Camera bag company Peak Design is toting around a new title as the second most crowdfunded company in history. The company has now raised over $13.7 million through six crowdfunding projects, putting it just behind the most crowdfunded company, watch designer Pebble Technologies.
The company launched in 2010 after their first Kickstarter became the second highest earning campaign for the crowdfunding site at that time. Since then, Peak Design has successfully funded six different projects and now offers a range of camera bags, clips, straps, and covers.
Raising over $6.5 million, their last Kickstarter expanded their camera bags with a new backpack, tote, and sling bag, pushing the company into the second slot in the category of highest grossing crowdfunded companies.
Peak Design began when Peter Dering, an engineer and hobbyist photographer, toted his DSLR around the world on a three-month trip — very uncomfortably. When he returned, he spent ten months crafting a solution, then decided to test out that solution on Kickstarter.
“I’d never heard of a go-to-market strategy when I set out to build this company,” Dering said in a press release. “The entire calculation was far simpler. I spent ten months thinking about a specific product to solve a specific problem. Confident I’d done that well, I just figured that I’d magically get people to buy them. Luckily, Kickstarter came around just in the nick of time, and I never even had to consider a strategy. It was a no-brainer for someone doing what I was trying to do.”
Last year, the company entered the top 12 Kickstarters since the crowdfunding site’s launch. Peak Design’s latest campaign for a sling, tote, and two backpacks pushed the company just shy of the largest Kickstarter company. The firm recently added an Indiegogo campaign for the same bags for an exclusive pre-order, raising over $6 million in that second campaign for the Everyday backpack, tote, and sling.
