Aussie kitchen tools & gadgets company, Dreamfarm, has taken its brand on a different route by launching its latest design on Kickstarter.
Only four days after introducing a crowdfunding campaign, the project called Ortwo had already reached its funding goal, which is, considering the amount of effort that goes into putting a campaign together, quite a feat says Dreamfarm PR and Social media manager, Cate McDermott.
“It started with a ‘hey, we should totally look into this’ one Monday, and we set ourselves a deadline of the following Wednesday at COB to have our campaign live―with absolutely no clue what we were in for over the ensuing 10 days,” she explains.
A video shoot, a couple of photo shoots and many, many hours of editing later, the campaign went live.
“We were stoked to be fully funded in four days but have found it’s definitely a beast that needs constant feeding. Like any other sales or promotional channel, if you take your foot off the pedal for half a minute the momentum slows and it takes a lot to get it going again.
As to why put a Dreamfarm product on Kickstarter for the first time, McDermott, says it was more a matter of why not?
“Kickstarter used to be predominantly for start-ups and one-man-bands to see if their half-baked idea had legs. They would use their Kickstarter cash to polish their idea and hopefully be able to bring it to life but more and more we’re seeing established brands coming to Kickstarter to launch near enough complete products as a means to test the waters and gain invaluable feedback from a community of early adopters before the product hits the mass market.”
Ortwo is the world’s first pepper mill to combine the convenience of one-handed grinding with the extra speed, ease and a never-seen-before output when grinding with two.
McDermott says there are many benefits to launching on Kickstarter including the exposure to a community of people who crave innovation and may not have come across Dreamfarm otherwise, as well as learning which countries the product is likely to do well in and where they should focus their marketing efforts.
There are also benefits to the Kickstarter community in backing the project. “Over the years (and also quite recently), the Kickstarter community has also been burned by a few highly publicised failures, where projects failed to get off the ground for one reason or another and backers’ money evaporated with no refund or reward, so being an established brand with a worldwide distribution network and proven ability to manufacture high quality products gives backers an added sense of security when backing our project.”
Indeed, people were pledging for more than just one Ortwo, instead backing two or even four pieces, adds McDermott.
“There’s even a backer in Singapore who has pledged for 10 so he has plenty for gifts for family and friends,” she enthuses.
“We also assumed that Ortwo Lite would be more popular owing to its significantly lower price point but the uptake of Ortwo and Ortwo Lite has until now been fairly even. We even have people pledging for one of each, which was certainly unexpected. These are all things we will be keeping in mind for future in-store promotion and packaging options that we would have not known ahead of time had we not bitten the bullet and given Kickstarter a go.”
By Marion Gerritsen
