I’m rather addicted to the crowd funding site Kickstarter. It’s not just a place to “pre pre-order” and get stuff cheap. It’s a place you can back artists and, increasingly, good local causes.
You can back this local Edinburgh company by promising just £5 (if they’re successful) in return for a mention or £10 that and some soup.
It’s perhaps a little bit of a shame all they offer is soup at the lower levels. I get that’s what they do but they could have thrown in some t-shirts sooner, made profit on those and ended up with a small army of local advertisers wearing their brand.
The Kickstarter is a great idea. I hope it succeeds. I hope we see more local businesses doing this.
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Bruce from Union of Genius here. Thanks for the tweet and the
article. I hear what you’re saying about wanting some sort of
merchandise at lower levels. We thought long hard and about that and
mostly it comes down to economics. Once kickstarter takes its cut and we
have bought, printed and mailed t-shirts there is a risk of there not
being much left over. That said we are open to suggestions and we will
have a think about other options. Originally we thought that the t-shirts
and aprons would be better for people outside Edinburgh because they
wouldn’t be able to come in for soup. Maybe though we can look at a
reward which has to be picked up in the cafe (to save on postage) and
which we can make work at say a £10 or £15 level.
I think there’s plenty of logic there. Hopefully the cash keeps coming in. Some campaigns introduce “add ons” for things like t-shirts but I’m not sure of the mechanics of that… though understand the tactic is to re-approach the people who’ve already pledged and try and get them to increase that pledge.