The "Coolest" cooler has set a new record for crowdfunding on Kickstarter.com by raising more than $10.5 million with a few days left to go before the end of the fundraising period on Friday.
"If you're going to be consumed, how fortunate for it to be with your dream product and your dream project," the 39-year-old
Coolest cooler inventor, Ryan Grepper, told The Oregonian, upon the news of the new record. He also marked the occasion with a celebratory Tweet.
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Grepper originally set a $50,000 fundraising goal to produce roughly 300 of the multipurpose cooler, which comes with a number of features, including an 18-volt blender, Bluetooth speaker, and extra-rugged wheels. He was shocked when the project made headlines last month, and started adding investors by the thousands.
Going into the campaign, his "confidence was pretty low," he admitted to the newspaper, acknowledging that an earlier campaign with a $125,000 goal had failed last winter.
But after going back to the drawing board and launching the new summer campaign that's blossomed into $10.5 million, he told The Oregonian, "Certainly, I'm overjoyed."
"It doesn't take a giant company to get a great product launched. I'm excited about what crowdfunding can do for inventors and creators," he said, commenting on the power of the crowdfunding model for startup businesses.
Grepper's crowdfunding record exceeded several other multimillion-dollar campaigns from years past, including the Pebble smartwatch ($10.2 million), the Android-based Ouya videogame console ($8.5 million), and The Veronica Mars Movie Project ($5.7 million).
There's a lot more work to follow the Kickstarter campaign, though, since backers who pledged $185 or more have, in essence, made an advance purchase of the cooler — meaning that Grepper now has to manufacture over 45,000 of them by February.
"Every day I see as a production deadline," he said.
Grepper explained that the production schedule is "aggressive," but he's been working with a team of industrial designers and sourcing companies in preparation for the mass production of the cooler.
Roughly 3 in 4 successful Kickstarter campaigns experience delays, however, and Grepper has vowed that no matter what, he will keep his nearly 50,000 investors in the loop with frequent updates to the Kickstarter page along the way.
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