Kickstarter – Writer Emergency Pack, March 29, 2015
As backers of Writer Emergency Pack, you helped us make something brand new. In December, you received the very first decks—nearly 8,000 of them, shipped by me and my friends out of my garage over the course of one very busy week.
It was exciting, exhausting and unrepeatable.
I knew that when it came time to sell these decks to world outside of Kickstarter, we would need to do it differently. So I asked you for advice. You steered me towards lots of smart people who were happy to answer all of my questions about warehouses and shipping.
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StartupSmart, December 5, 2014
The challenges for Kickstarter-backed hardware startups don’t end once you’ve raised the money.
Microbrics’ managing director Brenton O’Brien, who is beginning to ship his LEGO-compatible Edison robots after a successful crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter, has the extra pressure of getting his product out in time for Christmas.
“We’ve been dealing with the issues of getting products out to customers and stock into the distribution centre,” O’Brien says. “We’re a little behind where we’d like to be, but because a lot of people ordered these as Christmas presents and we don’t want to disappoint anyone, we’re working really hard to get these out before Christmas.”
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Nine months after successfully funding their project on Kickstarter – setting the goal at $125,000, but raising $938,771 from 5,358 individual backers – industrial designers John Van Den Nieuwenhuizen and Vitor Santa Maria finally began shipping out the first units of their Hidden Radio & Bluetooth Speaker to their first batch of customers on Monday with the help of Palo Alto, Calif.-based ShipWire.
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From Little Things, September 24th, 2012
Annex uses ShipWire, an order fulfillment and logistics service, to manage inventory and shipping. It’s something, Ward says, Annex couldn’t have survived without.
“That’s been a big part of our success. In just six months, we were supplying more than 70 countries. We wouldn’t have been able to do this without it.”
ShipWire interfaces directly with the award-winning Annex Shopify store. For example, if someone in Sydney orders an iPod Opena through the online store, ShipWire will determine the customer’s proximity to its warehouses around the world.
It then provides shipping options from the closest warehouse — in this case Melbourne — listing costs for express post through to regular snail mail.
“You need to plan for success. Put the systems in place before you need them.”
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An iPhone case with an integrated bottle opener, the Opena® Case was – funnily enough – conceived over a few beers. Launched us- ing Kickstarter in June 2011, it received 50% of its funding goal within the first week. Word quick- ly spread around Australia, Amer- ica, France, Japan, and Russia and by the end of the first month, the product received 188% of its original funding goal. Not a bad start to kick business off.
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