Sisters Sabrina and Silvia Scandar’s young fashion startup is designed for crowdsourcing. Designers post their ideas on sewlove.co and the people vote on their favorite fashions and sometimes offer suggestions for changes. Sew Love will manufacture the winning design.
“A lot of people use fashion as an expression of who they are. My sister thought what better way to express yourself than to actually be able to design your own clothes. We started playing around,” said Sabrina, 25, a Miami native who works out of the Wynwood co-working space LAB Miami. Silvia, 29, now works in San Francisco.
In the last couple of months, the Sew Love sisters have already crowdsourced one of their first winning designs, an orange Tulip Skirt (it was originally prototyped in pink but its fans had another vision). They are now running a campaign for a purse made of recycled materials. They’re working with a developer to build out their site and have added a fashion designer to their team.
Sabrina said as a young company they are fine-turning their business model and want to fully test their concept — but they need money to do that.
Enter Kickstarter, the website where people ask for money to finance their projects. The sisters are seeking $20,000 to give their startup a funding push, including financing production of that Tulip Skirt.
Kickstarter is the largest of dozens of sites, including Peerbackers.com based in Palm Beach County, devoted to crowdfunding, in which donors contribute small sums of money to get a project off the ground. There are dozens of projects posted on Kickstarter from South Florida, such as a ToyQuarium, music-related projects and quite a few video games.
One of those games is HarmEvil, the first product being developed by Oneironaut Games in Miami, a company incubated in the Game Developers Guild hosted at the Collaborative Open Innovation Lab at Florida International University’s Engineering Center. Contributors to Oneironaut’s Kickstarter project get various rewards, including a digital copy of the game at the $5 donor level. Higher levels offer more involvement, even meeting with the Oneironaut team. What does the $500 level get you? “An opportunity to leave a gigantic footprint in the HarmEvil world,” the founders say. This includes inside access and a say in the direction of future game development.
“In our game, each character has its own unique personality and you become attached to the character,” said Oneironaut’s founder, Gio Peralto-Pritchard, 19, who has teamed up with developer Carlos Gonzalez, 23. Both are FIU students. That customer attachment is important to the company, too. “We’re really trying to interact with our customers,” Peralto-Pritchard said, adding that along with the funding to develop the game, Kickstarter is helping the small company to get its name out there.
The Sew Love sisters, meanwhile, are already a quarter of the way to their fund-raising goal, but Sabrina Scandar understands that even its Kickstarter campaign may need a little kick to reach it. That’s why she has timed Sew Love’s launch party for Sept. 20 at LAB Miami, before the Kickstarter campaign ends Oct. 9. “We’ll have iPads there. We’ll make it very easy for our fans to contribute,” she said.
Read a fuller story about Kickstarter here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/08/22/v-fullstory/2963464/giving-projects-a-kickstart.html
(Photos show Silvia and Sabrina Scandar of Sew Love, top; middle photo shows Silvia Scandar and two models wearing Sew Love fashions; bottom photo shows Gio Peralto-Pritchard and Carlos Gonzalez of Oneironaut Games, which is producing the HarmEvil video game.
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