What does Indiegogo’s partnership with Brookstone mean for Asian startups’ crowdfunding?

Image credit: Sebastiaan ter Burg

Indiegogo’s recent partnership with Brookstone seems like it should’ve been done a while back, but is an interesting move nonetheless.

A partnership with an offline partner means that successful campaigns will now have direct access to physical stores across hundreds of locations in the US. In addition, Brookstone is offering to cover a comprehensive list of needs for any product launch.

But what does this mean for startups in Asia?

This means that given a successful campaign enough support, Brookstone is willing to take over the hurdle of getting your product to actual stores in the US. To put it simply, they’re willing to streamline your startup’s ability to capitalize on crowdfunding success.

From the page on Indiegogo, here’s the list of services Brookstone is willing to provide:

• End-to-end design and engineering
• Cost-effective manufacturing
• Product packaging
• Compliance testing
• Product placement, signage, and expert sales associates
• Customer service, returns, and shrink control
• E-commerce
• Marketing, advertising, PR and social media
• Wholesale and retail distribution

I’d imagine for most startups not named Pebble, getting to a stage that includes all of those factors takes years.

It will be interesting to see if this partnership will mean that Indiegogo becomes Asia’s go-to platform. Because of Kickstarter’s requirements for the crowdfunding company to be from mainly Western countries, I’ve seen many startups in Asia go with Indiegogo, which has no such requirements there.

While Kickstarter boasts better stats than Indiegogo at this point – thanks to tremendously successful campaigns like Pebble – I’d be interested to see if Indiegogo can capture the international scene with this.

Another aspect to this is the question of what exactly Brookstone is getting out of this from these startups. Beyond the given of fetching some of Indiegogo’s hottest products, I’d be surprised if this was merely a commission-based system.

They’ve also got some pretty big names in tow including China-based hardware accelerator, HAX, US-based hardware accelerator, Hardware Club, and billionaire entrepreneur, Mark Cuban.

The current lineup of products on the site has significant campaign numbers behind them, ranging from US$178,000 to US$3.4 million.

A quick glance at the company reveals that the New Hampshire-based retailer has 300 locations around the US (quoted from 2011 so I’m sure that number has gone up or down a bit). The focus seems to be on tech and lifestyle products, fitting Indiegogo’s batch of successful products quite well.