Quirky

I was asked to review Quirky.com, a sort of product development generator website.  My first impressions are good:  Obviously they compete on design, a key part of start-up. I like crowd-sourcing design as a tactic, and they rely on that.  If you nose around a bit, you see Quirky.com gets orders before going into production, which shows they follow the entrepreneurs' task of minimizing risk.

Crowd-sourcing here seems to be a feature, when in fact it may not always be a benefit.  I like crowd-sourcing as a means to review a lot of talent swiftly.  But once we find good talent, I think it is better to keep using your winner.  To crowd-source every single item seems too much work.  And too many designers on a simple item seems like trying to sip water from a fire hose.  Just too much.

If I were running Quirky.com, I would shy away from the mass merchandise/ narrow margins market they target (there even seems to be an association with Bed Bath and Beyond & HSN).  Better to work up a network of say 5000 small specialty retailers and feed them the new products.  Design is important, but customer feedback trumps design every time, design is in the service of the customer. With the specialty stores the margins are wider, and the quantities lower, but there is progress on the design, a process that in itself generates revenue and profits.  Going straight to BB&B and HSN leaves way too much money and market feedback on the table.

A couple of points that may cause problems:

1. By appearing to go "big," they risk all sorts of legal action.  Big gets sued... but Quirky.com in fact is a small business.

2. Along those lines, I did not see anything relating to IPR, and I hope they steer clear of any part of that, they don't need it.  Be open source!  Make your money marketing, not controlling.

Small businesses reflect the uniqueness of the owner, as does the product mix.  It would be interesting to see how a company apparently without the uniqueness of individual small owner will progress.  I wonder if it is replicable, since design is so diffuse.  Is this the next groupon, will it be copied to death?

Some things I could not quite figure out, such as how do participants make money?  Royalties? And then some metrics might be useful.  Such as for a given idea,  how much time in design vs how many make it to "shipping?"

This looks like good, innovative, creative, perhaps even seminal effort.  It will be interesting to watch.  But without a stronger integration with specialty markets, it may be more of an excellent Junior Achievement learning project than a sustainable business model. Time will tell.

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