Hopefully you found some interesting information from part 1 of my Kickstarter series. For part 2 I will dig a little deeper into the success and failures of Jewelry Kickstarter Projects using data from Kickstarter and data collected by me from the 2014 jewelry projects listed on Kickstarter. We will look at Kickstarter projects by month, then by region and look at best practices for improving your strategy if you are looking to create a Kickstarter campaign.
Kickstarter numbers for 2014 lists some charts on how 2014 overall did, with trends. Some are listed below, the first is project successfully funded by month. Note: These are for the entire world, not just the USA.
August is the clear winner of successfully funded projects, with October coming in second. Kickstarter did not give all projects by month, unsuccessful and successful. So I looked at jewelry projects for the USA and had my own breakdown.
I have the bar chart with unsuccessful projects for the month in red at the bottom and funded projects in purple at the top, combined you get total projects by month. August and September tied with 28 projects in that month. September looks to have a high number of failures 25 out of 28 projects failed to get funded. Not counting March, which had only one project, no month had more successes versus failures. So if you are using Kickstarter’s graph and thinking of launching your project for a certain month, my data above, which is a smaller set, would discourage you from that. There is more than just timing. Your geographic location may dictate you success rate. I looked at USA jewelry projects by state and region.
By State
Larger states will in many cases have more people to attempt to launch businesses, the same idea applies to Kickstarter funding. The 2014 top 5 states to have Jewelry Kickstarter projects, also had large cities with high populations.
For 2014 Jewelry Campaigns in USA
By Region
These states also have high population cities so it is not a surprise to see more attempts from them. I then looked at the amount of projects by region.
Still the numbers skew to the larger states, California is in the Pacific region and New York in the Northeast region. Next I looked at the data by successes and failures.
Now we see some real differences, the Pacific region is the most successful region, followed by the Northeast. The South is struggling to be funded, only 6 of the 35 projects launched will succeed. Compared to 17 out of 45 for the Pacific and 11 out of 37 for the Northeast. Now we know from the previous blog post, jewelry has a lower average success rate compared to other project categories but it seems as though there may be some takeaways that can improve best practices.
Best Practices
Below I’ll focus on 3 areas to improve your projects reach and hopefully with enough work improve your projects success.
- Networking- California and New York have an advantage of hosting lots of events geared towards fashion, arts and jewelry. If you are looking to be funded start by going to events to network and start get your name and business out there. See if there are meetups geared to your industry or try and start one to build a group to work with. Local classes and workshops offered by community colleges can also be a starting point for meeting people interested in your industry, if you are an expert in your field offer to give a talk or presentation a younger group could help on another area you need to succeed in, social media.
- Social media- Successful campaigns use their social media outlets for spreading their campaign info to other people. You should have a Facebook page, it’s free. You can start or should already have a blog for people to learn more about you and your product, WordPress or Blogspot are free options to start out with. For visual objects like jewelry, Instagram is important to be present on. Do not have only the generic email this contact on your Kickstarter campaign as your only way to be reached, not when there are so many free options out there to use to reach more people. You need to build a small following before you start this project. See if local papers will feature you. The size of your following before you start this campaign depends on the amount you’re looking to raise. The higher the goal, the more people you need to support this.
- The Actual Campaign Page- Kickstarter lets you put whatever you want to tell your story and ask for funding. The top 3 successfully funded jewelry projects all have videos telling their background and purpose of the campaign. Explain why you are doing this, what the money will go for and what the backer will get. For the first two if you use photos which I highly recommend, make sure they are well lighted and sharp images. This needs to look professional and legitimate, you only have one chance to make a good first impression. For the last part, the incentive for backers, have specific tiers for donations and show photos for what the item they receive for that donation will look like.
This is just a starting point but is important to think about. Next post I will look at the top 3 funded USA jewelry projects of 2014. I will analyze their campaign and see what has happened to their company since receiving their goal amount. Thank you for reading my article come back later in the week for the next article.