people to spread the word about the campaign. The product was later picked up by the Verge and then appeared on the front-page of Kickstarter, which obviously had a huge impact on the overall numbers, but it was the initial support from our early adopters that created this momentum.

How did you manage the unexpected number of backers on Kickstarter?

We were completely unprepared for the numbers we achieved on Kickstarter. In fact the very first MiniDrives were actually baked in an oven by me and Piers in his flat in Manchester. After our less than overwhelming campaign on Indiegogo we were expecting to bake a few more in the oven, and if things got totally out of control we had a UK manufacturer lined up. In fact things got, much more than totally out of control and we found ourselves in a situation where we needed to manufacture and ship over 12,000 MiniDrives.

It soon became evident that we had reached the threshold where we could not viably do this in England, and therefore had to look to manufacturers in China so that we would be able to scale up production.

In fact, the number of backers had huge implications for all aspects of the operation and was not something we had really thought about when we first launched the product. This meant that as soon as the campaign ended we needed to work out how to put systems into place that would allow us to scale all parts of the business. Outsourcing logistics and using cloud-based services such as Zendesk for customer support really helped make this manageable.

Quick Tip: You need to plan for out-of-the-park success in the same way you need to plan for failure. How will larger orders affect your manufacturing and shipping plan?

How quickly did you fulfill orders after the campaign?

The campaign ended in early August 2012 and we started sending out the product in early February 2013.

What challenges did you face during the transition period?

It was a further 6 months between shipping to our Kickstarter backers and when we started shipping to the general public. Through a combination of our own inexperience and not necessarily working with the best manufacturing partner for us, about 10% of what we shipped to our Kickstarter backers turned out to be faulty. That was a really big kick in the teeth for us and we felt like we had really let our backers down. It could have been quite easy to give-up there, but we had a really clear vision of what we wanted to achieve and did not want to let down the people who had supported us at the very beginning.

We spent the next 6 months working harder than we had ever worked to redress the quality issues seen in the first production run and building something that could be turned into a viable business rather than a one-off Kickstarter project.

What are some of the changes you made?

The first and most important change we made was changing our manufacturer. Following a series of serendipitous meetings we ended up working with Foxconn who do a lot of manufacturing for Apple, which was a huge win for us. The product also underwent a fundamental redesign and we hired an external design consultancy to conduct a thorough Design for Manufacturer analysis to assess the product’s suitability for mass production. We also learned to delegate more and took on two people to help with customer support. With a rock-solid product and systems in place that would allow us to scale, we finally started selling to the general public just over a year after our Kickstarter campaign.

Were you worried at all about being down for an extended period and not selling?

Once your product is out there, it’s relatively easy to be copied, so we were very vulnerable during that period. A competitor did come along and took advantage of us during that period, which was incredibly frustrating because you pour a lot of your energies into building a product and then to see someone come along and copy your idea is quite hard to take. However, we knew that we had a great team behind us and we had this great product and that as soon as we started selling again that it would be OK.

How have operations changed in the past year?

Immensely! At the end of Kickstarter it was just me Piers and Bea (our amazing CFO, who makes sure we don’t spend our all money!). Now we are a team of 8 retailing in 40 countries with 25 distributors, and can count Apple’s online store in Europe as one of the places where we sell our MiniDrives.

What’s next?

Although we are normally based in Manchester, England we are currently spending 3 months in Tel-Aviv working on our next project. This first product was a very simple idea, but it has allowed us to create the foundations of a business with a steady cashflow. We’ve got some pretty exciting ideas in the pipeline, and the idea now is to keep innovating and bring something new to the table.

To read more about what it’s like to launch and run a successful crowdfunding campaign, be sure to check out the rest of interviews in this series LINK.

You need to plan for out-of-the-park success in the same way you need to plan for failure. Consider how will larger orders affect your manufacturing and shipping plan.

Panda’s Kickstarter campaign exploded onto the Kickstarter scene in late 2011, raising six times their original goal. Described as “The First Eco-Friendly Brand of Luxury Sunglasses,” this project managed to attract 275 backers over the span of 60 days.

