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Content Tagged ponoko
Sick of IKEA? Design Your Own Stuff, And Get Rich While You’re At It
You know that doohickey you’ve wanted to make for the last decade, but you’ve never had the right materials or equipment? The one that’s going to make you rich? Your time for glory has arrived.
Ponoko, which launched at TechCrunch40, has introduced a revamped site that will bring e-commerce functionality to their marketplace, allowing users to buy, sell, and give away the designs they’ve created. The site allows designers to sell their products and have Ponoko ship them directly to customers, enabling them to create a virtual storefront with few (if any) upfront costs.
Sellers need only pay a small fee to the site in addition to the cost of materials, without having to worry about establishing distribution channels or inventory. And buyers are guaranteed that products are unique - they can even buy and modify design files if they want to tweak something.
Ponoko has also added a factory and moved its headquarters to San Francisco, explaining that over half of their U.S. visitors live in California. According to Ponoko, the move, combined with the direct designer-to-consumer retail model, will help reduce carbon emmisions. Ponoko’s desire to go green is given further credibility by the addition of Graham Hill, founder of TreeHugger, to their board.
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TechCrunch40 Launch Success: Ponoko
We are being flooded with emails regarding the TechCrunch40 conference - things we did right, things we did wrong (lots, apparently), and suggestions for next year. All are welcome, but what I like to see the most are the emails from presenting companies talking about what’s happened to them since they went up on stage last week.
I’ll be pulling all of the feedback into a wrap up post later this week, but today I received an email from Ponoko, one of the forty launching startups, that really made me feel like the whole thing was worth it. “We reached 1 million website hits within 23 hours 27 mins and 6 secs of launch,” said Derek Elley, the company’s chief strategy officer.
They also wrote a blog post noting some of the coverage the company got immediately after launching - there was a lot of it. So much, in fact, that the site went down for a while.
Ponoko is a cool way for designers to create new physical products and sell them. Users collaborate on design and prototyping all the way through to production. Check it out - the website is back up and humming.
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