Lift : The Launch

It’s been quite a journey for us as we develop our very first IPPINKA in-house product, and we’re nearing the end! Lift is a versatile wall mount that stylishly organizes your busy life. Last week, we revealed Lift’s final components: a wood dowel hangar, a powder-coated steel arm, and a CNC-milled birch plywood plate that secures it all to the wall. As you’ve seen in this blog series, we’ve put a lot of thought and care into the design, and we’re excited to finally be releasing Lift through Kickstarter on June 14th 2016. Are you as excited as we are? With only 10 days to go, let’s get into our final instalment of our behind-the-scenes design blog, where we show you what went into preparing Lift for launch.

Why Kickstarter?

As our first time launching a product, we could think of no better way to introduce it to the world than joining a crowdfunding community. Kickstarter is a great platform for launching innovative ideas, products, games, anything you can think of. At the office, we’re always checking Kickstarter for products to feature on IPPINKA because it’s where innovators are releasing exciting solutions for our everyday problems. These entrepreneurs would not be able to go to production without their amazing sponsors – the backers. We think Lift fits right in with the Kickstarter model: we’ve made a product that resolves your everyday clutter problems in a minimal and elegant way. It is also valuable to us to have a community of backers who can offer us their feedback. That way, we can make fine adjustments to the design, in order to suit their needs.

Informing the world

Kickstarter is full of great ideas, but we know that not all of them reach their funding goal. We wanted to get people excited about Lift by showing them what it’s all about: minimal, clean design that is tough, versatile, and blends in with its surroundings. It’s more than just a utility hook: it’s a thoughtful addition to your living space. But that’s not always easy to communicate with a picture or two. So, we collaborated with Maxym Perron to shoot a video illustrating everything about Lift in under 3 minutes: our motivations for the project, how it works in your everyday life and the care we put into the design. Shooting the video and crafting our campaign was its own design project: we had to identify the goals we wanted to accomplish, figure out how to accomplish them with our available materials, and collaborate with the maker to put it all together in a final product. We settled on a short video showing how Lift can ease your daily routine by hanging different objects and such. Filming Lift, made us realize the importance of visual language, how it can help communicate every little detail about it and still show our 8 months of hard work.

SO WHAT NOW?

We’re really looking forward to our June 14th launch on Kickstarter, and we’re hoping you are too. What does a Kickstarter launch mean? It means you will be able to start backing Lift by, pledging any amount desired to support the product, by helping us meet manufacture order minimums, and getting it on the market. We want your input too: our Kickstarter page will be a great place to give your thoughts on the design and get updates on production. Of course, there’s something in it for you: as an early backer you’ll be one of the first to own lift, and you could even earn amazing feedback about our progress.

The Finish line

When we first started our blog feature, we told you that Lift started out as a need: a need for elegant, functional storage. As designers, transforming that need into a physical product is exciting, but we’re even more excited to send Lift out into the world where it can meet that need. At the end of the day, that’s what it’s all about. We’ve put the time into the design, collaborated with quality manufacturers to refine it, and put the work into our launch so that we can make Lift stand out from day one of its campaign. So mark the date on your calendars, and be part of Lift by backing us on Kickstarter on June 14th !