Neil Phillips, Director of Distribeauty UK, has firsthand experience of launching a brand with crowdsourced funding. Here he explains what the benefits and challenges are…
Distribeauty UK recently launched Crowd Colour via Kickstarter funding. Tell us more…
Kickstarter is a reward focused Crowdfunding platform rather than an equity stake investment. This means that supporters of the project pledge for rewards rather than a stake in the company. The process is effectively a way to take pre-orders on future product concepts or prototypes. The campaign is an all or nothing model where you set a funding target. You only get the funding if you achieve 100% or more of your target. Our product conceptualisation to completion of the Kickstarter campaign was around 5 months. Our team spent 4 months developing the products, sourcing suppliers and preparing the product offering for our campaign. Kickstarter has an easy to use submission process that allows you to create your campaign page and showcase the rewards on offer.