The Best UK Kickstarter projects (and the worst)

Financial crowdsourcing website Kickstarter has finally launched in the UK, giving us Brits the chance to invest our hard-earned cash in weird and wonderful projects that may or may not get off the ground. It can be something of a minefield finding the right project amongst a whole host of dodgy ideas and daft inventions, so we’ve picked out a few of the best to help you get started.

On our quest, we also spotted some absolute monstrosities, and felt we had to share them with you too. People’s take on Kickstarter varies immensely. Some see it as a simple retail transaction, give money get stuff; while others view the projects like charities, to which they are donating in hope of helping.

The sensible way to look at them is as businesses looking for investment in order to make money, and so are open to the full force of our critical gaze. Naturally we’ll be happy to review any of these projects once they go on sale if the companies behind them want to prove us wrong. Don’t feel too bad for any of the projects we’ve highlighted here – after all, any coverage is good coverage, right?

BEST: BEERLAB

At the risk of sounding like an alcoholic journalist cliche, we love a good pint here at Expert Reviews, with at least one card-carrying CAMRA member on staff. However, much as we love both ale and building things, we’ve never quite got up the gumption to brew our own.

That’s where Beerlab comes in. It promises to provide a complete open source guide to brewing, with recipes, methods and step-by-step guides to building fermenters, kegs and other essential brewing kit to get you started.

Open source brewing: free, as in beer.

With a funding goal of £23,000, the project is asking a lot, but you’ll be funding a full year’s research into the fine art of beermaking. And, presumably, drinking.

WORST: DADA UNDERWEAR
We aren’t sure that underwear needed to be made interesting, but clearly DaDa Underwear can see a gap in the market we can’t. It promises to use “art, bamboo, recycled paper and empowerment” to shake up the “rather bland luxury underwear market”. We’re prepared to run with the idea, although hopefully without any intimate chafing from all that bamboo.

Unfortunately, DaDa seems to have confused the word “interesting” with “hipster 1950’s throwback” – meaning all their cuts and fabric patterns either look bland or outdated. Pastel colours, stripes and spots might look great on a beach umbrella, but they’re not what most of us want from our boxer shorts. We’re not convinced that the world of designer pants is going to be challenged by a pair of pink and white running shots.

Marcel Duchamp would not approve

We do admire DaDa’s commitment to ethical labour, organic fabrics and recycled packaging, but at £18 a pair, our idea of style is more about understated simplicity than pastel blue polka dots.

BEST: FIST OF AWESOME

Even before you start reading the Kickstarter pitch for The Fist of Awesome, the fantastic lead image and accompanying caption could be enough to sell you on it right away.

All games that don’t involve bear punching are now ruined

The “time-travelling-lumberjack-‘em-up” sees lead character Tim Burr with, quite literally, a problem on his hand(s). His hand has become self-aware after his house burnt down, referring to itself as the “Fist of Awesome”. To make matters even worse, bears have taken over the Earth, so it’s up to Tim and his fist to save the day.

It’s a ludicrous set-up, but we just love its retro pixelated art style and witty humour. And we get to punch a bear in the face! At the time of writing it had only raised £1673 of its £5000 goal needed to help finish the game, but with 25 days to go, we really hope it gets funded. We all agree that our iOS and Android devices would be sorely lacking in bear-punching apps without it.

WORST: THE INDIVIDUALITY PR♥TEST

The slogan of the The Individuality PR♥TEST
is “Get Your Revenge on the World by Being Better than it”. Yes, really. The company is also based in Brighton – where else would a bunch of capitalism-hating, ecro-warrior hippie types band together to form a collective aimed at punishing big business and getting back at The Man? They want to “sneak under the corporate mainstream” in order to protest against the “samey, boring high street things being spoon-fed to us”, imploring its customers to “give in to the potential of diversity and see how far we can take development”.

Superseding the individuality paradigm in Brighton

And how does it wish to do this? By printing 200 T-shirts, each with a different design. That’s right. T-shirts. We made individual T-shirts once. By using string and a bucket of dye, and we certainly didn’t get funding first. It might be time to pass along the peace pipe guys…

BEST: PICADE

The Picade is a minature work of genius that repurposes a Raspberry Pi mini computer into a tiny arcade cabinet.

quite possibly the best way to relive childhood memories, now the Crystal Maze theme park has closed

Comprised of a kit that includes a frame, screen, speakers, arcade stick and buttons, the Picade combines two of our great loves – building things and gaming – into one glorious weekend project. Once you’ve loaded on your (legally obtained and certainly not downloaded from the internet) emulators and ROMs, you’ve got your very own pint-sized arcade cabinet.

