Personal projects

Loup Kids Big style for little people.

The time I launched a (box delivery) kids clothing line and did a kickstarter campaign to expand the line. You can check it out here.

I sewed all the sample pants. Silk screened the tshirts. This is what got me interested in crowdfunding. I spend 6 months learning how to launch a campaign. I did not raise the goal since Kickstarter is a platform for children's items. Childrens books focused on women and tech do well. I raised a bit of funding from my personal community but many of them did not have kids. Also this was a high end children's line, I realized in retrospect that is a very small market. It is difficult to produce affordable clothing in the US, which was my initial plan. Parents don't want to spend more than $35 for leggings. I needed to focus on finding an over-seas manufacturer instead of a US one. It's very difficult to make a profit on fashion with US manufacturing.

Artsy An art platform promoting female artists + writers.

My partner and I launched the original Artsy back in 1999. It's still up here.  We created the first platform showcasing women artists and writers. We experimented with selling art online as well.  In 1999, with out any advertising, this was way before social media was invented, we grew our individual visitors to 60,000 per month. I interviewed Yoko Ono, De La Soul, Judy Chicago, Nancy Spero. We created a large community focused on promoting women in the art world. Since women were always considered "Artsy" and hardly ever regarded as "Masters." We were often the subject of paintings but few received the same recognition as the men. We even put out a print magazine. This was our college thesis project, funded by the UMass Amherst. After graduation we continued to grow the project. We stopped in 2001 since the art world went on hiatus and budgets were cut. The new Artsy.net took our original idea and removed the female angle, and focused more on selling the art work online.