Why Kickstarter and Indiegogo Fought for Her Smart Jewelry Brand

by Pocket Sun (@pocketysun)

This is Part I of the Series “3 Chinese Young Female Entrepreneurs To Watch in 2015”, featuring Jing Zhou, Founder and CEO of elemoon.

Elemoon is the first wearable jewelry brand, and the only wearable tech project that Kickstarter and Indiegogo were fighting for (see elemoon’s successful Kickstarter campaign). And there’s a reason to it — with retail and luxury e-commerce channels, elemoon is about to exceed $10M in revenue in the U.S. within a year. “Many people are not aware that jewelry is a $300 billion business. We are the first company that combines light luxury bracelets with wearable technology,” Jing said. Silicon Valley disappointed her when she found out that every wearable startup was making cheap, similar looking plastic wristbands. Naturally, women care about whether what they wear on the wrists looks good.

“Wearable tech needs to be wearable for women. Ugly is not wearable.”

She wanted to design a beautiful high-tech bracelet, which was non-existent before her. To get her team inspired, Jing took them to New Mexico to see jewelry designs by Native Americans. Elemoon has a variety of colors to choose from — black, white, gold and silver, and these bracelets change colors based on your daily outfits. It makes so much sense. You can’t wear the same shoes to every occasion, so why the same bracelet?

This July, elemoon will be available for sale at $399 in a flagship store in Hollywood, as well as on luxury e-commerce websites, to draw young millennial female customers who are into city luxury (think brands like Tory Burch and Kate Spade) and high fashion. Jing told us that she is developing the next product in partnership with one of the most desirable jewelry brands in the world. But elemoon is much more than a bracelet. “We are building a wearable tech jewelry industry supply chain.” Elemoon provides an open back end for wearable tech developers, just like the Apple watch does.

Jing wasn’t a tech person by trade. In fact, she was the only Chinese journalist at the Businessweek headquarters, interviewing numerous business executives all over the U.S. This experience certainly made an impact on her, because she didn’t have much hesitation jumping into entrepreneurship.

Previously, she was also leading Girls in Tech (a non-profit focused on women in technology and entrepreneurship) in Beijing. Leo Wang of PreAngel, one of her early investors commented that Jing is a marketing genius. She has been able to leverage many top of the world resources in Hollywood to create a great market for her company. At the same time, being non-technical also made it difficult for her to figure out the technology elements. She didn’t have good tech or manufacturing partners in the beginning, but that didn’t stop her.

“I was up at 5am every day to visit every factory in Dongguan and Shenzhen, and it really took me a while to know the supply chain inside out.”

At the same time, she was selling her vision to developers and engineers who had no idea how jewelry works. Her engineers didn’t anyone what they were working on because people would probably go, “Are you kidding? You’re designing a bracelet?” But when the product finally took shape, the engineers’ girlfriends or wives loved it.

Speaking of her experience with raising funds as a young woman, Jing admitted that it wasn’t easy.

“To compete with guys, we have to be 5, even 10 times better than them to prove your vision and capability.”

There was once when she was introducing elemoon to a male investor, he casually told her that he would see if his wife and daughter would like it, and suggested that his daughter intern with Jing in the summer. “If I were a guy with the same project, investors definitely would have been talking terms with me already!” Jing joked.

This girl with black hair and red highlight is on fire. Her products will be on the shelf in a high-end celebrity buyer store in Hollywood this summer. Now you can put an beautiful and smart jewelry piece on your Christmas wish list!

Originally published at www.iamsogal.com.