It is the WORLD’S FIRST smart handbag that has been both co-created AND activates social improvement.
Tell us about your product
The Hyde-Away, by Calayne, is a smart handbag that lights up the bottom of your handbag, so that you can find things, and it has an installed power cord to charge your phone or tablet. It makes your life easier.
The lights tell you when to re-charge the installed power bank in your Hyde-Away. And as you’re re-charging your handbag, the lights show you how much power you have.
So it’s a smart handbag that fulfils our higher purpose which is to ‘improve peoples’ lives’. We’re social entrepreneurs at Calayne, and we’re using the Hyde-Away to fund social impact causes. The product is the means to an end. Through the handbag, we are assisting social impact organisations that work in children’s education.
So, a smart handbag that funds children’s education. We think that’s pretty smart in itself.
In what way does your product stand out from the pack?
It is the WORLD’S FIRST smart handbag that has been both co-created AND activates social improvement.
We realised very early on in the project that co-creation, engaging with your communities in the design and development of your products, would be the new frontier for business. So we created a private Facebook group called The Creative Fusion Project, into which we invited a small group of friends. This group of co-creators helped us to design the brand identity and the first handbag design.
We’re now engaged in the co-creation of the images, video AND the music for our Kickstarter campaign.
We’ve also structured the business in a smart way. We’ve forged relationships with primary electronics manufacturers in China, so if we can conceive it, we can make it, and we purchase our components at factory prices. And we’ll incorporate the business in Hong Kong, so we can minimise our corporate tax burden.
So the savings that we make from this factory to consumer, F2C, model, we pass on to our social impact partners.
Here’s another smart way of doing business. We will ask each community where we sell our products, to nominate social causes that we can consider supporting.
So not only are we co-creating the product, we’ll co-create the Kickstarter campaign, and we’ll crowdsource the social causes that our community identify as needing our support.
We think that this is the way that business needs to go. Less of a focus on the shareholder, more of a focus on the community’s needs.
What can we expect from you in the future?
With our ability to have almost any electronic component designed and mass produced, there are A LOT of ideas that you can conceive of. Once we have launched the Hyde-Away, we will be enlarging our product development co-creation space.
We already have a technology extension to go into the handbags that will make a HUGE difference to women, and men, around the world, and at the same time fund social causes.
There are a range of products using the core technology, but re-packaged into different forms that will appeal to travellers and parents alike.
And we have an exciting plan to bring these to life. We want to take a co-creation workshop on the road. We want to meet our virtual co-creators in a real-world event, where we will co-create product designs, and our next technology innovations.
What we are most excited about is our plan to film each event and to provide this film as a record of the event to each attendee. Now, every film needs an accompanying musical track. We are working with our musician friends on a way to co-create this music. A triple co-creation event! How cool is that?
Once we have launched the Hyde-Away, we will be looking at how we fund these events. So any ideas from your readers would be appreciated.
Where can people buy your bags?
Our Kickstarter campaign will launch at the start of March. We have all of our suppliers standing by, and with a successful funding of the project, we will begin production in mid-April. Our deeply held wish is to be shipping in time for Mother’s Day.
The stylish Hyde-Away is made of premium luxury Amalfi leather, packed with technology that makes life your life easier, and will retail for US$199! From that price, we can all take a fair slice of the profits. Our suppliers, our customers, our team, our communities, and ourselves.
People can follow us on www.calayne.com or on our social media pages.