Since launching a successful Kickstarter, Panda has grown into one of the top high-end sunglasses brands that produces handcrafted products made from sustainable bamboo. We had the chance to sit down with one of the project’s creators, Vincent Ko, who was nice enough to share some of the secrets to running a successful Kickstarter campaign.

How did you come up with the idea for Panda?

Vincent Ko: A few years ago, the other founders and I were at our college homecoming reunion and were in a retail store where we saw Toms shoes. We were all big fans, because Toms paved the way was one of the first entrepreneurial-social consumer products. That was the catalyst behind Panda’s social mission. We figured we could make a fraction of the impact that Toms made with a different product—in our case, that was eco-friendly sunglasses.

How did you turn that idea into a business, and why did you choose to launch via crowdfunding?

We wanted to make a discussion piece and we figured sunglasses would be the best way. We had to link up suppliers and manufacturers with a source of bamboo and see if they’d be willing to make sunglasses out of wood. We chose crowdfunding because we had an idea for the bamboo sunglasses, but although we wanted the product, we weren’t sure if others wanted the product as well. Kickstarter is huge now, but when we launched the campaign in 2011, it was more a platform for trading ideas. Kickstarter would be a way for us to see if other people also wanted bamboo sunglasses.

“Kickstarter would be a way for us to see if other people also wanted bamboo sunglasses.”

You raised nearly six times more than anticipated. How did that affect your strategy?

It proved to us that other people wanted the sunglasses and allowed us to have confidence to say “OK, let’s really grow this and make it into a business.”

Who did the campaign target?

When we first started, there wasn’t much of a target. We thought it would be a younger, eco-friendly audience. But over the last three years, we’ve found that our customer base is so scattered—there’s no particular age group and people are buying them for various reasons, whether it’s because they’re eco-friendly or just that a wooden sunglass has a very cool aesthetic. It’s a win and it’s a struggle. It’s a win because we’re not limited to one customer segment, but it’s a struggle because it’s not a niche where we can pinpoint exactly who the customer is.

Quick Tip: Business plans are certainly necessary, but you won’t figure out who your ideal customer is or why they will buy your products until you actually get out there and gather real consumer behavior data.

Kickstarter gave the Panda team a platform to test out whether or not others actually wanted high-end bamboo sunglasses and to figure out the customer demographic that would be most likely to buy the product (along with their reasons for supporting).

How do you reach such a broad group post-Kickstarter?

Press coverage drove a lot of traffic to our site. We were in business, fashion, and eco-friendly lifestyle publications. A fashion brand that started from a crowdfunding movement is a sign of the times.

How quickly did you shift from the crowdfunding phase to order fulfillment?

The product was finished about 45 days after the campaign finished and we began shipping them out 45 days after that. The Kickstarter backers were given a discount promo code to pick out the sunglasses they wanted and place their order via our online store.

At the same time, we also allowed customers that were not Kickstarter backers to purchase at full retail price, and we began filling orders right away. Initially, we had to individually re-package the first 500 orders in our garage because we were getting the casing, labels, and sunglasses from various suppliers. We dropped the orders off with Fulfillrite, which fulfilled them.

Quick Tip: Don’t wait to set up your website until after your campaign is over. If you meet your fundraising goal, then you have the perfect opportunity to convert individuals who find your successful campaign from news websites, social media, and forums into new customers!

At the very least, set up a landing page to collect email addresses of individuals interested in pre-ordering your product. There are a lot of tools out there that will help you set up a website if you don’t have any kind of coding ability. I recommend Wix, SquareSpace, or Shopify.

How did you approach your first year?

Our first-year strategy was to have an online presence. We built our online store in the first three months and did industry tradeshows, including ENK in New York and Magic. We were a little bit out of our league but it was good. From there, we ramped up our wholesale business.

Why did you choose to attend tradeshows?

We had a couple of advisors that were either former or current executives at well-known retail brands. They said that though the tradeshow business can be expensive, we should try it out and see what happens.

Our first tradeshow was great. Though we were the youngest in the group and had a unique product, we stood out in a good way. This was within four months of opening, and we were there shaking hands with some of the largest retailers in the country. Within our first year, we were placed in the Trend Accessories section of Nordstrom stores nationwide. We’ve since gone away from tradeshows and are focusing more on our online presence and empowering our retailers by driving foot traffic to their stores. One way we do that is through a store locator on our website.

