And so, after 50 days of patience, persistence and promotion, my crowdfunding campaign has ended – although it will still be live for the next week, due to Indiegogo’s option to allow successful campaigns to remain live, so feel free to have a look, if you like!
It has achieved five pounds over the £500 target, would you believe? I am pretty elated by this, and also relieved that all efforts promoting the campaign have been rewarded.
I am very grateful to everyone who supported my crowdfunding campaign, and feedback towards the overall project – ‘Perfume as Practice’ – has been extremely positive and exemplified the crowdfunding achieving its target. Thank you so much, everyone! I can now think about how exactly I will spend the money, and how that money will enable my goals to reach fruition.
The only negative comments I have received centre around the project being over-ambitious. But then what artist isn’t over-ambitious?! Indeed, the comments raised failed to address the fact that the 100 perfumes I plan to make will contain a fair bit of experimentation, research, exploration and alchemy – they are essentially portraits and will be designed for artistic purposes only. I think the assumption was that I wanted to create 100 bespoke and branded perfumes of saleable and consumable quality. Which isn’t the case and in fact I wish to offer some kind of alternative to that.
So, was my crowdfunding a success? Well, yes I think it was. Hindsight, however, would suggest that a six-week crowdfunding campaign was too long. Four weeks would have sufficed as I don’t think I reached any more people during the final two weeks, and by then fatigue had set in. Crowdfunding can be quite a consuming beast, and now that it is over, I feel a little liberated and able to think about other stuff. This is just as well, as I am showing work at Wadsley Arts Festival this weekend and organising an exhibition at Exchange Place Studios the following weekend to coincide with Castlegate Festival. So I have plenty to think about!
