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)

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!

Cool European Startup

Yes, we are one of the 28 hottest European Startups according to Microsoft BizSpark; Last Tuesday we attended the Microsoft European Summit in Paris & met a lot of people to let our venture grow more rapidly :-)


Please find more pictures at our Facebook Fanpage

The most popular designs

Please find here the most popular designs & Tshirts.