“Industry-disrupting.” “First ever.” “Category-bending.” These are some of the phrases you might find attached to a Kickstarter project, and they might be used to describe anything from an at-home 3D printer to a new graphic novel. Since its founding in April 2009, Kickstarter has acted as a successful funding platform for more than 152,000 projects that collectively earned roughly $3.5 billion at the time of this writing. It’s leveraged by artists in need of funding, entrepreneurs building new brands and even already-established businesses that are announcing new products.
But regardless of these numbers, Kickstarter is still the wild west of product development. Not all projects make it off their feet (more than 265,000 have failed), and some that do still fail to go into production, like the notorious iBackPack, which took more than $700,000 in funding and then promptly disappeared, leaving its backers in the lurch. That’s an extremely rare case though; the grand majority of funded projects deliver.
Perhaps more interesting than the statistics are the types of projects that find incredible success on the platform. Board games and video games are common winners, but luggage, headphones and a strange automatic toothbrush also find themselves in the upper echelon of things that have earned millions.
Outdoor products are up there too. Kickstarter doesn’t designate a category for outdoor gear, so we combed through its project archive manually to find the ones that earned the most. We classified these items based on an explicitly-stated purpose for use in the outdoors, but also looked for things that might generally be used for travel and adventure and are optimized with traits like weatherproof materials or technical components. Our findings were, in a word, unexpected.
Coolest Cooler
Goal Amount: $50,000
Total Earned: $13,285,226
