HAPPY 2011

Enjoying the old & the new: we look back at 2010 as a year that makes us happy & we welcome 2011!

2010 was an amazing year for JUSTPROUD. The first international shoot with the winning members, the new website, the first MAGAZINE and of course the involvement of over 10.000 members. We are very proud of meeting all the talents who all inspire the JUSTPROUD-team & together we won 3 International Awards! Soo cool!

In 2011 the 2^nd international contest will take place and we’re very excited. All members can participate to become the face of JUSTPROUD, the photographer and the designer. With or without experience in the fashion industry, you are invited! It’s the community who decides who gets the opportunity.

JUSTPROUD is an international community that connects fashion talents from all over the world. This makes the fashion processes so interesting.

We wish you the best for the New Year and lots of opportunities in the fashion industry.

Merry Xmas & happy 2011

Merry Christmas to all of you! Christmas means a spirit of love, peace, harmony and the celebration is not complete without a meaningful gift.
Therefore the JUSTPROUD-team presents you the first free MAGAZINE which was made possible by the community. With inspiring members, designs, looks and more!!


2011 will be an exciting year for all of us;


First of all we will present you some designs that will go into the pre-order stage; currently we are discussing with the designers & our production-team how to arrange everything; we expect to have it ready first week of the new year.


Second of all we will start the 2nd International Contest around mid January. We have almost everything ready & set to start this very cool event, with a very cool destination & the possibility for our members to expose themselves.


And last but not least we will include some new features to the site: to give more information to our members & fashionlovers & at the same time to provide more input to our designers.We hope to have this ready at the beginning of February.


Enjoy your holidays with family & friends!

Winners of the Tshirt giveaway

The raffle to win a JUSTPROUD Tshirt is closed and today we will announce the winners.
We noticed that some people only left a post on the article (instead of posting the link to their profile on our Facebook page). Because of our awards over the last weeks we decided to be mild, so here are the winners:

1. Queeny Zeshya 
2. Mallory vd Hulst 
3. Hannah Kassey Bacolod
4. Gabriela Vlad 
5. Mizz T-ny
6. Victoria Ranoe 
7. Amy Lee 
8. Shi Terrace 
9. Monica Ammerman 
10. Isaa Enguero  

All winners will be informed in person as well; Thanks everybody for your participation & looking forward to your contributions on Justproud.

& yet an other Award ...

Yes, we did it again: together we won an other award; Our mutual passion is clearly visible!  This time JUSTPROUD is an Innovator Award Winner in the 2010 Summit Emerging Media Award (Summit EMA) competition.

The Summit International Awards organization is devoted to furthering excellence in the communications industry. Throughout its sixteen-year history, the organization has established itself as one of the premier arbiters of communication excellence. Companies and individuals from more than 50 countries across five continents participate annually in its awards programs. 

Thanks everybody! This will push us even more to create extra value for all our members. woop woop!

Contest, navigation & charity

The beginning of this week we won the IMA Outstanding Achievement Award; a reward to all our members that we are on the right track; very cool!

Contest

We are very excited on creating our next contest; it takes some longer to implement this contest as we feel we had to adjust a part of the design (and a technical part of the site – to allow designers to connect to a contest, by submitting a design; for now the design was the center instead of a ‘general contest’ ). We are very happy with the outcome, but on planning it gives us some headaches. We aim to start the contest before the end of the year. Sorry for the delay, we try our hardest to get it started soon.

Navigation

On the design of the website we thought we should adjust the site, starting with the top headers. Currently we have 3 parts: the header, the login/connect section & the navigation. In the countries where we are integrated in MSN we even have the MSN template above it; therefore people have to scroll sometimes to see the page content (depending on resolution).

We managed to fit all functionalities in 2 parts: header with navigation & login-header.

Over the next weeks we will integrate this adjustment.

Charity

Besides our business objectives with Justproud, we also want to add value to society; therefore we support http://www.friendshipnederland.org/ (the dutch division of http://friendship-bd.org/ ) a foundation which identifies and reaches the poorest of the poor and the most marginalized communities in Bangladesh.

We encourage that you support this foundation as well.