Quick Tip: When most people are brainstorming projects to launch on crowdfunding websites like Kickstarter, they start with ideas that they are passionate about and products that they want to see exist in the world.

After raising over six times their Kickstarter goal, Panda has gone on to become a leader in their niche and have attracted the attention of big name brands like Nordstrom.

To read more about what it’s like to launch and run a successful crowdfunding campaign, be sure to check out the rest of interviews in this series LINK.

Don’t wait to set up your website until after your campaign is over. If you meet your fundraising goal, then you have the perfect opportunity to convert individuals who find your successful campaign from news websites, social media, and forums into new customers.

In February 2013, Brian Park, R.N. and founder of Nabee Socks wrapped up a successful crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter, having raised $12,741 in 30 days.

Named after the Korean world for butterfly, his compression socks use a process called graduated compression therapy to reduce leg and foot pain, prevent swelling, and improve post-exercise recovery.

But, there’s a twist. Rather than the staid and neutral color offerings of traditional varieties, Park’s socks are available in designs spanning argyle to stripes and to polka dots.

The project’s mission to add an element of fashion to footwear that’s popular among medical patients and staff took Kickstarter by storm, and the team ended up attracting over 250 backers.

Now, over a year later, the successful, yet modest Nabee Socks Kickstarter campaign has transformed into a thriving business. Park now works with Fulfillrite to help manage the demand for his nearly 300 orders each month.

We had the privilege of talking with Park about what he learned from the crowdfunding campaign and his first year in business. Check out our interview below for tips and advice for navigating the online fundraising arena.

Coming up with the idea.

How did you come up with the idea for Nabee Socks?

Brian Park: I was a nurse at the MedStar Washington Hospital Center in Washington, D.C., and a lot of the doctors, nurses, and patients wore compression socks. The socks tend to be sold in neutral colors, causing the doctors and nurses to wear colorful socks over them to express their individuality. Some of the younger patients, especially the girls, didn’t want to wear the conventional socks with shorts or a skirt.

Also, my roommate teaches cross-fit and the people in her class wear colorful high socks to protect their shins while lifting weights. Because compression socks help with recovery and endurance, this seemed like another area that could be tapped.

The variety of markets that this product touches is interesting. Why did you choose to launch a crowdfunding campaign?

BP: I read The Lean Startup by Eric Reis, which is about testing an idea with minimal investment. Kickstarter was a great means by which to test my idea. If the campaign didn’t succeed, I could assume my idea was not marketable and I could walk away or take a different direction without having invested a ton of money.

I came up with the idea in October of 2012 and launched the Kickstarter campaign in December of that year. I have a graphics background and figured I could make a decent video myself. I put the campaign together in about three days.

Preparing for the campaign.

Who did you work with to fabricate the socks?

BP: Compression socks require a special machine and a city in Taiwan has a number of manufacturers that have them. I went to Taiwan and checked out a couple of the factories. I was concerned about quality since poorly made socks could hurt the people wearing them or just not help them at all.

I found a manufacturer that had basic ISO certification as well as ISO certification for medical devices and I made sure that the company’s socks were FDA registered. I made some modifications to their socks, which was difficult because the company is limited in what they can do with the compression sock weaving process. That all required an investment of about $2,000.

Who were you targeting and how did you market to them?

BP: When I started, I tried to throw a wide net. I was focusing on 22 year olds to 35 year olds who were making at least $45,000 per year. I initially thought that my No. 1 buyers would be athletes—but instead they were mostly nurses, doctors, and people with poor circulation in their legs.

I think I overestimated the number of people in the cross-fit community and the number of marathoners who were seeking funky socks. A lot of the initial marketing was done through word of mouth.

 “A lot of the initial marketing was done through word of mouth.”

Did anything happen during the crowdfunding phase that you didn’t anticipate?

Despite Kickstarter providing a lot of visibility, you really do have to rely on your friends and family to get the word out about your product. Very few blogs covered me during the campaign. The larger blogs told me to get back to them when I was fully funded. The smaller blogs covered me and were eventually picked up by bigger blogs and websites, which gave me a lot of traction. I thought I would be able to get in right away, but it’s actually quite a bit more difficult.

