6x6x6 Project #5: Neri
For those of you who have been following along with the 6x6x6 Project (6 side projects in 6 months, each taking 6 hours or less), I’ve been on something of a hiatus for the past year or so. The most compelling reason (well, excuse) for this is that I took on a coaching role in the Product Design department at Stanford, which turned into a lecturer position last year and ate up a fair bit of my extra time (although as those of you with kids will attest, “extra time” is an abstract concept at best).
In a way, my work at Stanford grew out of the mindset I began to cultivate with 6x6x6; try small, experimental projects to see where they lead. In this case, coaching students in the capstone Product Design series became a more involved, challenging, and engaging role as a lecturer.
Now that I’ve had a bit of time to adjust (and my teaching schedule is currently only Winter/Spring quarters), I’ve decided to dive back in to 6x6x6 (though, the 6 months no longer applies…but what good are constraints if you can’t break them?). And for this project, I chose to collaborate with someone who has been a creative inspiration for me for a long time…my mom.
For many years, my mom Anina has sewn wonderful creations for herself, our family and friends. From a scuba-diver costume (complete with aluminum-foil “tanks”) for me when I was 3, to beautiful clothes for my now 3 year old daughter, she has always motivated me to attempt creative endeavors myself, initially for fun but eventually as a core component of my many disjointed careers.
Recently, she has been producing some basic but beautiful leather products, and we’ve decided to launch a line of simple, durable products together, which we’re calling Neri.
I took it as a challenge to launch our site in less than 6 hours, so I used some of the tools I’m familiar with. For the site itself, I chose one of Anders Norén’s clean, functional (and free!) themes , Fukasawa. I installed it to my hosted solution at Pressable, which makes installing WordPress sites as easy and quick as pressing a few buttons.
- Set up time: 3 hr (including uploading assets & writing copy)
- Cost: Theme (free); hosting ($25/mo for up to 5 sites, and there are much cheaper option but I chose Pressable for it’s scalability and ease of setup).
I needed to take some photos of the products; thankfully in a previous life I did a lot of this type of photography, so I already had a good setup, and just had to buy a roll of cheap poster paper for the backdrop.
- Shooting & processing time: 2hr
- Cost: Paper ($6.50)
Next, we needed a way to sell the products, so I again chose Gumroad, which makes setting up small-scale e-commerce as easy as plugging in a few variables and uploading an image. It also gives you the option to pre-sell, which was helpful for this particular product. Gumroad also has a nice plugin for WordPress, which made it easy to integrate with our site.
- Set up time: 30 minutes (already had an account with Gumroad which expedited things).
- Cost: free (they take a 5% commission which includes credit card fees).
So, in roughly 5.5 hours, we put together a basic e-commerce site, and are ready to start selling products (check out the site here)! We’ll be launching more products soon, so join our mailing list if you’d like to be notified once we do!
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