The designer, based in Sheffield, reached his £32,000 Kickstarter goal way ahead of time and (at the time of writing) is currently sitting on £59,000 of investment with 13 days remaining. With kits expected to cost around £120, we’re giving serious thoughts to picking one of these up.

WORST: SPINEE

We’re actually quite taken with this headphone cable management spinner, which should let us start listening to our rapidly growing collection of chiptune remix albums (it’s for speaker testing, honest) without having to spend ten minutes untangling the wires first. Unfortunately we can’t give it our seal of approval as the designer is under the laughable misconception that people should be encouraged to use Apple’s bundled Earpod headphones.

So near, yet oh so far…

It’s bad enough that Apple customers care so little about music that they stick with the bundled earphones, which are leakier than a sieve and make earplugs practically a requirement for venturing onto public transport, but at least we were safe in the knowledge that they weren’t immune from the problem of tangled cables. If they all bought one of these, the resulting smugness could be enough to bring about the apocalypse. Basically, investment = the end of the world. You know what to do.

BEST: NIFTY MINIDRIVE

From Apple hate to Apple genius – the Nifty Minidrive is the best way to add extra storage to a MacBook Air or MacBook Pro yet. With SSDs having much smaller capacities than mechanical hard disks, it can be difficult to fit all your music, video and games on one without having to do some shuffling, but you can’t slot in a standard SD card without it jutting out the side of the laptop.

So simple, we can’t believe Apple doesn’t do it already

Enter Nifty, the tiny MicroSD card holder that fits perfectly flush with a MacBook, letting you add up to 64GB of extra storage without having to worry about removing, breaking or losing it. Better yet, you can swap out memory cards on the fly in case you want one for music and another for video, or are working on a large project but don’t want to leave your laptop with your colleagues.

The Nifty Minidrive secured an amazing $384,000 across its Kickstarter campaign – pretty impressive, considering its Manchester-based creator was only after £11,000. Watch out for this one when it goes on general sale.

WORST: The UK T-Shirt Project!

Clearly we missed the memo and it turns out the saviour of the world’s economic crisis is solely in the hands of T-shirt printers, as this is the second shirt-related Kickstarter to make our list. The creator of this hair-brained project has obviously watched Inception one too many times, and is now stuck in a dream within a dream where he thinks the general public would want to buy a T-Shirt with his personal funding goals emblazoned across it.

How could you not want one? Oh, that’s right – it’s crap.

We’re pretty sure the whole thing is a big joke – just watch the comically amateurish video and listen to the bumbling commentary. Is he drunk? (And will the final designs really use the Comic Sans font?) but the sad thing is there’s actually potential beneath the awful pitch. Let customers design their own shirt, choosing the project title, funding amount and backers, rather than some arbitrary numbers for a (almost certainly unsuccessful) project. We’ll even give up our future royalty claims if the creator wants to adapt his concept, because we’re just that nice.

BEST: OSTRICH PILLOW
It was a tough call working out which category best described the Ostrich pillow, but in the end, how can you not love something that’s designed to help you nap? Yes, you’ll look a tad silly slipping it over your head and tucking your hands into the pouches, but you’re then ready for a power nap, just like a real ostrich.

Bringing new meaning to the term “duck and cover”

Only here you’re not hiding your head in the sand ignoring the world’s problems, but snoozing on a soft bed of bliss to help improve your productivity, which is a much more preferable place to catch a quick power-nap if you ask us. The London-based project surpassed its $70,000 goal, reaching $195,000 by the end of its 30-day Kickstarter run. We’re already drafting the petition to get a crate of these delivered to the office – for the increased productivity benefits, naturally.

WORST: PROJECTEO – the tiny instagram projector

This hopelessly pretentious hipster-bait has somehow already earned its $18,000 Kickstarter goal, along with a further $10,000 with which to bring the tiny projector designed for your instagram photos to life. Project creator Benjamin Redford is clearly no fool, having chosen to list Projecteo in dollars rather than pounds to secure the all-important investment from Long Island layabouts and loft-dwelling New Yorkers.

Yes, it really is that small and yes, it really is that pretentious

Using single frames of 35mm film and projecting images up a massive two feet away, each Projecteo projector wheel can show off up to nine of your overly saturated, effects-heavy photos of the sun filtering through trees, close-ups of burgers you bought from that pop-up restaurant you heard about through Twitter, or your cat in delightfully ironic poses.

We’re secretly hoping this is a fake project, with the names of buyers being passed on to the Army – who will be in readiness to reinstate national service.