Customers and buyers of the jT invisible men’s undershirt were giving us feedback regarding the retail packaging recently.
One of the main comments was that it had a slightly dated look because of the images used on the front of the box. You be the judge:
Current Retail Box for the jT from Collected Threads
Rather than risk losing some potential customers, we thought we might design a secondary sleeve for the jT men’s undershirt that could be used over our existing box. It was then we turned to the popular Crowdsourcing site, Crowdspring. If you haven’t heard of “crowdsourcing,” it works like this:
- You, the buyer, post a project to the site for whatever it is you need. You set the length of time and the award amount for each individual project. This could be a logo design, retail packaging as described above, or a one of the 40+ categories available.
- ‘Creatives’ (artists, writers, graphic designers, etc) submit proposals to either a public area or a secure private portal. If you’re concerned about privacy, you can ensure the creatives sign a generic Crowdspring NDA or your own.
- The proposals are then reviewed by you on a 5 star rating system and you leave comments for each of the submissions. Because creatives are competing to win the bid, they make the requested changes and resubmit for review.
- At the close of the proposal period, you choose the winning work and pay the creative the award amount. Crowdspring takes a fee over and above the award to host the project and provide the gathering place for the creatives.
Quality of Crowdsourced Work
There’s some really great designs as well as some not-so-great ones. We found the more we submitted feedback in a timely manner, the more the creatives sent us relevant designs. Check out some of these submissions:
Price
For this particular project, we put up $1200 for the award, $300 for the Crowdspring fee, and $99 for the Pro advertising package which kept me on the front page of the site for the duration.
Verdict
If you have ever subcontracted a graphics design company, you might find you pay close to or more for 1-3 people working on the same design. With Crowdspring, you can have 20-100+ creatives all bidding to win the work at the same time. From our experience, this gets the project in front of a lot more creative minds. We have 2 days left of a 2 week campaign and already see 30-40 designs that would do well on a retail shelf out of 300 submissions.
For those with smaller budgets who are looking for maximum creativity, we would highly recommend the crowdsourcing model.