A year and a half after Kickstarter

In the summer of 2015 you helped us raise $275,661 to get our business off the ground. We're here to give you an update on what you've helped us achieve.

Our Home

First off, we used some of the money to move into a new office where we could manufacture your Kickstarter rewards.

This is a comparison of what the spaced looked like when we moved in, and what it looks like now. We were a team of 5. Now we're a team of 20!

The Product

The product you received was the first version of our new tattoo, which we produced in the shortest amount of time we possibly could (even though it may have felt like a long time...more on that below).

Since then the product has undergone immense improvements. Every single material has been improved upon and the formula has undergone several revisions to maximize its effectiveness.

The Business

You've helped us become a real business that provides jobs for 20 people and growing. We're very proud of the team we've put together. We have Harvard scientists, Fortune 500 marketers, experienced financial experts, and hard working staff. We're even sponsoring a few employees who want to start new lives in Canada :) See the team here.

Raising money on Kickstarter also helped us raise $1 Million in Venture Capital, from some celebrity investors! Read more about it here.

Survivor host Jeff Probst invested in our business.

Stretch Goals

Our Kickstarter campaign contained multiple stretch goals. Here's a quick re-cap of what they were and our current progress towards fulfilling them.

$100k - Custom Tattoo Creation

We've been building software that will allow you to personalize your inkbox tattoo. We're currently in private beta and will be releasing it to the public in the next 2 months. Sign-up to be one of the first to use it here.

$180k - Research into more colors

One of our first hires after Kickstarter was a world-class Organic Chemist. He's making progress into color research. The science is still in its infancy, but it's highly promising.

Lessons Learned

Like most successfully funded Kickstarter campaigns, we delivered late - 6 months late to be exact. This happened for a slew of reasons:

We didn’t plan for scale. We set out to raise $20k. In our minds the max we could hit was $100k. We were wrong. Fulfilling nearly 15,000 tattoos when we only set out to fulfill 1500 changed the way we needed to manufacture.
We had no experience manufacturing. We had to learn a lot in a short amount of time. We should have researched the scale of manufacturing more before launching the product. We knew rough costs, and knew it would work, just not the specifics. And we learned it’s the minutiae that leads to problems.

Other mistakes we made:

We didn’t charge enough for international shipping. We actually lost a lot of money on this.
We offered over 300 unique designs. This added layers of complexity to our fulfillment that led to delays in delivery. Though we prepared for this in our initial delivery estimates, it was compounded by the complexity of the new manufacturing process.

Try our new tattoos!

From the entire founding team at inkbox, we want thank you again for helping us achieve our dreams. We're unabashedly proud of the product we've used your support to build and we think you're going to love it.