Springleap’s own Eran Eyal was one of the judges at the Fashion Kapitol in Joburg.

Here’s the article that was posted on the Official Website of Johannesburg:

Working to the brief of a creative design around the South African flag and football, designers produced some vibrant work.

IT was all flags, footballs, design and big prizes at the Fashion Kapitol in the Joburg CBD on Friday, 28 May. Brand South Africa’s Fashion Funk competition had a winner, and she was one happy person.

Frances Miller was chosen from 15 finalists who were in turn chosen from 160 entrants countrywide. She couldn’t stop smiling once the announcement had been made: “It feels so good. It feels fantastic, mind-blowing, after all the hard work.”

Miller is from Cape Town and is studying at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology. Her greatest inspiration, she says, is her family, followed by her fellow students and lecturers.

Her design was a colourful dress with gathered layers of the South Africa flag. The bodice consisted of flag colours plaited and woven together.

The dress was overlaid with large Ndebele-like rings, echoed in rings around the ankles. A hood, made of felt strips, had a long string of pom-poms coming off it, falling to the hips, interspersed with small black and white footballs.

“The pom-poms around the hood are all the colours of our flag representing what our country stands for and where we come from,” said Miller.

The ensemble was finished off with beaded jewellery on the model’s wrists, arms, neck and forehead. Fringed fabric around the ankles and arms was symbolic of “animal fur which is worn during traditional African dances“.

“My design is fun, exciting, and bursting with rich colours and textures – a true fashion description of what the World Cup is going to be for this country and all our visitors,” she said.

The other 14 finalists were: Marné Nelson, Charné Gouws, Thembi Sibeko, Boikanyo Kgwete, Anandie Klaasen, Chanel Korff, Cinani Nhlapo, Kutloano Molokomme, Charlene Oosthuizen, Lethabo Nyathi, Rene Burger, Charmian Booyens, Bianca Thomas and Lauren van Zyl.

Miller added: “This design is inspired by our beautiful country and the people who live here. I have used certain materials, textures, colours and patterns to express our country’s culture. I also included small details that are unique to South Africa, like the small wire animals and footballs attached to the accessories and the colourful beading and patterns.”

Judges
The judges were Craig Jacobs, Eran Eyal, Malcolm Klûk, Nonhle Thema and Sandy Rogers.

Jacobs, the creative director of Fundudzi, said of the design: “It was quite difficult to choose the winner but in the end we went back to the brief which was a creative design around the South African flag, and football. Frances took things imminently South African and incorporated them in a clever way, with shards of flags gathered into the dress.”

The finalists clearly had fun – the designs sparkled with colours of the flag, replica footballs in skirts, tops and bags, with vuvuzelas weaving their way around the models’ heads or necks or twisted into their hair, with tall football socks. Necklaces and bracelets in flag-colour beads filled their arms and necks.

The prize was R10 000 for the winner and a further R10 000 for the school at which the winner was studying. Miller and the two runners-up will also get a double page spread in Cosmopolitan magazine, and Miller received R20 000 in fashion vouchers from Edgars, one of the sponsors of the competition. Edgars also put up R40 000 for a student bursary.

The Fashion Kapitol is the heart of the fashion district, on the eastern edge of the CBD, and consists of 26 blocks of fashion-related industries. The Kapitol consists of 30 shops, offices, studios, a restaurant, a small square, a ramp, an amphitheatre and an arcade linking Pritchard and Market streets.

Rees Mann, the mover and shaker behind the Kapitol, said of Fashion Funk: “For us it is important that Brand South Africa has brought this event to the inner city, and to the Fashion Kapitol.”

Although the Kapitol had not officially been launched yet, the revival of the district had brought nearly R1-billion in investments into the area, he added. This had mostly been in the form of conversions of old office and manufacturing buildings to residential units, done by City Properties and Afhco.

Read the article here on the official website

Written by Lucille Davie
Tues, 01 June 2010.

Firstly a might big thank you to the guys over at Brainstorm Magazine! Thanks for the awesome feature!

Check out Eric and Eran in all their glory on pages 38 and 39 on this months issue (April 2010) of Brainstorm Magazine.

A multi-purpose online vehicle

Springleap.com does t-shirts. It does pretty good t-shirts. And it’s stimulating local talent while it’s at it.

