Say goodbye to conventional price setting methods and hello to crowd-pricing, a brand new retail experience.
Just two weeks ago, this little island called Singapore has seen the launch of yet another great initiative! Known as Haystakt Projects, this new business wants to bring to you creative and independently produced goods at crowd-determined prices.
Haystakt as a company was first established in 2012 with the aim of coming up with better ways for independent makers to do business online. Since then, the company has built up a sizable community of makers from Asia and finally launched an interesting new platform known as Projects. Earlier last week, we had the privilege to interview Mr. Joel Leong, one of the founders at Haystakt, to tell us more about this new initiative.
Tell us more about Haystakt and why you think it is adding value?
Haystakt is a crowdpricing platform and marketplace for creative products. We started the company because a lot of our friends had novel ideas for products, but struggled to bring them to commercial fruition. We built Haystakt to lower that barrier, so that anyone with a great idea could have a shot at bringing their creative product to market. We’re constantly thinking of better ways for makers to do business online.
We knew there had to be a better way to help makers produce at scale, so we said, why not take the decisions of pricing and production into the hands of purchasers themselves? For a community that’s constantly innovating in the area of product design, we’re excited to introduce what we think is a more efficient distribution model.
Many people have heard about crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo, but not crowdpricing. Could you explain how crowdpricing works?
Crowdpricing allows customers to influence the price of a product. That means the more people order, the less everyone pays. By placing pre-orders, customers help makers achieve greater scale during production. In turn, makers pass on the cost savings gained.
What problem does crowdpricing solve for makers?
Many makers struggle with production quantity and pricing decisions, especially when producing for a limited domestic market. Often it’s guesswork, and results in surpluses or shortages. Crowdpricing takes a demand-based approach to price-setting by taking these decisions to the purchasers themselves. On top of assuring makers’ earnings at any scale, it helps mitigate the risk of overstock, gain more customers through flexible pricing, and incentivizes early adopters with cost savings.
Tell us about the name Haystakt, what does it mean and how did it come about?
There’s something special about self-producers and independent makers. Being small means they innovate quickly, but more importantly, they make things with passion and care about the little details. But the problem with being small is that you get lost in an ocean of bigger fish. Small things become hard to find, or sometimes, insignificant. Like a needle in a Haystakt.
But when you bind a couple of straws together, strong ties become hard to break – it’s a golden rule. We hope that one day our collection of little things becomes a giant heap you can’t miss.
Right now, it seems like most of your projects are in the craft industry. Do you plan to expand to other kinds of creative projects like local movies or technological products?
Absolutely. Anyone can start their own crowdpricing project on Haystakt, and we’re excited to see different types of projects take off.
Haystakt Projects are ideal for products that have substantial overhead costs, since they’ll benefit from being spread out over multiple orders. So while you can’t exactly ‘fund’ a film, you could probably use Haystakt Projects to gather pre-orders for your DVD release. We’re also especially interested in the growing wearables market.
What is the revenue model for Haystakt?
At Haystakt we believe there’s room to rethink traditional retail. So we take a 5% commission whether a product was crowdpriced or sold through the shop.
What are Haystakt’s direction and goals for this year?
This year is about education and growth, both locally and regionally.
We’re so excited that many young entrepreneurs in Singapore like Ladibird, Lensy, BigSpoon and U2opia, amongst many others, are taking bold steps to solve problems with their own ventures. And if you are, like myself, a big fan of hand-crafted stuff, head over to Haystakt and support some of these crafters from all around the region!