JUSTPROUD awarded by IMA

The Interactive Media Awards decided to grant JUSTPROUD with the Outstanding Achievment Award in the category Fashion / Style. 

The Outstanding Achievement award is the second highest honor bestowed by IMA and an extremely challenging award to win. Our website has excelled in all areas of our judging criteria and represents a very high standard of planning, execution and overall professionalism.
We are very happy with this award & all our members who made this possible! 

Win a free T-shirt!

By heading towards 10.000 members on our new site, it’s time to celebrate! 

How does it work?

1.  We will have a raffle for giving away 10 grey JUSTPROUD T-shirts.

2.  Update your profile at www.justproud.com  (make sure its complete)

3.  And post the link to your JUSTPROUD -profile on our Facebook page.

4.  We will pick random 10 winners.  

All members may only participate once; We cannot communicate on the result.

December 15th  its over & than we will announce the winners. 

Introduction offer about to end soon...

Our introduction offer at the store for the first Tshirt production will come to an end soon; So in case you want to purchase one, please make sure you will do it this week!
http://store.justproud.com/category/54-t-shirt.aspx
Thanks for your support & enjoy your day!

Within 26 years....

Over lunch we were talking about what might be and this is what came out: Probably in The September issue of Vogue UK in the year 2036 we will find this overview :-)) So we have some ambition but than again we never take ourselves too seriously :-) Enjoy your day

Your store is OPEN!

Yes, the shop is open and features the Tshirt designs of Daniel Hernandez; we hope to add more apparel in the store soon! https://store.justproud.com/

Shop & next competition

Pixelaward

We are still very excited to be nominated for the Pixelaward (best community) This prestige award could help us getting even more recognition over the world. So please keep supporting us by voting for the “people’s choice award”, and we are confident that the jury will choose the best winner (competition is pretty stiff with Aardvark, which is acquired by Google for 50M US :-)

Shop

The last weeks Djon & his team is working very hard to get the shop live; hopefully we will be able to do this today; the challenges we have are that we want to bring live a multi-currency, multi-language shop where we will include as many possible payment possibilities; especially the local ones in the EU are a challenge due to differences in VAT compared to outside the EU; we try to have 1 single price worldwide (including shipping).

It seems Djon has tackled most challenges in this & we are very excited to go live with the last piece of the puzzle.

2nd International Contest

As announced earlier, we will have the 2nd International Competition soon; we will emphasis on ‘tops’ within this competition; so T-shirts, blouses, Tank tops, layers, shirts & polo’s. In the following competitions we will emphasize on other types of apparel.

The prize for the winner of the design contest will be that the item will be produced & that you will get a part of the revenue, having a produced apparel you designed & recognition.

The prize for the winners of the model & photographer contest will be as well a part of the revenue of the produced item, recognition & a fully paid international photo-shoot. For now it seems we will be able to do this in Singapore, Asia.   We are sooo looking forward to fly over there with our members & create a cool photo-shoot!

Sponsoring

On the sponsoring approach we are finalizing a proposal for 6 sponsors (both global & local) to team up with us online (the site) & offline (TV show, fashion shows & sampling). The first talks were very encouraging, especially because it is clear that with our 360 degrees/365 days communication offer we have something in our hands which is pretty rare in the industry.

Nominated for PIXELAWARD

Yes, today Justproud nominated for the PIXELAWARD; 
The Pixelaward is awarding the "next big thing on internet": The Pixel Awards take a fresh look at the best on the web. They are the cutting-edge website award, annually honoring compelling sites that have shown excellence in web design and development. Sites are submitted in 24 diverse categories. 

Justproud is one of the 5 nominees in the category "communities"; please vote for us at http://www.pixelawards.com/nom_win_2010.php#Community

International contest

Day by day our member base is growing; and people are starting to find their way on the website.  To support the current members, we thought it would be a nice idea to prepair some contests for our 2011 Collection, this way people will also find their way though the site more easily. So soon we will start our next International Contest; currently we are preparing everything & we expect it to be ready soon.

Here you see an artist impression of the contest page.

The contest will be for designers, models & photographers. The details & prizes will soon be revealed.

In the upcoming weeks the shop will be live as well. Here we will sell our first items produced by the community. Our signature piece, our LOVE T-shirt of Daniel Hernandez, is produced and in our warehouse ready to ship. Detail will be on the site & in the shop soon.

