City Fabric is a new apparel business based out of Raleigh, North Carolina which creates products using city maps. The brainchild of Matt Tomasulo, an Urban Planning student his idea was to use figureground maps, which map out the cities buildings, rather than streets as design templates for t-shirts and originally sold these at a market in his home town. The company now seeks to expand to include other cities such as Manhattan, Boston, Austin, Chicago and San Francisco and appealed to the crowd funding community on Kickstarter for $13,000 to expand production and the range. The reaction to the business has already been so popular with almost $20,000 raised already with another 27days of fundraising left.
Design houses Family and PlayLab have got together to create a very interesting concept of what New York could look like in a few years time. With the central idea of utilising the city's natural resources the team have created +Pool, a floating pool concept. River water would filter through the pool walls, described like a 'giant strainer', removing bacteria and odours from the river and creating clean, safe water for swimmers. The pool is also being designed with various users in mind with 4 types of pools accessible including a Children's Pool, Sports Pool, Lap Pool and Lounge Pool. Right now the team are working with a team of engineers to design the filtration system. A recent feature on crowdfunding site, Kickstarter has already seen +Pool surpass their funding expectations highlighting the interest and desire to bring this cool idea to life.
Established by Candice Cabe, Day2Night allows customers to click on and off heels of various heights. The idea came to founder Candice Cabe on a business trip in which she was advised to pack lightly but found that so much precious space was taken up with her day and night time shoes. Day2Night has 5 interchangeable heels ranging in height from 1 1/2 inches to 3 1/2 inches. As a start-up business the company only has one style and one colour right now but is already in talks with a New York shoe designer who is working on 10-12 pairs of different designs for the debut shoe collection. The business is seeking total investment of $150k and is utilising Kickstarter to help fundraise for the first stage of development.
The story behind Minimal's TikTok and LunaTik is simply incredible and inspiring. Minimal is a Chicago-based product design company which invented an innovative multi-touch watch for use with the Apple iPod Nano. The watch's unique design concept enables people to slot their nano into the watch, introducing the concept of multi-functional arm clocks. Great idea aside the company however had needed financial backing to make the product a reality and decided to utilise the crowd-funding site www.kickstarter.com. Their €15,000 funding target was well and truly smashed with over $596,000 raised during their time period...and counting and happened to be the largest funded project in Kickstarter history. Supporters of the product could pledge $25 to pre-order one of the products - so a great deal for them too. With such success the company can now offer customers two versions - their standard model TikTok and their premium design LunaTik. Check out the video for more on this great story and go get yours!
