The Hypercycle social network was first launched on December 19, 2014. It is truly the labor of my love. Hypercycle is a social marketplace for custom product design. It is a fun, easy way to create t-shirts and more. Hypercycle users can upload their art, share their designs with their friends, and open their own storefronts to sell their creations to the world.
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| Artwork by ELGAMI | Model: Amarna Miller (https://www.instagram.com/amarnamiller/) |
Hypercycle's vision is to democratize design the world over by connecting everyone with makers.
Back in the day, c. 2001-02, having a dynamic blog with posts that could be generated from a simple GUI blew most people's minds. I make no exaggeration when I say that as a twelve year old I literally had the coolest website within a 5 mile radius. So what problem did Content Management Systems ultimately solve? Obviously, millions of people love to write, but at the time they lacked a medium with which to share their ideas effectively on the web without having to learn all sorts of boring and Byzantine code. Then came WordPress. Why should delivering a mobile storefront for personalized goods be any different? According to MIT's Smart Customization Group, mass customization will be a $37.5B industry by 2020 in the US alone, with 15% of clothing purchased by Americans being customized (Bain & Company, 2016); applying this same logic to worldwide B2C e-commerce apparel sales, a few crude assumptions and a rough estimate later, suggests a total market size of $294B (Statista, 2016).
It doesn't take a giant factory to offer this kind of platform. Firms with as few as 10 employees are capable of providing customization services for both common and niche products alike, such as swimwear (http://www.postcardswimwear.com/) or racing drone skins (http://www.droneskinz.com), but often lack the technological means to deliver the product creation portion of their fulfillment service to their customers, i.e. their front-end application. This is why we created the Hypercycle social network, to help manufacturers of customized goods build up and leverage their own communities of artists, designers, and promoters to grow their brand. By constrast, brands that lack manufacturing capacity themselves can tap into various order fulfillment APIs, such as Printful's Orders API (https://www.theprintful.com/docs/orders) to sell customizable products without having to own a printer or understand the technical details of the order fulfillment process.
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| Why stop at clothing? Hypercycle Supercar designed by Parker Langlois |
We at Hypercycle believe that everyone should be able to have their say when it comes to designing the products they love. So why stop at clothing? Currently, Hypercycle connects designers of original art with producers of all-over sublimation print and screen-printed apparel, including yoga pants, t-shirts, racing drone skins, sweatshirts, and more. For the less artistically inclined, our users are able to leverage simple procedural algorithms to create wild and whacky pieces of art with just a swipe and a tap. I can only imagine what we come up with next.
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Bain & Company. 2013. Making it personal: Rules for success in product customization. http://www.bain.com/Images/BAIN_BRIEF_Making_it_personal.pdf
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Statista. 2016. Statistics and Facts about Global E-Commerce. http://www.statista.com/topics/871/online-shopping/
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| Capri Leggings designed in Hypercycle™. Model: Kayla DeLancey (https://www.instagram.com/kayladelancey/), photographed by Bryon Adkins (https://www.instagram.com/badkinsmedia/) |
- Martin Erlic (CEO) - Self-taught Complexity theorist. Software dev. Algorithmic artist. Mad scientist. Visionary.
- Jure Erlic (COO) - Business Development. Mega sales guy. VR fanatic. Dreamer. Empire Builder
- Parker Langlois (VP Design) - Design-obssessed product architect. Supercar enthusiast. Designs yachts for a living (no hype).
Interested partners may license Hypercycle's social marketplace technology to enhance their own community's retail ecosystem and product offerings. Features include:
- Social Network, i.e. likes, comments, followers, messaging
- Design custom products, i.e. T-shirts, Leggings, Skirts, etc.
- Ability to add to custom products quickly
- Customizable user profiles
- Push notifications
- Search & explore (Recommendation engine and search filtering for products & designers)
- Users can earn a commision by designing products and sharing them
- All purchase orders are stored in an organized customer database for manual order fulfillment
- Additionally, orders can be connected to Printful (https://www.theprintful.com/) to automatically fulfill orders from a specified range of products with no manual work required, i.e. for storefront owners who do not have their own manufacturing printers/processes.
- Some customers choose to sell "digital skins", or collections of purchasable patterns instead of supplying real products. This is another great revenue stream that does not require a manufacturing process.
- Available platforms: Web, Android
- Platforms coming soon: iOS (All current licensees are eligible for a free iOS app and updates upon release).
- Lifetime core software updates and access to new platforms upon release (Android VR, React VR, Carmel, etc.).
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| Instagram: @elgamiapp |
- Elgami - Custom Clothing — Our own flapship application for demonstrating the Android app platform. Users can generate their own patterns, upload art or transfer photos to their favorite pair of leggings, crop tops and more.
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| Instagram: @droneskinz |
- DroneSkinz® — An Android application for custom user-generated racing drone skins.