Cameesa - The Blog

vonmonkey about his initial impressions and thoughts about Cameesa.

Check it out here

What amazes me is how well vonmonkey was able to not only grasp the site, but his analysis of the underlying effects of using crowd funding. I couldn’t have written it better myself.

Cheers Jon! We look forward to seeing “Take Me to Your Reader” make it into print. At the current pace of Support, it should be there in no time!

One of our artists, stevebalistreri, recently submitted a real-life design, the Flabongo. (http://cameesa.com/support/design/28/flabongo-evolution)

In my 26 years of existence, I have done my fair share of partying, but I have never encountered a Flabongo; hence, my inquiry on Steve’s post asking “what the hell is a blongo?” (http://cameesa.com/forum/post/12/new-design-flabongo)

Even after Steve explained the Flabongo concept, I was still somewhat puzzled, and skeptical of the Flabongo.

So, this past Saturday night, I attended a Lincoln Park house-party at a friend’s place. As midnight struck, a mysterious creature entered Brendan’s home. It was pink, had no legs, and its insides were ripped open. Lo and behold, the Flabongo had entered my life for the first time ever. I was stupefied and amazed as to what I was seeing. Who would have ever thought that I would see a design on Cameesa.com - for the first time ever - and get a real-life taste of it, only days later.

I flew off the couch and greeted the gentleman who brought the Flabongo into my life. As I approached him, he quickly jumped back because he thought that I was going to kiss him (note: it’s atypical to kiss strangers in Chicago…although it has been accomplished before.) I told him the entire Flabongo/Cameesa.com story but he clearly did not understand my amazement of Flabongo.

The moral of the story is : “Cameesa.com brings people together, whether in designs or real life.” I want to deeply thank Brendan for a great party, Steve for the Flabongo design, and the gentleman, whose name will remain confidential, for bringing Flabongo into my life…..I miss you dearly.

Cameesa was featured in Mashable yesterday. It’s a good article overall outlining our goals and questioning the value of crowdfunding. Read it here.

There’s some nice artwork on Tank Theory’s site. They’ve established the Tank Theory Artist Society where they invite premier artists and designers to produce work for their t-shirt line. They’ve also added an artists section that showcases the work of artists who’ve created Tank Theory tees. The one thing I do find odd is that they decided to categorize their t-shirts as: “Artist Society T-Shirts” and “Standard T-Shirts”. After looking at the Artist Society T-Shirts do I really want to see Standard T-Shirts? Anyhow, I think they may want to drop the word Standard. There’s some great artwork on the site. I was thinking of picking up Swordplay as it’s from one of my favorite artists Mike Orduna aka Fatoe.

An excellent post from the CEO of Idea Couture, Idris Mootee. I couldn’t agree more on his stance in regards to “management”.

When you build a high performance culture, no one needs to manage anyone. You pick not only smart people but also people that have a passion for success, strong analytic mind and/or creative self expression somewhere deep inside them. They are not managers and not aspire to be one. They are good coaches and leaders. They want to be part of something big, bigger than an individual, meaningful, to make a contribution, and to find fulfillment in what they do. You can only inspire, coach and support them, there’s nothing to manage. If you’re telling me you are actively managing your top people, then these yearnings are often managed out of people in the unrelenting quest for predictable mediocrity or satisfactorily under performance.

This view is one of the main reasons the Cameesa team is a team. We all pull our weight and are passionate about Cameesa. I think if anyone on the team had to manage someone else we’d be in big trouble. But since we are tightly knit group that works synergistically together we keep moving along and improving Cameesa. Not to mention that we all complement each other very well in terms of skill sets.

Newsknitter is a data visualization art project that uses clothing to display large scale data. There are a couple of things I find interesting about the project. The first being the removal of the individual from the design process and second the use of computer technology to create the garments. Information gathered from political news feeds online are aggregated and converted into a unique pattern to be knit into a sweater. It is the aggregate information from multiple individuals that help shape the patterns in the shirts and not a single individual in isolation. Finally, a unique and innovative way to use news in clothing. This should help people forget once and for all that CNN sells t-shirts.

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.

-Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Although execution is of crucial importance, especially in a small business, it is important never to lose sight of the overall vision. It is this vision that will inspire your partners to get the business to a new level despite the large amounts of work. It is also important not to get consumed by daily tasks to the point where you lose sight of the future and stop innovating and improving.

Is the universe trying to tell me something?