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.