The signature piece T-shirt wasn’t ready, in all colors, at the time of the shoot, with Vanessa & Bonnie. So for the shop we had to improvise a new shoot with some members. Here you can find the first impression; soon the full set will be on the site & we made some movies about it as well.

We are very happy with the lookbook entries; currently we have over 100 entries already and this is of great in inspiration to our designers. As well are the comments to our topics. Thanks very much for your support, keep up the good work & have a great weekend.

Justproud & MSN

Yep, the moment we have been waiting for; Justproud is content partner of MSN Holland, For one out of six Dutch people MSN.nl is the Internet homepage. MSN.nl gets over 300 million visits per year, which leads to over 4 billion viewed pages on MSN.

PRESS RELEASE

Award-winning fashion website JUSTPROUD content partner of MSN.nl

Crowdsourcing platform makes fashion industry accessible for everyone

The Hague, October 12, 2010 – Today the fashion website Justproud became content partner of MSN.nl. The site was integrated under the topic 'fashion' into MSN, one of the Dutch leading online platforms. Besides the latest and nicest news MSN-visitors will be inspired and informed with daily articles and fashion photography in which they can actively contribute, for example by designing their own fashion, or to participate as a model or photographer to work for the projects of Justproud.

The core of the concept is to discover and to bring talents from the fashion site together so they can create designs and arrange the photography. Justproud makes it possible for most the popular designs of the site, that have enough subscribers to be actually produced and orderable.

Jeroen Verkroost, Online Editor at Microsoft, is pleased with the addition that Justproud brings to MSN, "Justproud and Microsoft fit well together. We want to offer people the possibility to contribute to the site and to show their talents. In the past, we offered visitors the chance to be discovered as a model, now Justproud adds the possibility for our visitors to show how much talent they have in the fashion field."

According to the founder of Justproud, Geert Rietbergen, with a partner like MSN we can make the fashion industry accessible for its users. "The extensive reach of MSN and the online knowledge enables us to renew the fashion industry. With this partnership we can offer a great stage to our members." Justproud is currently busy with negotiations in other countries to realize partnerships for have a global impact in the fashion world.

About Justproud
Justproud is a global fashion platform that brings talent together to create new fashion items. Designers, models, photographers and fashion lovers get the opportunity to take their first steps in the fashion industry, which often is difficult for outsiders to enter.
The site is currently available in English and Dutch, other languages (German, French, Spanish and Turkish) will soon be available.
Justproud has been awarded two prizes: the Web Marketing Association awarded Justproud ‘Fashion Standard of Excellence’ honor and Microsoft named Justproud ‘Windows Azure Showcase partner’.

About MSN
MSN.nl the Dutch start page that always brings the latest and nicest news. MSN operates in more than 40 countries. For one out of six Dutch people MSN.nl is the Internet homepage. MSN.nl gets over 300 million visits per year, which leads to over 4 billion viewed pages on MSN.

Tshirts & other news

This week was one of interviews, receiving Photo samples of the T-shirts and developing the store.

Beginning this week we received the photo samples of our first Tshirts; believe me they are very cool! Now the shooting will be done for the store & then we actually can sell our first items, made by the community!

As we become more noticed every week, we receive more interview requests as well; this week a team from London flew in to make a portrait of us. As soon as it’s ready we will show it to you. Each shot took zillion takes to get it right, but we are improving on this rapidly.

 On developing the store we have a setback; one of our main developers isn’t able to work. The store is pretty complex (different languages, currencies, member information, pre-ordering process etc. so it will give a delay on creating the store as we had in mind; for now we will create a temporary solution so that the sales can continue.

The 1^st 2 weeks were encouraging; the sign-up rate of the site is very high; the potential to interact on the site is higher, so our community officer Joey will make a presentation to the team how to increase this. Somehow we have the feeling we have to emphasize the opportunities more; this is fine-tuning the site which we will remain doing for the rest of our lives, so that’s cool!

Enjoy your weekend & vote & connect to some of the designs!

Award, Tshirt & interview

It was soooo nice to be ‘live’ this first week!

