$1k Project Summery

Paperweight — A papercraft that folds into tangible objects, unfolding Asian American immigration culture and memories of pains and joys.

Costs

There are stickers, bookmarks, and paper templates within each papercraft kit. I am aiming to print both die-cut stickers and sticker sheets. Those will cost $118 for 100 die-cut stickers and $175 for 100 sticker sheets (4" * 6"). The bookmark will be printed front and back in 16pt. cardstock Matte paper for 100 copies costing $54.71. The product with the paper template will be shipped within the kraft bubble mailer, which will cost $170 for 100 copies (the least amount for production). The most tricky thing in the production phase is looking for the print studio for producing the paper template. The paper has to be folding-friendly and held color nicely. It will be pretty time-consuming to look for a print studio with good deals. I set the budget around $300 to print 100 copies. So currently it will cost around $818 to produce 100 papercraft kits.

Revenue

I started funding my project on Kickstarter two weeks ago. Today is the last day of my first Kickstarter campaign. My project has raised $344, only 17% of my $2000 goal. Sadly, it didn’t go so well with the funding plan. Ideally, the profit (subtract the cost of printing and shipping) will be donated to the Stop AAPI Hate report center.

Backers

9 people have backed my project.

• 3 people pledged at the $19 Papercraft Kit: Van Car, totaling $57
• 4 people pledged at the $55 Everything!!🤩, totaling $220
• 1 person pledged at the $12 Sticker Pack Small
• 1 person pledged at the $29 Sticker Pack Big

Feedbacks

Jane and I spent a lot of time interviewing people in different phases of our project. We couldn’t thank more to all of them for helping us settle down on our core idea of the project. In the beginning phase, we interviewed a couple of our friends about what it means to be an Asian American. Some feedback we got was that the tone of voice needs to be subtle. It shouldn’t only focus on the beauty of our culture and experience, but also the pain and fear of it. People need to understand the struggle, celebrate the difference and just leave us be. After we launched the project, we got lots of supportive feedback, such as the project is so touching. We even got one feedback that said, “this is the most positive post I ever saw this year.” But at the same time, we also got some feedback like the storytelling isn’t very clear on our Kickstarter campaign page.

What’s Next

Jane and I are definitely planning to relaunch this project later in the summer. Before that, we are going to finish the design of the two more papercraft kits and refine our storytelling. We probably will produce the stickers first and sell them on social media and some online stores. We will try to reach out to more people through email if we relaunch the project.