Cameesa - The Blog

Paul Isakson discusses in his Evolution of Brand Building presentation that brands should start committing by defining what they stand for.

Some of Paul’s points outlined below:

The product is the marketing.
Make better products first.

The product should be the focus and better products create their own buzz. They ultimately convert people into evangelists.

Start looking at Marketing as a progressive story.
Create room for agility, flexibility and iteration.

In the internet era brands are no longer fixed and are constantly in flux. Therefore brands should be flexible.

However, in a crowdsourcing (where the community supplies the product) and crowdfunding (where the community decides what gets produced by supporting) paradigm, a shift occurs and the community ultimately has the power to define the brand. Therefore, with Cameesa the community is the brand. Not only does the community focus on making the product but is also involved in evolving the brand the story through their community participation.

Rumplo is a platform that let’s people rank and track their favorite T-shirts and T-shirt designers. It was built to be a promotional platform for those whose business is T-shirts to potentially receive a larger following. I haven’t gathered any background information on traffic numbers yet but it does look like they have a fair bit of content on there. About 21 pages worth of T-shirts. I also found our friend Joe from Fantastic Bonanza on the site. The platform seems promising and I’ll need to give it try.

There’s an interesting new community platform and social network for fashion called Fashionspace. Started in the UK by Holly Bellm and Harry Bridgeman it is:

“A place to buy, sell or swap your independently designed, vintage or 2nd hand fashion and network with other designers, creatives and fashion-lovers”.

I think this was a niche just waiting to be filled, a community platform centered around fashion and specifically fashion designers. As VentureBeat reports, the platform launched last October and possesses a community of 22,000 active members and 800,000 monthly unique visits. Holly and Harry built the community by leveraging relationships with an initial group of designers that would provide credible content. Bellm’s hopes Fashionspace will help uncover new fashion design talent as MySpace has done for undiscovered music talent.

The one advantage I see over other community platforms that Fashionspace intelligently built in, is a commerce platform to allow community members to set up their own boutiques. The feature is very relevant for their niche community of independent designers. There are no fees to participate or to set up a shop. Fashionspace generates revenues by taking a 10% cut from sales transacted on their platform.

Out of curiosity I went to see what they had in their T-Shirt section. For the full story visit VentureBeat.

Andrew Lockhart at Thinking Interactive posted an excellent article on the 9 the nine types of brand communities expanding on Sean Moffit’s article at Buzz Canuck. Examining this model is definitely relevant for Cameesa and other community based sites.

The above diagram outlines the level of commitment and involvement a community offers and its effects on brand impact.

A quick overview of the categories is as follows:

Commitment

1. Open – Communities that don’t require registration and allow anonymous participation. An example would be an anonymous posting on a blog.
2. Registration – Most common, sign up to participate.
3. Purchase – Community based around the purchase of a product. The membership can also be the product. Example, pay a fee to join an exclusive community.
4. Outside Selection – Members are selected by existing community members or an organizer as registration is not open to everyone.

Involvement/Interaction

1. Spectators – Members who join a community to gain the benefits and contribute or participate very little.
2. Critics – Members that participate with comments, tagging, rating, reviewing, voting, etc.
3. Creators – Tend to be the most active members on community sites in terms of content contribution.

How the model applies to Cameesa.

I know the model as presented by Andrew and Sean is not rigid with fixed boundaries and is assumed that there is overlap and variety between communities. However, Cameesa’s model of Creating, Supporting and Buying is a tightly knit eco-system that needs high levels of participation from all its members and promotes high levels of interaction between all of them.

Broken down as follows:

Artists “the Creators”- upload their artwork to be printed on t-shirts (High degree of involvement).

Supporter’s “The Critics”- seek out designs that inspire them and fund it’s printing (Also, a high degree of involvement). The word “critic” is not as appropriate for the Cameesa community as supporters will most likely support artwork they enjoy, actively moving towards the products they’d like to see succeed.

Buyer’s “The Spectators” – Seek out shirts they are crazy about and purchase them.

A community member can fill all of the roles as they are not exclusive. In terms of commitment, creating and supporting require registration while purchasing does not. On the whole each pillar is important in the Cameesa community in order to produce quality tees the design savvy will enjoy. Artists and supporters will collect the proceeds to sustain their activity on the site while providing an excellent breeding ground for high quality designs. All will have a significant impact on the Cameesa brand.

Fontsruct is a free online font-building tool that allows type sharing among the community. This is an interesting way to cultivate a design community. Provide a single online location not only to create new typefaces but to share and download others for free. It is also interesting to see flash used in an effective way. To build interfaces for online editing tools.

I recently came across the Emptees site and was extremely impressed with not only the community of talented designers but with the elegant execution of the site by Indie Labs. Note: Indie Labs also is behind “Big Cartel”, the easy to use online store application for apparel designers. The interface for Emptees is clean and simple as the site is divided intuitively into 3 sections: Tees, People and Talk. The home page is also well conceived displaying not only the top Tees but the most recent conversations in the talk section as well.

I recently posted the news of our launch on Emptees and received some great feedback (My Post) . Thanks to all who responded. For those who’ve sent emails I will be in touch shortly. An interesting point was made by TAC in terms of creating a point system. I think this is a great idea as the team has discussed this on numerous occasions. I will also post news about particular community features in the near future as we are getting ready “beta” testing.

Again, many thanks to the Emptees community.