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As a fashion customer, you accept waiting as just part and parcel of buying your clothes. You wait as omniscient figures in penthouses play a high-stakes game of Red Light, Green Light and wave on or turn away the trendiest styles, hottest designers, and game-changing technologies. You wait as investment firms, luxury conglomerates, swagless executives, entrenched designers, and retailers all get to take a crack at a brand and its clothing before you ever get a say. Kickstarter’s biggest in-an-ideal-world promise is that they’ve done away with all the waiting. Unlike clothes shopping, the crowdfunding platform gives you the chance to peruse a marketplace of ideas. “People on Kickstarter aren't shopping,” says Kickstarter spokesperson David Gallagher. “They're supporting the creation of something that doesn't exist.”
In the fashion space (the site’s seventh largest category, but a “strong and growing” one, Gallagher says), the promise of the crowdfunding site is that a creator—shaken loose from the chains of powerful investors or the ruling luxury conglomerates that own the luxury houses where creators are forced to cut their teeth for years and years before finally getting the chance to install their singular vision—can easily connect directly with you, a paying customer.
“I love Kickstarter because they're opening it up,” Josh Gustin, founder of Kickstarter-funded denim brand Gustin, says. “If you have a good idea, give it a shot. You don't have to win the approval of Barneys anymore.” Instead, you need the approval of the masses, or at least enough of it to reach your funding goal. But what does that look like?
This summer, it looked like a romper, for dudes. For a brand that was seemingly met with near-universal ridicule, Romphim raised an awful lot of money—just over $350,000 from a single campaign. That would have been an impossibility without Kickstarter. Daniel Webster-Clark, one of the brand’s founders imagines asking a friend for funding: “Hey, can I borrow $200,000 to make some male rompers?" The next step might be to pitch a VC fund—“Hey, we've got a great idea,” Webster acts out the hypothetical pitch. “The next big thing is male rompers”—but it’s hard to imagine getting past slide one. The Romphim is something that maybe wouldn’t have existed without an army of individual backers, but is this really the future Kickstarter promised? Since Kickstarter’s launch, $127 million total has been poured into Kickstarter fashion projects, birthing jeans and jackets and, yes, male rompers. But is Kickstarter creating new product categories in fashion or merely clickbait clothing?
Aman Advani tells me that the inkling for Ministry of Supply came when he found himself cutting and discarding the bottoms of dress socks and splicing the tops onto athletic Nike socks, in the hopes of creating a more comfortable sock to wear to work. It’s a creation only someone so far removed from the fashion industry, like say an MIT engineer such as Advani, could love. But he saw the beginnings of a company.
Before Ministry of Supply raised almost $430,000 then landed a $1 million investment, there wasn’t a precedent for fashion brands on Kickstarter. “Ministry of Supply was definitely a trailblazer,” Gallagher says. Advani didn’t even bother researching other fashion Kickstarters at the time, and instead tried to emulate successful tech projects. Advani says there are two types of projects that can potentially go on Kickstarter. The first is “[insert whatever thing here] but better.” These sorts of projects don’t need Kickstarter. “You already know the market likes blank, they're definitely going to like blank on steroids, just go build it,” Advani says. The second sort of projects are the challengers that aspire to upend entire categories.
Technology masquerading as fashion is one of the cornerstones of Kickstarter’s apparel projects. Ministry of Supply’s gear—moisture-wicking dress shirts that Advani calls “performance professional” fits into this category. Flip-flops are instead 3D-printed marvels engineered for your feet, hoodies and T-shirts are made out of something called Filium to shrug off odor and stain, and magnets are put to work in order to eliminate the scourge of belt holes. On Kickstarter, the is less What does this fashion item look like? and more What can it do? The majority of projects on Kickstarter aren’t launched by legit designers, but rather entrepreneurs promising “disruption” of your closet.
“What we're trying to do is say [if] business casual is dead, then business comfortable is next,” says Advani. “If Brooks Brothers is right, then so be it. It will have been a risk well taken.” But consumers have embraced Advani’s concept to such an extent that others are now trying to get a piece of the pie. Since Ministry of Supply’s launch in 2012, plenty of other fashion-first brands have added, or tried their hand at, blended performance and formalwear: Gant Rugger has its Tech Prep line, Calvin Klein makes one, and even Brooks Brothers experimented in the space. At the very least, Kickstarter opened a pathway for Ministry of Supply, and the concept it’s heralding, to make some noise.
Other companies aren’t as fortunate to wake the sleeping giants and live to tell the tale. Kickstarter frequently functions as a place where large companies pillage ideas, or wait for concepts to prove their viability. The most prominent example is Pebble, a leader in the smartwatch space that was once valued at $740 million but is now out of business. The company debuted on Kickstarter in 2012—three years before the Apple Watch hit the market. Pebble founder Eric Migicovsky, who now works at startup incubator Y Combinator, declined to comment.
When Gustin launched with the promise to sell $81 raw denim, Josh Gustin was already running a denim brand—but he was selling jeans in stores for $205 and gaining no traction. Part of the reason Kickstarter has been able to bend the menswear industry is that it gave a different route to people with nontraditional ideas—if not about jeans, then about ways to sell them. “I like the fact that it gives people a shot in an industry that can be very difficult and closed,” Gustin says. “I love Kickstarter because they're opening it up. If you have a good idea, give it a shot. You don't have to win the approval of Barney's anymore.”
