As far as Adam Saraceno was concerned, he was just “helping out a buddy.”
The buddy was Peter Dering, a San Francisco entrepreneur who had quit his job to start a camera accessories company called Peak Design. Saraceno needed a job, and Dering needed somebody to run a Kickstarter campaign for his company’s first product, a device to keep your camera within easy reach.
Neither had any idea that the Kickstarter campaign for the Capture Camera Clip would be one of the most successful of 2011. At the time, the $364,698 it raised made it the second biggest crowdfunding campaign ever.
“I remember thinking that a camera accessory felt like a niche thing,” says Saraceno, now the company’s chief marketing officer. “For it to get the kind of support that it did kind of blew my mind.”
That Kickstarter campaign did more than launch an incredibly successful company, one that over the past five years has expanded to include items that appeal not just to photographers, but commuters, travelers, and anyone who has to transport their gear from one place to another. It inspired a new kind of funding model, one that relies entirely on crowdfunding.
It’s paid off for the company, which has followed that initial campaign with four others. The most recent, for the Everyday Messenger bag, brought in close to $5 million in 2015. Forbes called Peak Design the “most successful crowdfunder on Kickstarter.”
And Peak Design just initiated a new campaign this week, thus adding a full line of bags—including a couple of backpacks, the most requested item from fans—to the catalog. Nobody’s making any predictions, but this one just might set another record for the company.
We talked with Saraceno about how he got involved with the company, how they came up with their unique model for fundraising, and their plans for the future.
Getting the call
First let’s back up to 2011: after traveling through New Zealand for a year, Saraceno and his girlfriend were finally back in the U.S.
“The first eight months we were back in the states we spent crashing on couches, going to weddings, picking up random temp jobs,” says Saraceno. “We were pet sitting for my sister while she was on her honeymoon when Peter called me.”
Saraceno jumped at the chance, especially because it meant he didn’t have to endure a desk job. He had already gone that route for several years at the software company Intuit, and it wasn’t a good fit for a guy who doesn’t like being tied down.
So Saraceno did his thing on the road, while Dering held down the fort in San Francisco. Kickstarter was getting a lot of buzz at the time, so they decided to use it to raise money for the nifty little device Dering had created to keep your camera from swinging around.
They crossed their fingers and waited to see if anyone would want to fund the new company. Turned out that 5,258 people thought the Capture Camera Clip was so cool, they would buy one before it even came off the assembly line.
“I remember thinking, ‘Holy smokes, this thing is more successful that we thought it would be,’” says Saraceno, his St. Louis roots showing through.
Soon after the Capture Camera Clip made its debut, Saraceno and his girlfriend (now his wife) decided to hit the road again. This time they moved to Australia, where they stayed for 18 months.
It might seem a little unorthodox for one of a company’s key employees to move half a world away, but Dering says it’s never been an issue.
“Adam and I have been working from different cities for about five years now,” he says. “We’ll often go many months without ever seeing each other’s face, but I don’t think either one of us even notices it. I feel Adam is as connected to me and our colleagues just as much as anyone who rolls into the office on a bicycle. He’s a leader in the company, and he does it from a few time zones away.”
A new business model
The fans of the Capture Camera Clip were eager to see what Peak Design came up with next. In fact, it was the backers who suggested the company’s next products, a pair of camera straps called the Leash and the Cuff.
But could they raise the money they needed on Kickstarter? Or would their backers see this as “going back to the honey hole,” as Saraceno puts it, one too many times?
It turned out that Kickstarter, with its emphasis on getting to know the people behind the product, was the right place for a small, scrappy company like Peak Design. The team, which had added five more people at this point, always communicated directly with their backers.
“They know Peter’s face, and they know my face,” says Saraceno. “Or at least they know that I’m the one with the beard.”
At some point, it hit them: crowdfunding wasn’t just a way to launch their business. It could be a long-term strategy.
“It’s tough to tell when we decided that this was how we were going to do business,” says Saraceno. “Probably after our second campaign, and certainly by the time we did our third, we realized that having a Kickstarter campaign every year was a sustainable way for us to do business. Launch new stuff, design products, and make a living doing what we love without anyone telling us what to do and when to do it.”
The Peak Design team keeps in touch with backers long after a campaign is over, keeping them in the loop about what the company is up to. They see some of the same people fund them year after year.
“There definitely are people who have followed us through all five campaigns,” says Saraceno.
Weathering setbacks
Staying in touch with customers means being honest about their screw-ups as well. When Peak Design released its Slide camera strap—its fourth Kickstarter campaign—they discovered too late that a problem with one of the components caused it to pop off the camera.
“It was just the worst,” says Saraceno. “It’s hard to imagine a worse failure. We didn’t catch the issue until we had shipped it out to 1,500 of our Kickstarter backers.”
They got some negative press—the kind that can sink a startup. But luckily, they caught the problem before the straps were released to the public.
“We have a very open relationship with our backers,” says Saraceno. “We just admitted that we [screwed] up. And the end result was that we came out of it with more goodwill from our customer base than when we started.”
But after such a misstep, would fans fund their next project? A year later, they launched a Kickstarter campaign for the Everyday Messenger. It brought in $4,869,472, making it one of the most successful crowdfunding campaigns in history.
It’s not just the amount of money the campaign brought in that’s impressive. It’s the fact that very few companies—fewer than 1 percent—have been able to keep momentum going through five successive campaigns.
The camera bag has been an incredible success, and not just among photographers. It’s the product that’s transformed Peak Design from a photography gear company to a lifestyle brand. It’s won awards from publications as diverse as Men’s Journal, National Geographic, and Popular Photography.
The success of the Everyday Messenger once again brought in interest from private equity firms. So far, the company has turned all of them down.
“We’ve heard people out,” says Saraceno, “but we feel like we can do everything we want to do without taking on outside investors.”
And why should they follow the rest of the pack? Peak Design has been profitable since its first year, reaching more than $13 million in sales in 2015. Not too bad for a company that’s never taken a dime of venture capital.
Finding a home base
Peak Design has now grown to include 20 staffers. Most work out of the company’s San Francisco headquarters, a loft space in the Dogpatch neighborhood. They are currently focused on the company’s sixth Kickstarter campaign.
“Managing our Kickstarter campaign is an all-hands-on-deck effort for us,” says Saraceno, who is the voice of the company. (And we mean that literally—his is the voice you hear narrating the company’s videos.) He contributes the friendly voice for all the content on the website, and keeps in contact with all the backers with frequent updates.
And he still handles everything remotely. When Saraceno and his wife moved back from Australia (“We decided it was time to settle down a bit,” he explains), they decided against San Francisco. Instead, they chose Austin, partly because his wife went to the University of Texas and partly because, well, they liked it one time when they visited.
For the first time in years, he does have an office. He’s a member at WeWork Congress, which gives him a home base in downtown Austin.
“But as the company has gotten bigger, I do more time in San Francisco,” he says. “I’m probably there a week out of every month.”
At any given time, Saraceno says, between a quarter and a half of the staff is out of the office. It’s the kind of company where people are encouraged to live the kind of lifestyle they depict in their marketing.
But Saraceno realizes just how lucky he is that five years ago, a college friend called him up and asked for help with a crowdfunding campaign.
“In the whole company, it’s only me and one other person who are really remote,” he says. “Over the years, I’ve been lucky to carve out a position that I can do from pretty much anywhere.”
Photos: Peak Design, Liam Lonsdale