Innovation That Matters

Crowdsourced fabric design

Retail

Crowdsourced innovations have already claimed many pages here at Springwise.com, including everything from sneakers to customer service to restaurants. The latest spotting? A Finnish site that lets consumers submit and vote on new home-interior fabric designs. Bon Bon Kakku, recently launched by Helsinki fabric and interior manufacturer Vallila Interior, lets creative consumers design their own fabrics and offer them to the crowds for voting, comments and–ultimately–purchase. Users begin by registering on the site and submitting their design, including metadata, thumbnail and preview images. Visitors to the site can then rate and make comments on new designs, helping to decide which will go into production. Based on voting results, Bon Bon Kakku chooses new fabrics to produce and sell; creators of selected designs win 6m of the fabric they designed. Other visitors, meanwhile, can buy fabrics from Bon Bon Kakku for EUR 25 per meter, plus taxes and shipping, in units 150 cm wide. Bon Bon Kakku’s winter design competition, which kicked off last month, will be open for voting through Nov. 10. Free fabric for winning designers is nice, but the next step for a business like this? Let consumers earn some cold, hard cash for their efforts in the form of a percentage of sales of the fabrics they design. This is Generation C(ontent) we’re talking about, and it’s filled with minipreneurs yearning to be part of Generation C(ash). Yes, we know–that’s too much trend jargon for one sentence 😉 In plain English: thanks to the internet, talented consumers can share their creative efforts with the rest of the world, and increasingly expect to be rewarded for those efforts, or even to be able to make a living off their creative output. The sites that help that happen are the sites that last! (Related: Customer-made wallpaperSticky car art with a crowdsourcing twist.) Spotted by: Julia Valle

Website: www.bonbonkakku.com

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