Beacon & Lively graduates from The Refinery CT and wins the Angel Investor Forum award.

Last week marked Beacon & Lively’s graduation night from The Refinery CT Accelerator program.  The Refinery is a 12-week program focused on scaling women-led businesses.  The program concluded with a pitch night, where Beacon & Lively won the Angel Investor Forum award. 

We're honored to be part of the The Refinery.

The Refinery Accelerator was a place for Beacon & Lively to validate our product strengths and to learn from our customers; women who run businesses, manage families, volunteer in their communities and maintain a social life.  These are women who remember a time when their cell phone wasn’t a permanent tech fixture in their lives.  A stylish accessory like the Beacon bracelet helps them stay in the moment and limits their need to reach for their phone.  

Beacon & Lively is a company led by women, with our first product created for women, so The Refinery was a perfect fit.

As the Apple Watch enters the market, we see a shift in wearable tech from early adopters to general consumers.  We see consumers wanting more style and simplicity in their "wearable technology".  Embraced by women with a strong work ethic and a deep understanding of entrepreneurship, Beacon & Lively was able to expand our investor network.   

The Beacon is a simple, stylish way to stay connected that looks like jewelry, not like tech.  Solving a problem for women.  

Beacon & Lively is grateful to have gone through The Refinery program, inspired by the group of women-led businesses and motivated to leverage the momentum of the Accelerator to bring our product to market.

Our Place in the Wearables World.

Apple is just weeks away from launching its official entry in to the wearable technology world. We thought it might be timely to reflect on what it means for Beacon & Lively. 

First, what’s our opinion on the Apple Watch?  We don’t know yet.

It is beautiful. But is it fashionable?  Apple thinks so. It’s obviously a technological achievement and it's the best looking smartwatch we have seen.  Pricing starts at $350 (up to $10,000!), and it’s jam-packed with features.  Apple CEO Tim Cook says he uses his watch to control Apple TV and says the list of features is “a mile long.” The obvious response is that it’s impressive…  but is that what people want? Is that what people want on their wrists?

At Beacon & Lively, we’ve dedicated ourselves to focusing on simplicity and fashion.  Our accessories have to be something you would want to wear, even if they didn’t have technology, and something that is discreet and single-minded in its functionality.  For example, we’ve always designed this as a piece that you’d rock even if the battery was dead. 

We applaud and admire Apple’s brand and efforts.  Their device is beautiful, smart and compelling. It’s also “version 1”. It will get sleeker, thinner, and even “smarter”.  Just as watches are worn with jewelry, we see wearables taking many forms for many different types of people. 

The Apple Watch gave us comfort in our resolve to make things simple. Our bracelet is jewelry first and technology second.  We consider technology simply as a mechanism for solving a pain, and not more than that. We are particularly sensitive to functionality-creep, confusing controls or overwhelming options. We, and we believe many of us, are getting exhausted with options and approach the technology in our products as a means to an end, not the end itself.

The pics from our photo shoot (below) say it all.  This is jewelry. It fits into your life.  And while it’s designed so that you won’t need to look at your wrist every 30 seconds… other people might.

Add your voice!

Hi everyone, this is your B&L update!

We recently made a trip to NYC where we met with angel investors, venture capital firms, jewelers and jewelry bloggers. We received really great feedback, especially on the design of the jewelry. Some of that progress has been posted in our tweets (some has not :-) ).  We have more trips and conversations being scheduled.

Last week we applied to the R/GA Accelerator program. This is a 3 month program in NYC that includes production, design and financial assistance to startup companies. Most companies get additional rounds of funding after the program. The timing and the support is perfect for Beacon & Lively.

Although R/GA is very exclusive and only accepts 10 companies into the program from around the world, there’s a way you can help us get noticed.

Follow or recommend us at: http://www.f6s.com/beaconlively

Adding your voice to our application will demonstrate our potential to R/GA!

Also, for those of you in the Philly area, we’ll be presenting at the Philly New technology Meetup this Wednesday.  Check it out and stop by!  http://www.meetup.com/Philly-New-Tech-Meetup/events/194891982/

Thanks again for all your support!

Taking this show on the road!

Fashion isn’t just for Philly! (Bet that hasn’t been written too many times.) We’re taking our Beacon up the road, to show off the future of wearable-fashion-tech in the Big Apple.  We’re meeting with potential investors and partners who can help us achieve our vision.  We’re also stopping by some boutiques, talking with bloggers, and demonstrating our smart bracelet to “street fashionistas”.

We’ll post some fun pictures in the days ahead, and hopefully some exciting news.

Closer to (our) home, if you’re in the Philly area over the next couple of weeks, we’ll be part of a couple of events…stop by and say hi!

August 14th at NextFab  – R/GA and Techstars will be visiting Philly to see Beacon & Lively and other local startups involved in the “Internet of Things”.

August 20th at Philly New Technology Meetup  – Beacon & Lively will be one of the spotlight presenters.  It’s our “IPO” (Initial Product Overview)!  Come out and support your favorite connected accessory startup!