And while direct-to-consumer wasn’t brand-new when Gustin launched in 2013, the sales pitch hit a nerve with customers. The company raised $450,000 after loudly blaring its sales model, along with the promise items would be sold to customers at more than half typical retail prices. With Gustin, the conceit wasn’t just that customers were getting denim at a value pricepoint. It was that Gustin had created a more efficient model for them to buy those jeans. Buying them, then, didn’t just make customers feel more stylish. It was a way for customers to feel like they were outsmarting the fashion industry, and everyone who was paying $200 for raw denim, in one fell swoop. “The tech community values efficiency as well,” Gustin says. “So they want that product but they're like, ‘Hmm, it's interesting that you have a more efficient model around it.’” And Gustin’s able to keep customers once it gets them in the door. The comments on the brand’s Kickstarter page are largely positive beyond some gripes about customer service and the denim nerds over at Heddels describe the product as “a quality pair of jeans at prices that won’t break the bank.”
And Gustin’s philosophy is that once you’ve made a customer feel like a big brainiac, you should continue to do so. In this way, Kickstarter can have its own effect on how a brand is run. Gustin continues to use the Kickstarter model for every one of its products launches. “The one wrinkle for us was, we think people are kind of missing the point,” Gustin says. “A lot of brands go on Kickstarter and they leverage the crowdsourcing model, but then once they move on they abandon it. And our whole plan was, ‘No, no, no, the whole point is the crowdsourcing model is what's so powerful.’”
The Adv3nture hoodie is a hooded sweatshirt. It is also a bottle opener, a pillow, a mini pen holder, a passport transporter, and a neoprene-lined drink cooler. By any standard, this is an over the top product—one that’s either ridiculously epic or just ridiculous.
The hyper-functional hoodie, launched by Zane Lamprey in September 2016, accumulated just over $1,850,000 in backing and is still the most-funded fashion Kickstarter ever. Lamprey has launched three wildly successful projects total, ranging from the hoodie to a TV show that eventually landed on National Geographic.
“[Kickstarter customers] want to make a difference,” says Lamprey. “It's like, ‘Hey, man. You seem pretty cool, and I like your product, and I'm going to back this because I want to help you out.’” Kickstarter also believes people are seeking out more than a shopping experience when they visit the site—they’re looking to create something totally new.
The Adv3nture jacket represents Kickstarter at its most promising and frustrating. Kickstarter can engage a consumer who isn’t interested in fashion, and can open the floodgate for every weird—and potentially industry-changing—idea. Yet the most funded product in the category’s history puts a bottle opener on a zipper.
Lamprey argues a jacket would be a harder sell in a department store. On Kickstarter, he can produce a video that explains how it works, and why you need it. “You can't just say like, ‘Hey, look at my cool shirt,’” Lamprey argues. “You need to say, look at my cool shirt, here's what it does. Right? So it's not really about the fashion, it becomes more about functionality, and so I think crowdfunding has really changed the view on how functional apparel can be.”
This stands in contrast to the way the majority of the fashion industry has operated forever, though. Reed Nelson, the content manager at San Francisco’s Unionmade, worries about what we lose in trading fashion for function. “In a basic-necessity-for-society sense, I'm sure these utilitarian things make a lot more sense in the same way that everyone in WALL-E wears the same clothes, right?” he says. “Style has always been a form of self expression but I think if the only idea you're trying to convey is that ‘I'm efficient,’ it's just a less interesting place to be.”
Whether the gatekeepers like it or not, Kickstarter is presenting a vision of style outside the established norms. That products like the function-first hoodie raised over a million dollars proves they are viable. “In a town where people drink Soylent for three meals a day and want to slim down on everything and swear by Acronym stuff, not because the silhouette but because of the functionality,” Nelson says of San Francisco, “there's definitely an audience for that.”
No matter what you think about the necessity of performance formalwear, disrupted denim, and travel-ready hoodies, Kickstarter has proven that there’s a desire for them. “Finding out if ultimately there is market pull for your idea is critical, right?” Ministry of Supply’s Advani says.
The Romphim may not have the category-busting, undercutting, or straight-up functional qualities of the above items. But it, too, wouldn’t exist without thousands of regular non-investment-company-owning people coming out of the woodwork to endorse it.
And, surprise, some of these people just want something to wear. Romphim’s Webster admits it was hard to find precedent for the Romphim among former successful Kickstarter campaigns. “They were of more about pioneering a new manufacturing process, or trying to bring together new technologies in a way that hadn't been done before,” Webster says. “Versus what we were trying to do, [which] was really just trying to jump into a place where menswear traditionally hadn't been.”
They set their sights on reinvigorating a style—yes, male rompers—that they felt was underserved. If this inclination were wrong, Romphim wouldn’t have raised over $350,000, and retailers like ASOS wouldn’t have started getting in on the action with dude rompers of their own.
It’s okay if you think it’s stupid; in fact, that’s the whole point. The entire point of Kickstarter is the principle that what you think is stupid, someone else might pay for. Social-media humiliation can scare corporations out of ideas, but Romphim suggests that for every hater there’s a backer. And if the Romphim is a stunt, it’s also a wildly successful one. It’s clothing as clickbait—and a whole lot of people clicked.
When you survey Kickstarter, you see that the fashion category’s problem of funding clickbait is endemic on the platform. The most-funded projects are a device with the same functionality and look as an iPod but with better sound quality, and a super-chilling cooler. One highly-funded project aims to bring back Reading Rainbow. There are few true category challengers, like Pebble, or even Ministry of Supply. And fashion is an even more challenging category to upend with instant audience approval. After all, the fashion system generally requires designers to spend years in the trenches for the opportunity to plan months and months in advance—predicting what the customer will want, rather than giving it to them in this exact moment. Kickstarter promises a revolutionary future that doesn’t need to cede to the requirements of the industry. But for now, its biggest success stories are items that cater to our most momentary whims.