After a long development period finally we show you the new site;

We will publish the results after one month (to have a real standard) but believe me, those are very encouraging!

Award & showcase

Like we announced already, we won our 1^st prize (Fashion Standard of Excellence) & this week our Microsoft Casestudy is published as well. Besides the fact that this is not our main goal, it’s always cool to get industry recognition.

Update & lookbook

Over the last period of time we divided our attention to running the current site, monitoring, and check for bugs etc & for creating our first localized site in Dutch. The last had some more impact than we hoped for but now we are pretty much ready to go.

We hope to add some other languages soon.

Tshirts & interviews

The first Tshirts, created within our community, are in production & we expect them soon. At the same time we are finishing the store, so we can display them there & is everybody able to buy them :-).

Our unique concept gets more attention & we have almost each week interviews;  by now we almost can work at any TV station as anchorman J.

This week we were also preparing the production for the Yunomi / Justproud promotion. We are waiting for the winning design & ones that is in, we will share it with you.

Now its weekend but we are already looking forward to next week !

Award for Justproud

Yep, we did win our first award: The Web Marketing Association is proud to present 
this 2010 Webaward "Fashion Standard of Excellence" to JUSTPROUD 

Justproud V1.0 beta is live

Yes, today we are live with the new version of JUSTPROUD.

First of all we’d like to thank you for all your input and effort. Our beta-version gave great insights on how we can facilitate our members better. So we are looking forward to your reactions.

In the upcoming days we will improve all imperfect items that we’ll find together; so if you find something, please let us know.

So what did we do?

We enhanced the site; from “only co-creation” into a fashion platform.

This way we will have more interesting items for and by fashion lovers. People can give opinions, share looks as an inspiration for our designers. At the end of the day, the fashion lovers are the ones who will buy the co-created apparel.

Main infrastructure changes:

There has been an activity stream added, so people see what other people do on the site, this will inspire people to cross navigate through the site.

Facebook & MSN messenger connect were also integrated; which makes it easier for people to join, comment and vote.

And we are now fully running on Microsoft Azure.

The site has 4 sections:

Opinions:

Here we (and in a later version you) write a fashion story and ask our members to share their opinions; by doing so the designers (& and other co-creators) will learn more about the insights of the fashion lovers who are their target group for buyingfashion items.

Lookbook:

At our lookbook members from all over the world are able to upload their own clothing style. They have the opportunity to tag the brands they are wearing; so it’s both an inspiration for our co-creators as well as for other members.

Co-creation

We changed the design of this section; current members are advised to check their profile.

Now it’s easier to search for members (yes, we have a full name search) and for projects. On the profiles people can comment and you will be able to reply.

Now a more sensitive item; on the voting part we adjusted the required votes to go to the next stage; the reason will be announced within a few days. You all will be happy.

Shop

Here we will sell our co-created items; we expect it to go live early October. It will be fully integrated with in our site and member base.

Please enjoy the new site; looking forward to meeting you there!

New version live

JUSTPROUD is about ready to go live with her new version of the website.

We aim to be live Wednesday September 15^th . Today & tomorrow we will work on getting the last items done. Tuesday we will be offline as we have to migrate all data.

We expect to be online with the Dutch version on Monday September 20^th .

Other languages will follow later this year & early next year.

We received the photo-shoot samples of the first designs & are soo happy with them. Its cool to see how we created this together with you & see it come alive!

In our V1.0 we will cover more fashion news & therefor we are looking for fashionbloggers. So if you have a great fashion blog, please contact us. 

Justproud promotion

Currently In Holland & Belgium we started a joint promotion with Unilever's Yunomi. 

Various women magazines (Viva) include the ad below; in the center there is a code to win a Justproud T-shirt. 

Joint promotion of Justproud & Yunomi

Last week of debugging

Almost weekend and we have the new site running smoothly on our computers. We expect the last days of debugging and bugfixing next week & migration of the database of the current site. This means we will have to put the old site offline for a few hours to put the new one live!

Partnership with Unilever

As from today the members of Yunomi, the biggest women community in The Netherlands & Belgium, have a chance to win an exclusive JUSTPROUD T-shirt.