Why, asks Springleap.com founder Eran Eyal, would someone invest R4 million in a T-shirt company? Well, they wouldn’t. Someone has invested R4 million in Springleap’s holding company, Fashion Evolution, though, and what they’ve invested in, says Eyal, is crowd-sourcing.

Crowd-sourcing is one of the new Web 2.0 concepts on the block, and big companies, with serious money, are doing it on a professional basis-Amazon.com, Unilever, and Cisco systems being notable examples.

On Springleap this takes the form, says Eyal, of thousands of artists, worldwide, contributing design ideas to the site. These are voted on, and every two weeks anew winner is announced, and t-shirts with that design are produced.

The designer gets R7 482.18 (R3 741.09 in cash and R3 741.09 in t-shirts), whatever sponsored prizes apply, R2 for every shirt sold and royalties if the design is used in the future.

Springleap gets an endless supply of good ideas. It also gets a vocal and interested community, contributing to quality control by voting on the designs they like.

Corporates also interact with the site, says Eyal: “Absa used us to crowd-source a design for the last Casual Day.” AMD has also made use of the site, finding it via the Industry standard Innovation 100 Awards, where Springleap placed second in the retail category in 2008.

Test-bed

According to Eyal, Springleap has been a test case for the creation of white-labelled software. Fashion Evolution is currently using the R4 million that it raised in it’s first round of funding (late last year) to redevelop the software. It then plans to go back to market to get another R50 to R100 million.

“We’re creating a web platform that will enable you to drag and drop crowd-sourcing, events, social networking, e-commerce-any functionality you need to create functional and interactive websites in less than 4 minutes with zero know-how, “says Eyal.

The cincher is in the crowd. As CEO and co-founder Eric Edelstein put it, in a statement released at the time the funding was raised: “Imagine a large company, such as a beverage company, creating a new name for a beer. Using our web-based platform, in a matter of weeks, not only can they have a fully-functioning, 100 percent branded crowd-sourcing, social network website centred around their offering, but using our methodology, they can also have a community of people wanting to get involved.”

The software platform will be available on a Software as a Service (SaaS) basis, and companies wanting more-like custom theme, or custom URL (www.you.com not www.you.springleap.com) will be able to pay a small fee ($10 per month, Eyal suggests) to obtain such.

“Our goal, within three to four years, is to have 30 to 50 million people in the community across 1.5 million networks,” says Eyal, who obviously isn’t shy about dreaming big. All of the networks will be trading and sourcing solutions using crowd-sourcing.

“We can create the platform for free in three to four minutes,” he adds. “If you want extras you’ll have to pay a small fee.

“We’ll be giving it [the platform] away for free and monetising it to millions of people via different value adds. For corporates, we can customise it within two to four weeks, including corporate logo, appropriate skin, corporate identity and so on for far less than the R1 million and 12 months it typically takes to develop a corporate site,” he says.

Once again, Eyal emphasises that the people are what makes the offering valuable. Having a platform is one thing, populating it is another.

Says Eyal: “We’ll be able to go to corporates and say we know what triggers communities (positive and negative) and we have a way for people to move ethically between communities, s we can give you 50 000 or 100 000 people, and manage that community for you and help you understand how to monetise that community and manage it yourselves.”

Eran says sites like Ning and Yola have taken the approach of ‘lets build and then monetise’, where Springleap has taken the approach of monetising first so it understand show it happens and can make it happen again.

Pone of the first sites to launch will be a charity site, “doing something for the greater good”, Eyal comments. The site will be available to any charity that wants to crowd-source, enabling people to give back without “having to go pack fish in Alaska”.

Newbies

For a two-year-old company, Fashion Evolution is aiming high. Eyal says the SaaS platform will be ready for launch by August, as well as the revamped site and another three or four brands powered by the platform later this year. He aims to have 15 to 20 internal brands live within the next three or four years, all on the platform, with a combined community of around one or two million people.

“the VC’s are loving it,” he states. “We’re saying ‘no’ at the moment until the software is ready and the company is more highly valued than the current R50 million.” Nice position to be in, really.

Recently I had the great pleasure of attending the Silicon Cape Event held at the Woodstock Biscuit Mill in Cape Town.

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What an EXEMPLARY event drawing over 400 of the most influential people in the Internet, developing, eCommerce, VC and supporting industries.

Of course Springleap.com attended and I got a fantastic opportunity to chime in and voice my opinion about the Silicon Cape Initiative and why Springleap.com are avid and firm supporters of all such events.

