Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Launch Pad – FlipBooKit”.
Hello, i’m mark rosen hi, i’m wendy marvel and we’re a flip flicker um. So the first thing that we’re going to do is um. Just give you a quick background of where the idea came from and how we got to where we are so. Flipbookit is a diy hand, cranked miniature movie machine that you can actually load your own animation and cards into so uh. We traveled through europe and we went to a um, a retrospective of edward muybridge and he had all these devices and we were so amazed at the old technology and we thought oh, let’s make something like edward, so we saw split, flap displays and mark, and i Came home to the states and mark started ripping apart printers because he wanted to reconstitute the old parts, and he said i bet i could make something from these like a flip book. So we started going to old aerospace, junkyards and pulling stuff from all these bins and we started creating flipbooks. And this is just some pictures from the workshop and these were the things that we started making and they were gallery pieces that we were showing and they were all hand, tooled beautiful little devices.
And then we started getting approached to do installations. And then museums are asking us to do flipbooks and we even went on a tv show and built a 25 foot flipbook. So we went to maker faire um and showed these flip books and we were approached by matt richardson and he said you guys should make kits and we said but we’re artists we don’t make kits.
But then we thought, let’s make a kit. So we got to building the prototype, and this is where we started off, so we funded twice with kickstarter the first time, just kind of to see what would happen and and uh. We turned out with uh something like 137 000 and then last year.
We did it again because we wanted to update our injection molds and and make a lower cost product and and that campaign uh netted us another 57k. And now we have this established, refined product and a well-nurtured trademark, and the thing is we discovered that there are some magical aspects to this product along the way. It’S it’s a great educational tool. It’S uh! It’S this medium for art. That’S super fun to look at and it stimulates people’s imaginations and you can sort of see some of the action we had. There should be a little video, sorry guys well anyway, the idea is, is you can see sort of that flipbook excites people and it gets enables people to build their own animated movie machine and you could uh make a hand cranked flipbook or you can motorize it, And control it with an arduino and we actually, we sell kits that have the arduino kit so or you can embed it into other objects and customize it in your own funny ways. So anyway, where we’re going with this thing, i’m not sure uh. We still have a little bit of room to bring the cost of goods down.
We manufactured all in the united states and we love that we’ve done a lot with uh product development and promotion, and i think we have a pretty strong brand yeah. We what we’ve started doing recently are workshops. We’Ve been giving kits to charities and trying to just work with the community hacker spaces. We’Ve been doing, flippage shows working with artists where they submit their own animations.
We have a hundred artists that have made their own animations for the boxes and shows in brookland and in l.a leica sponsored us to do a show. It’S really exciting. So, just now, after a couple years, we’re finally going beyond our little web store and and we’re talking to retailers and we’re reaching out to new channels. Um, you can imagine all the channels like education and and yeah licensed products and such that that have been flirting with us. For now, the companies brought in almost half a million dollars in sales, we’ve sold about 7 500 of them and we’re probably going through a little growing pains because we’re just three people. But we’ve got now over 45 retail, ready skus and a portal for retailers to log in and order the product, and i don’t know you guys, probably got the little flip books.
We gave you we um, we specialize each one for you guys when they’re just printed on the labels that you can upload a video or a set of images and print it on your own home, printer and it’ll go on the cards that go into the box. So enjoy them well anyway, we’re happy to be here and thank you for the opportunity to show it off all right. Thank you. Thank you, guys, there’s some time for some questions from our judges. You know i actually don’t have a question, but i just wanted to say like i: there are very few products i see where they make me laugh and um gosh.
You guys have created something, that’s really delightful. So i i just want to congratulate you on that. Thank you, and i would i would concur with ann um. It’S still totally delightful. The opportunity to personalize a product like this for gifting is so broadly appealing from a consumer standpoint.
I’D love to see you on the grommet. Oh that’s great! You .