Visiting CES for Kickstarter

You might have noticed a bit of a theme with our client work this past year. Kaye has been working closely with Kickstarter to support their Design and Tech outreach team, alongside our work with their team in Japan and with their Comms team.

We were really excited to get the opportunity to travel with the Design and Tech team to CES this year. It was our first time at the show and it was absolutely unbelievable. We’re led to believe at HALF the capacity to what it was pre-pandemic.

Kaye met with 100s of product designers and startups to share the great work that the Kickstarter Design and Tech team do, and showcase ways in which the team can support projects on the platform. She also took over the Kickstarter social channels to share a slice of what was happening on the floor at CES.

Rewired an event series for Kickstarter

After the success of our gal-dem UK online tour for Kickstarter they set us a new challenge - how can we reengage with maker community after a year of lockdown?

Thinking about our work with Kickstarter, Distributed Design, Make Works and Make Manifesto we started to hatch a plan. We asked ourselves what do makers and designers want to hear in 2021? What issues are important to them? What trends have we seen emerging on the Kickstarter platform this past year that we might be able to provide insight into? That’s when Rewired emerged.

Each week throughout May we curated three one-hour sessions that dove into the ideas that are shaping a more vibrant and equitable future.

Session 1: Dreaming of the Future with Rob Hopkins, Sebastian from Lunark and Carson from Taur
Session 2: Design that gives back with Ross Atkin, Chloe Meineck and Daniel Becerra
Session 3: Wonder materials, circular waste and sustainability with Seetal Solanki and Tom Meades

We were delighted to co-host sold-out events with Heather Swift- Hunt from Kickstarter’s Design and Technology Team. With kind words and support from the maker community including Develop 3D and Restarters.

gal-dem x Kickstarter Partnership

Over the past year, we’ve been supporting the Kickstarter team here in the UK. This involves supporting press for Kickstarter prompts, projects and people specifically for the UK audience.

In 2019, Kickstarter started a partnership with the inimitable gal-dem magazine to support more women and non-binary creators of colour to find accessible pathways to raising funds on the Kickstarter platform. In 2020 they were due to take this project on the road to Sheffield, Bristol, Glasgow and Birmingham, everything was set and then the pandemic hit. They waited and waited in the hope we’d be able to do these events in person, but when that didn’t seem likely we started to plan to run these events online.

We decided to keep focussing on 4 regions rather than bringing together everyone in one session. The hope being that people could expand their local networks. Paved With Gold helped to secure a new batch of 12 speakers for the event series including Immy Kaur, Briana Pegado, Heather Marks and Azekel Axelle. We then worked with the gal-dem team to promote the events and create a friendly welcoming circle of creators to join in the conversations on Zoom.

Here, Kickstarter opens up some of the insights and advice from those sessions to all.

Meet Ding, the beautifully simple smart Doorbell!

We're very excited to introduce Ding - a smart doorbell that has been designed to fit into your home. No more dumb, overly techy doorbells for us. 

They've just launched on Kickstarter and have raised nearly $40,000 so far. 

We've been supporting Ding by giving them end-to-end Kickstarter support - helping them manage their Kickstarter project, managing their PR campaign, online content and social media campaign. 

You can support them by checking out their Kickstarter page. 

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