Via the major womens magazines in these countries numerous codes are distributed. The winning codes are entitled to an exclusive Justproud T-shirt. The Yunomi members can submit design for the T-shirt & together they will choose the winning design.

This is the first of several promotional actions Justproud will have throughout the world. Our new site will go live next month & then we will present our partners to you.

Cool hangtag & Bulgaria

Site:

The site is coming together; new features, new design & the opportunity to make several languages. We will start with an English & Dutch version. New languages are on their way.

The main features will include a ‘live feed’ like Facebook. So now it will be pretty easy to follow the people you like & the designs you like.

On development we have some challenges because the techniques we are using are the best for our purpose, but are very new. Not many developers are skilled enough to make enough progress. We are teaming up with Microsoft on various new services & techniques. Our co-founder & CTO Djon Kleine is busier each day with his small development team to make sure we will have a great site at launch.

Find here the new homepage:

Production:

We will receive the final sample today and we are very excited about that. We are informed about the characteristics of the fabrics and these do meet our high quality standards.

Find here the hangtag that will be attached to the first run; including the winners of our 1^st International Contest: Daniel, Vanessa & Bonnie.

Each production run (item) will have their own hangtag with the winners & the winning designer will be included in the name label as well.

Coverage:

Each week we get more coverage internationally; find here an article in Bulgaria. Soo cool!

New label & site versions

Planning

Next month we will go live with our site V1.0 including the shop!

First production

Over the last months we have worked intensively; we learned, adjusted & will continue learning.

We just received the first samples of the designs form our manufacturing partner Dupon & de Bruin. We made a few changes and will expect to produce quickly.

Design process

We made a few adjustments to our design process; in the new version of the site designers can submit their ideas without providing us a pattern. We will create the apparel from their rough ideas; this way we simplify the production process & ensure quality.

Due to our media partners we will have higher traffic, so we have to adjust the amount of votes to get items into pre-ordering.

Together this will enable more people to get designs produced.

New site screenshots

Below you will find some screenshots of the new site; feel free to feedback so we can take this into account for version 1.1 . The new site is designed to involve all people into fashion; a place where people can share opinions, show their style, co-create apparel & obviously buy them.

Profile page

Upload design

  

Search

Summer & the next stage

We have reviewed the co-creation site which is currently online. The results overall are good & the system does work, so that made us very happy.

We did discover things to improve which, so we will adjust the following parts:

•     Voting on Photographers & models: here we will add the % of all votes on the design that the particular model/photographer received, so it’s easy to see the ranking.
•     submitting designs we will divide into 2 different ways to submit:

o   Simple > choosing this will increase the probability that your design will get produced: here you upload your drawing & description & you leave the execution to us (specific fabrics choice, style of finishing, etc.). This way we will have more possibilities to adjust things to market needs and opportunities, so to produce the item.

o   Advanced > choosing this will increase that your design is produced the way you like to see it (incl. fabrics and finishing). This will ask more from you (like pattern and extensive description of fabrics, more effort in getting pre-orders etc). This way your design is likely to be produced the way you like it but its takes some longer & more personal effort.

•     the voting pages to optimize the usability.
•     We will add a new member type: make-up artist
•     will add search options (best voted designs etc)

Summer-time

Besides the above many new features & site-sections will be added.

So during summer-time we will be working hard to prepare the full site release. Nice way to spend our summer J

International contest

Because of some opportunities to team up with some big media companies we decided to postpone our 2^nd international competition towards the 2^nd half of 2010. We are only a small team, and we choose to emphasize our efforts in creating a sustainable full site, instead of improving the site over a longer period of time (which will make us miss the window of opportunity); this choice will get us in the regular business sooner, so we will be able to create the completions in a better frequency as well.

The next stage

The shop will be online from August; it took a lot of effort to meet all our logistic requirements; possibility to pre-order (but not pay yet), to order, (or to put in an order with a produced & pre-order item of which you would like to pay the first & be updated on the 2^nd), to offer different payment options in different currencies & and to deliver worldwide within a reasonable timeframe.

Impression of the shop

The launch of the first full site (still in beta version) will be end of August; we will launch it in English and have a first localization in Dutch; we intend to have several localizations live at the end of 2010 (like: German, French, Spanish & Turkish)