by Melina Roshard
At Wemakeit design products are sold, apps developed, start-ups launched, and music recordings published– and lately even farmsteads have been bought.
Whether as an individual, a collective or a start-up – on our crowdfunding-platform, everyone can bring their project online to a wider public and get joint financing from numerous backers. In return for this they receive a trade-off, be it through personal invitations, products or experiences.
In an ever-growing and globalized world, people increasingly prefer to support a project with which they can identify. And they are ready to hand out money for creative visions. Since our founding four and a half years ago, around two thousand projects have been financed through Wemakeit. Two out of three ideas which go online are successful. Currently, projects in the „food“ category are very popular. More and more of us wish to know where our food comes from. We would all like to eat locally and responsibly sourced food.
My personal experiences of success are the impact we generate. It is fantastic to be able to promote creative types, and to implement their projects and visions. Crowdfunding is more than financing: through participation and values, community and networks emerge.
Here at Wemakeit we think and act interconnected, we work in a mobile way and out of different locations. Our head office is in Zurich, we have an office in Vienna, another in Lausanne and since the spring we have been onsite in Tessin. Our programmers, who have fully exhausted digital possibilities, are at home in the South of France. We have a very flat hierarchy, we are all on an equal footing, and are always open to trying out something new.
Crowdfunding is no here-today-gone-tomorrow trend. It will establish itself as an alternative method of financing. The potential is massive! Already more than a hundred thousand backers have invested over nineteen million Swiss Francs. And that is only the beginning. In the future we want to strengthen our work with foundations, high schools, and private sponsors. For example, Swisscom has already supported over a hundred newcomer bands. We see lots of potential in private and public partnerships, and although there is a lot of dodgy stuff on the internet, it does offer tremendous networking possibilities. We can exchange things with people all over the world, we can organize ourselves, carry out joint projects, and act independently. Everything was not better back in the days. We live in a different time – let’s make the most of it!