“The smaller blogs covered me and were eventually picked up by bigger blogs and websites, which gave me a lot of traction”

How quickly did you shift to order fulfillment following the campaign?

Everything was very quick. My campaign ended in mid-January 2013 and I was fulfilling by the end of February. As I was approaching my fundraising goal, I put in my first order. I air freighted the product to Fulfillrite and was able to fulfill all orders in about a month and a half. I received many emails from my backers—both in surprise as to how quickly the product came and also how happy they were that they didn’t have to wait a year or more to receive their socks. I made up all my costs in that first month.

You came in less than $3,000 over your funding goal—do you think having such a close margin helped you turn over the orders rapidly?

I remember watching an episode of Oprah a long time ago about Spanx and how once the company was featured on Oprah, it had a near-impossible time keeping up with demand. I didn’t want that to happen but it was always in the back of my mind. It was nice to be a little bit over the goal since everything was already planned out for that quantity.

Life After Kickstarter

So, how did you get your first non-Kickstarter customers?

I carried around a big duffel bag filled with the socks—at work, to the gym, and in the back of my car. I was selling tons of socks. D.C. is a very transient city so people, especially the other nurses at the hospital, would leave town and spread the word. One nurse moved to a new hospital in Oregon shortly after the campaign and I started getting hundreds of orders from that city because she had spread the word to her new hospital.

That was repeated at different hospitals. Word just spread organically. Smaller blogs started reaching out. I was approached by the Los Angeles Times and from that point on, which was around September 2013, the word spread fast. I was featured in some hiking magazines, the Chicago Tribune, and a number of other blogs and newspapers. I was getting consistent orders that went far beyond my expectations.

How, if at all, has your business changed in the first year?

I’m still doing most of the work, but I hired a contract graphic designer and someone to take care of customer-service emails. It helps keep my workload down. I am a big proponent of automation, which Fulfillrite is a part of. I don’t have to go to the mailbox every morning and send out 30 or 40 orders.

My accounting is automated through Xero.com; I set it up so that everything is scripted and I check it once a week. During the last four months I have been traveling all around the world. I was able to visit 10 countries and still run my business.

How about refunds? Did you get requests for them?

Yes. That was something that I didn’t anticipate and it’s a good lesson for anyone doing anything related to clothing—and that is sizing. If you’re buying a product in bulk, you have to meet a minimum order quantity of a certain design in a certain size. Industry reports on clothing sizes are costly.

I went to the Library of Congress and was able to find [free] information from 1992 on shoe sizes in the U.S. I based my order off of that sizing, but there were two problems: the types of people who need compression socks for medical reasons tend be heavier set, which means they have bigger calves and therefore need larger sizes; additionally, since 1992 America’s obesity rate has increased, which again means larger calves and larger socks. I ended up needing more extra-large sizes and almost no small sizes. That left me with a lot of extra inventory.

What was one of the biggest challenges faced during your first year?

Marketing. I tried to do search engine optimization (SEO) and Google Ad-words myself and probably sunk close to $1,500 in one month. I hired an SEO company, which was another $2,500 for one month and that didn’t work, either. I was extremely frustrated. I just couldn’t get traction.

I ended up using a grassroots approach—emailing hundreds of blogs. One thing that helped was to keep my emails to three sentences and attach a PDF with the details.I would also offer them free product and other value-ads for bloggers. That all helped me break through, but until I reached that point the marketing was unbelievably frustrating.

“One thing that helped was to keep my emails to three sentences and attach a PDF with the details.I would also offer them free product and other value-ads for bloggers.”

What are you working on now?

I’m working full-time on the socks. The business is doing a lot better than I had ever anticipated. I use my spare time to travel while still maintaining and growing the business. I think people will be surprised to find that once you put in the initial extreme effort and all of those hours, you can get freedom. I never thought I would be making six figures selling socks.

“I never thought I would be making six figures selling socks.”

Nabee Socks fulfills about 200-300 orders and reports around $10,000 in profits per month.

To read more about what it’s like to launch and run a successful crowdfunding campaign, be sure to check out the rest of interviews in this series LINK.

