The main creator of the APP has two founders, one is the 25-year-old star second generation Wang Lingchen, the English name Oscar, he is better known in China as the son of actor Zhang Aijia; the other founder Zhang Zhuonan (Brandon), with singer Lin Junjie co-founded a tide brand.
Not long ago, a design APP "MainDesign" received attention on Weibo. As the exclusive cooperation app platform of the "2015 One Night Care for Autistic Children" campaign initiated by Zhou Xun Studio, the "Main Creator" customized T-shirts printed with autistic children's works for the stars participating in the charity sale.
For Oscar, which has its own graphic design company in the United States, it is far more interesting to do business with creativity and design than to engage in stardom. When recruiting for the design company, he interviewed many young people and thought their designs were great, but found that there was no space or platform for everyone to share.
"There are too many cattle people's works in China that are worth sharing", based on this original intention, Oscar began to develop this creative social software after returning to China, yes, he not only wanted to carry forward the creative design, but also used social networking to improve it. Oscar positioned the creator as an open platform for users to "stay and have fun" to do design, while sharing their graphic design, photography, and illustration works.
Talent that should not be overlooked
The original intention of the creator APP was to give debut designers the opportunity to show their works. In the end, there are three groups of target users: celebrities, designers, and young users who are mainly college students.
The role of these three kinds of people on the platform is different: celebrities and celebrities in various fields who are stationed in various fields play a fan effect to attract traffic, and improve the spread and influence of products by sharing their own creativity and design concepts with fans; designers, especially new designers, can upload their designs to the platform to display, accumulate popularity and improve popularity by releasing works on the platform, and can also directly sell customization on the platform; and for ordinary users, they can better absorb creative inspiration through replica work. Increase fun, increase user activity and stickiness.
The designer's creative design is the guarantee of texture on the platform. The public takes inspiration from the designer's work, customizes its own T-shirt, sweatshirt or long sleeve through its own DIY approach, and can choose to become its fan and follow it for a long time. In cooperation with the factory, printing on thousands of black and white T-shirts prepared through printing equipment, "as long as it is a printable product, we will strive to restore the original appearance of the design." One month after going online, the sales of T-shirts on the platform were 300 to 400 pieces. Oscar said that in the future, the customized category will also be extended, and it will be extended to mobile phone cases, pillow cases and cups.
"Too many talented people in China are being ignored. I hope to let everyone see that Chinese designers are very good. "By connecting WeChat, Weibo, Facebook, Instagram and another well-known picture social software, tumblr, the works on the creator are not stuck but can be simultaneously launched to other social platforms and spread outward." Oscar revealed that in the future, it will also attract more people to participate in the way of competition cooperation.
Playing with Creative Social
Custom T-shirts in the mobile Internet era has long been nothing new, looking at the market such as creation, orimuse, SnapteeTeam and other custom T-shirt APP can be found, these products generally have a simple interface, provide as many elements and SKUs as possible, or upload pictures by users themselves. Earlier, UNIQLO also launched a custom T-shirt APP called UTme, allowing users to DIY their own T-Shirt design. Its operation process is like this: first let the user draw a pattern, add text or photos, and change the picture by shaking the phone to get the effect of scattering or dotting. Once the user's design is shared, it enters Uniqlo's official gallery and becomes its copyright.
"We want to play with customization. The Chinese market needs to promote customized and personalized things. Oscar believes that the entire environment has been growing in this direction, and the market will increasingly need customized and personalized promotion platforms.
In the product logic of the main creator, creativity and design itself are more important than "customization", "other products also have custom T-shirts, but they are not strengthened to the social part." Oscar believes that for the creator, the T-shirt is only a "bonus" (secondary function), its real meaning is to provide a platform to do their own design, while getting the inspiration of others, "the future product is not the most important." It was the first platform in China to socialize with creativity. ”
Oscar, who came from a design background, for the product page aesthetic requirements to cause users to scream experience, before going online he did repeated product iterations, concise, beautiful, smooth, is the founding team for the product visual experience requirements. The main creative interface uses simple filter functions, plus many built-in functions such as text and materials, which enable many different versions of the same idea to be fissioned. The user clicks into the favorite picture interface, and only two functional options will appear below the picture: browse the picture and buy a T-shirt. At the top right of the interface are the functions of "fork" and "share".
For a "social" software, the most important thing is to find the motivation of users to socialize, at this point, what the creator does is to seize the "creativity", "design", "inspiration" for the urban group's desire to be innovative psychology attraction. The "fork" function can be seen as the highlight of the main app that distinguishes it from other customized APPS. In order to make the picture social more playable. Users can share their design ideas with one click through a simple "Remix" button, while other users can use them as materials and re-create on this basis. This way of sharing ideas is called "creative social" by Oscar.
Brand collaboration opens up malleability
As a half-insider, Oscar has a lot of star resources on his hands; because many of the team members have experience in the fashion industry, including partner Brandon, they have accumulated a lot of brand resources. The superposition of resources at both ends makes the product a lot more malleable for designers and users who like creativity.
For the platform, contact with brands and activities can be targeted to expand ideas, such as when Zhou Xun launched the OneNight public welfare activity, after discussing with Zhou Xun, Oscar decided to try to promote the charity sale on the platform by printing the paintings of autistic children on T-shirts. "OneNight-Zhou Xun Studio" was then used as a registered account to publish elements of children's works.
In addition to cooperation with such activities, most of the external cooperation is in the form of commercial engagement. Open the main creator APP, the first thing that appears is a series of picture streams, in which in addition to the picture content of the theme activity, there will also be some content released by the brand. By regularly holding design competitions on the platform, releasing design tasks, offline Pop-Up stores and exhibition displays, etc., we cooperate with the tide brand to give designers and creative talents on the platform a direct bridge to receive brand resources. Behind the social network, the business structure that supports it is more likely to be the malleability of cooperation with brands.
"Brands are always going to have, just find the right ones. Hope to find a brand that agrees with us. Recently, the collaboration between the creator and the famous American headphone brand Beats #Beats Family# to speak for the city is an attempt to find each other in the spirit of the brand. Some time ago Beats Electronics was acquired by Apple for more than $3 billion, in order to promote the story of the brand's founder American rapper Dr. Dre's biographical films, they also launched a "replica" template on the main creator, attracting hipsters to create secondary works, and with the platform as the center, through external channels to radiate.
For Oscar, the amount of brand resources is not what he is most worried about, finding the brand resources for the taste is more critical, and the product tonality will have a direct impact, and the non-conformity to the tonality to the product will lead to the loss of users.