Product Design
Design The Everything
SPIRE KICKSTARTER
DTE’s mission is to, “Make things people love to use every day.” We make things that add value to your everyday life.
We wanted to quickly ship a product on Kickstarter to help us gain experience with everything around involved shipping products and the Kickstarter process.
Role
Co-Founder
Web Designer
UX Designer
Marketer
Etc.
Team
AJ Huff
Myself
Categories
Product Design
Copywriting
Branding
Marketing
Briefing
We decided to launch a project on Kickstarter as part of their Make/100 initiative to learn about how the process worked on the Kickstarter side and to force ourselves into shipping a product. We had been talking about making a pen for almost as long as we had known each other, so that was a natural choice. We knew it was unlikely for our first ever product to be a huge success, so we put all our efforts into shipping and learning, rather than hoping for a runaway success.
Background
The Spire was our first experience with physical product design. My Co-founder, AJ, is a mechanical engineer with a background in woodworking, 3D printing, and generally just fiddling around with making things, so that is a huge asset to us. When starting a new project I always have a lot of questions for AJ and we work collaboratively in order to make it the best it can be. We are both responsible for making sure the product is useful for our customers, but I am generally responsible for the aesthetics and he is responsible for making sure what we’re doing is possible to make. Though because there’s only 2 of us we wear a lot of hats.
Project Experience
During the creation process we decided to make a pen that could only be made with 3D printing. Something that could not be made with traditional manufacturing processes was much more interesting to us and we believed would result in an interesting product, both aesthetically and in its utility.
When we came to packaging we came across yet one more thing we had no experience with. We decided to go with something we could make, which would allow us to control it and allow us to make it in small batch sizes, instead of ordering something in thousands. After making maple prototypes with 4 magnets in them we ended up outsourcing our boxes. They because tighter fitting, with 2 magnets (1 on each end), and were made out of walnut with no finish.
DTE has 3 principles, Practical, Intuitive, and Useful. Our goal is for everything we design to be used every day.
Writing the Kickstarter page was my responsibility. Kickstarter’s own help pages on how to run a successful project were very informative. I also read the most successful Kickstarter pages and some pen and product design pages that had succeeded. Our goal was to complete this project quickly and so I did not have the time be a thorough in the copy as I would have liked. Looking back I think the page was sparse. In future projects I knew I needed more about the DTE’s journey, how Spire and DTE had gotten to where it was, and where we wanted to go.
Our final Kickstarter video. (Can also be found at the top of the archived Kickstarter page -> here)
Outcome
We came out the end of the Kickstarter with 25 backers and $1,742. We had some issues with variation in our 3D printed parts, but we found ways to overcome them and fulfill all our backers. I’m super proud of the fact that we were able to have an idea and carry it all the way through to completion. AJ and I both learned a lot about product design, marketing, copywriting, and how to ship.