To get Fulfillrite’s custom pricing request a quote.

Compression socks that use a process called graduated compression therapy to reduce leg and foot pain, prevent swelling, and improve post-exercise recovery. What makes Nabee Socks unique is their wide range of colors and patterns! The project’s mission to add an element of fashion to footwear. That’s popular among medical patients and staff.

You’re probably shipping a lot of gifts this season. So you know that planning ahead is essential for holiday shipping success.

Below, you’ll find a list of key shipping deadlines to make sure your packages arrive by December 25.

For domestic U.S. deliveries, ground shipping deadlines range from December 15-19, while express services extend through December 23-24.

International shipping requires even more lead time, with economy services to most destinations needing to ship by December 1-9 to ensure Christmas delivery.

Remember: holiday shipping delays are common. This is due to increased package volumes, weather conditions, customs processing, and address errors.

Review the carrier-specific deadlines below and make sure you let your customers know when they need to complete their orders. It’s the surest way to prevent disappointment!

U.S. Domestic Shipping Deadlines

USPS

• USPS Ground Advantage™ & First-Class Mail®: Wednesday, December 17
• Priority Mail®: Thursday, December 18
• Priority Mail Express®: Saturday, December 20

FedEx

• FedEx Ground® Economy (formerly FedEx® SmartPost): Monday, December 15
• FedEx Ground®: Wednesday, December 17
• FedEx Home Delivery®: Wednesday, December 17
• FedEx Express Saver®: Saturday, December 20
• FedEx 2Day®: Monday, December 22
• FedEx Overnight Services: Tuesday, December 23

DHL eCommerce

• DHL Parcel Ground: Monday, December 15
• DHL Parcel Expedited: Tuesday, December 16

International Shipping Deadlines

USPS® (Canada, Europe, Mexico, Australia/New Zealand)

• First-Class Package International Service®: Tuesday, December 9
• Priority Mail International®: Tuesday, December 9
• Priority Mail Express International®: Tuesday, December 16

FedEx (Canada & Mexico)

• FedEx® International Connect Plus: Thursday, December 18

DHL eCommerce

DHL Parcel International Direct

• Australia: Monday, December 8
• Canada: Thursday, December 11
• France: Friday, December 12
• Germany: Thursday, December 11
• Hong Kong: Wednesday, December 3
• Ireland: Tuesday, December 9
• Italy: Tuesday, December 9
• Japan: Tuesday, December 9
• Mexico: Thursday, December 11
• Netherlands: Thursday, December 11
• New Zealand: Monday, December 8
• Rest of EU*: Monday, December 8
• Singapore: Wednesday, December 10
• South Korea: Monday, December 8
• Spain: Tuesday, December 9
• United Kingdom: Friday, December 12

DHL Parcel International Standard

• African Countries: Friday, November 14
• Australia: Friday, December 5
• Brazil: Friday, November 21
• Canada: Friday, December 5
• Eastern Europe: Friday, December 5
• France: Thursday, December 4
• Germany: Monday, December 8
• Hong Kong: Wednesday, December 3
• Israel: Monday, December 1
• Japan: Friday, December 5
• Mexico: Thursday, November 20
• New Zealand: Friday, December 5
• Rest of Asia: Monday, December 1
• Rest of Latin America: Thursday, November 20
• Thailand: Friday, December 5
• United Kingdom: Wednesday, December 10
• Western Europe: Friday, December 5

* Rest of EU: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Sweden

Asendia

Asendia ePAQ Select, Asendia Country Tracked, Asendia Fully Tracked

• Canada, UK, Australia/New Zealand, Western/Rest of Europe, Asia/Pacific Rim, Middle East: Friday, December 5
• Mexico, Brazil, Rest of Latin America, Africa: Friday, November 28

Asendia Tracked Duties Paid:

• UK: Friday, December 12
• Australia/New Zealand: Wednesday, December 10
• Asia/Pacific Rim & Middle East: Tuesday, December 9
• Brazil & Rest of Latin America: Thursday, December 4
• Western/Rest of Europe: Thursday, December 11
• All Other Destinations: Tuesday-Thursday, December 16-18

Note: Canada Post strike may impact deliveries.