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)

Apologies & new timings

Yes, we didn’t have much time to celebrate that we were chosen as one of the hottest BizSpark stat-ups in Europe, because we still have a lot to deliver.

After our pre-website, and our beta-version we were about to launch the store in May. With new business models (like ours) one has a plan & over time you have to adjust this; the same with us. We have adjusted our strategy to ensure we will have a sustainable business & business model and therefore we will open our store later than planned.

Traffic is the artery of crowdsourcing, so we spent a lot of time & effort to be fully embedded in the web; soon we will launch Messenger Connect & Facebook Connect, so it’s easier for people to sign up & vote. We are closing with some media partners to ensure great traffic & branding. We will be fully hosted on Microsoft Azure soon as well & we decided to give more importance to the Fashion Lover.

Overall the current co-creation site does what we had planned, so basically the beta-testing went good! It gave us a lot of insights & we will make various improvements. 

All the above resulted in an adjusted timing. We have planned to launch a fully new site (incl. store) end of August. In this site (of which we will soon present the first screenshots) many new features for co-creating & (as said) the Fashion Lover.

Our whole team has the feeling we are really creating something special together with you.

This can and will chance the world a tiny little bit, it will give opportunities to people to reach their full potential. Thank you for your support so far. We have a busy summer ahead, but it’s the most rewarding project we have ever done! Really cool!