Finally, we reached a mini-milestone this week: 1000 Likes on Facebook!  Thank you for your support and confidence.  We feel the love. It's super motivating for our entire team!

Dave | B&L

Our first demo day!

Big week for the Beacon & Lively team! We completed our fully functional prototype and gave our first product pitch. Both are significant milestones for our team and our bracelet!

The pitch involved over 20 people in our new work space (in Philly, of course!)  We talked about the team, the process, the product and the brand. People loved the concept of “Putting Technology in its Place”, and our Beacon was a big hit!

The best compliment we can hear is, “I would wear this even if it wasn’t connected to my phone”. EVERYTHING we do is about creating a stylish piece of jewely, that just happens to have “super powers”.

Over the weeks ahead, we’re taking this show on the road. More meetings, more demos, more momentum.

Stay tuned for more news!

Dave and the B&L Team

Life after Kickstarter for B&L

We’re cancelling our Kickstarter campaign today. Although we raised over $20K in just a couple weeks, we just didn’t reach enough people.  People don’t know about Beacon & Lively (yet), pure and simple. So like any good company, we’re adjusting our strategy based on lessons learned over the last couple of weeks.

First and foremost, there is a market for smart jewelry.  Ringly, fresh off an infusion of $1M in funding, launched their connected rings a week earlier than us and reportedly sold $100K in 24 hours. We’re the David to their Goliath.  No VC funding, no fancy PR machine.  Just a talented team of passionate people that have almost brought Beacon & Lively to life, mostly through the support of REALLY loyal and excited fans like you!

We believe that we are ready to launch Beacon & Lively and stake a claim in the wearable tech and jewelry markets. We have patents pending, a beautiful brand, and an initial product design that is fashionable and chic.  In short, we believe that we will succeed.

LESSONS LEARNED

So why has the Kickstarter not gone to plan?  Well here are our “lessons learned” and what we will be doing differently in the future:

• Press is critical- We always knew that PR would be crucial to our success, so we hired a prestigious PR firm out of NYC.  Unfortunately they just never made traction, and our project had 1000’s of views instead of 100,000’s of views. This was ultimately the biggest reason why we struggled. We’re currently evaluating new PR firms that more closely share our passion, goals and kickass spirit.

• Pre-orders vs. crowdfunding- Right away we knew that Kickstarter was going to be difficult for our customers. Many of our backers were confused. “What is a Kickstarter, anyway?” was a common comment we received. We added some explanations to our campaign, but for many people, the Kickstarter page was too confusing. Maybe if we offered the B&L Cuff made out of potato salad, we would have been successful? :-)  Going forward, we will look at alternative platforms for pre-funding that allow us to control the look, feel and simplicity for our backers.

NEXT STEPS

Although we are disappointed with our crowd funding results, not much has changed when it comes to our focus.  In fact, we recently sent out pictures of our new prototypes, and they look amazing (they are pictured at the top of this post)!

Going forward, our future is dependent on our ability to execute:

• Prototype feedback- We will have some really exciting announcements over the next couple of weeks as we reveal our fully functional prototypes! We’ll then “take them to the street” to get feedback on design, comfort, and functionality.  And yes…we know some of our Backers would like to be first to try them on!  :-)

• Find funding- This is already progressing.  We’re not worried, nor should you.  It’s important that we find sources of capital that share our vision and enthusiasm!

• Build backers- We’ll continue to get the word out over Facebook (almost 1000 likes) and Twitter (500 followers).  We’ll also start attending conferences to get our designs in front of people.  When people see our designs, we consistently get “wow, I would wear this even if it didn’t connect to my phone”.

STAY CONNECTED

As we draw our Kickstarter to a close, we invite all our Backers to follow our progress via Facebook and Twitter. We’ve also set up a “hidden” page on our Web site especially for you. We’ll move our regular communications and updates there.  Make sure you bookmark and follow this page.  Your comments and support have been amazingly helpful, and we hope they will continue!

http://www.beaconandlively.com/updates

Also, in recognition of your early support, when we re-launch our pre-order and sales efforts, we’ll honor your Kickstarter pricing. 

THANK YOU

Finally, THANK YOU for your passionate support.  We believe in our bracelet, our backers and our potential.

As one of our backers said, “I am so excited that to learn about this project!! I have been begging anyone and everyone I know to develop this very idea for the past year.” We agree and we are working really hard to bring the idea to life.

So “what is a Kickstarter anyway?”…we don’t know and we don’t care.  We’re focused on Beacon & Lively here and creating a bracelet that changes the way people think about wearable tech and jewelry.

WE BELIEVE THAT ...

Technology can be polite. 

Staying connected doesn’t have to be disruptive. 

A phone on the table is bad manners. 

A mobile device makes terrible company, unless you’re alone. 

And we believe that you’ll be seeing the B&L Cuff at a store near you soon.

More to come,

Dave, Veronica, Jordan, Brett, Pat, Anna, Joe, Phil and Andrew