Springleap.com featured in the social media March issue of Entrepreneur Magazine’s Small Capital (A practical guide for business owners). The social media issue includes a case study of Springleap, co-founders and co-owners Eran Eyal and Eric Edelstein gives insight into building online communities, crowdsourcing, and social media.

The Springleap case study delves into past achievements as well as future plans the entrepreneurs have.

Read full Springleap case study below:

Small Capital
Issue fourteen March 2010

A practical guide for business owners – The Social Media Issue

CASE STUDY: Springleap

To Eran Eyal and his partner Eric Edelstein, the sole purpose of their Springleap.com website is to enable the crowd.

“Our core business and intellectual property is building online communities and harnessing their power. We are all about crowdsourcing; t-shirts are how we chose to express it.”

The t-shirt business

The t-shirt side of Springleap.com’s business is deceptively simple. Every two weeks the Springleap.com community votes for their favourite t-shirt designs, submitted by other members of the community. The creator of the winning design wins R7 482, 18- half in t-shirts baring the designer’s name. T-shirts with the winning designs are printed and sold via the Springleap.com website, the Springleap store in Sea Point, Cape Town, and via preferred reseller partners such as Big Blue, Rockabilly, Idols, SKA, Lover and others. The artist also earns royalties on every t-shirt sold.

Apart from voting, subscribers to the Springleap.com website can browse through previous designs and buy t-shirts8 whenever they like. 8Springleap t-shirts are manufactured from high-quality South African cotton and delivered to their fans’ doorsteps free of charge.

The real business
As Eran and Eric point out, Springleap.com’s purpose is to empower its community and to keep the members coming back for more.

On the one hand, it is hugely empowering environment for artists. “They submit their designs and receive feedback not only from so-called ordinary people, but also from other artists,” says Eran. “In the two years of the website’s existence, we have seen numerous instances of artists collaborating, mentoring each other and commenting on each other’s work.”

On the other hand, Springleap.com is a hive of activity for all members. They can blog, comment, converse with other Springleap.com users, submit creations, win all sorts of prizes, photograph people wearing Springleap clothing and submit those pictures – the list is virtually endless. The trick, as Eran points out, is to keep the community busy and give then new and interesting reasons to visit the site.

One of Springleap.com’s success stories is the daily special. Every day at 12:00 noon, they announce a special offer on a specific (t-shirt( on their Twitter account (@Springleaping). With discounts ranging from 5% to 70%, buyers have only 24 hours to submit their orders. It is not surprising that the daily special is the cornerstone of their marketing strategy. “That is where our marketing budget is. To date, we have not spent a cent on advertising.”

Understanding that community building, and not t-shirts, is the heart of their business, has allowed Eric and Eran to diversify.
Springleap.com now works its crowdsourcing magic for all kinds of design projects for corporate clients in a variety of industries. In fact, this is the real money-spinner for the business. In 2008, Springleap.com was named the second most innovative company in the retail sector in the world, and in 2009 won the Jump.co.za *e-commerce award for best online clothing and accessories store.

Eran explains: “In 2010 we will relaunch Springleap.com and introduce a few other new brands. Even more exciting is that w will launch the platform as SAAS (Software as a Service). This means that anyone will be able to have their own free ‘Springleap-like’ crowdsourcing e-commerce social media community site in a matter of minutes, by simply dragging and dropping the elements into place. We will also have more advanced features for purchase as well as full-blown corporate models.”

The secrets behind Springleap’s success

1. Time and effort. Social media, community building and crowdsourcing have been Eric and Eran’s way of life for a decade. “We understand the platforms and how traffic is generated, directed and converted.”

2. Perseverance and very hard work. From developing the website to coming to grips with textile production, postage and delivery, the birth of Springleap.com was anything but painless. “All I can say is that sharks patrol these waters!” comments Eran.

3. Business common sense. Eran believes that three things make a business work: always be nice, make calls and network, and deliver what you promise.

4. A sixth sense. “In this business, you need a feel for what will work, much like a surfer senses a good wave.”

The Springleap.com team would like to thank Small Capital

For more information on crowdsourcing watch videos below

Latest news is that Eran Eyal, co-founder of Springleap was interviewed on local South African radio station GHFM by DJ JP Naude yesterday!

He spoke about the development of crowdsourcing and how Springleap fits into the bigger picture. Way-to-go Eran!

A Podcast will be available here soon!