“The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.”
This quote from Nelson Mandela is one of many inspirational statements featured on postcards as part of a Kickstarter Campaign started by a current student and two alumni of Wilfrid Laurier University. The Kickstarter is “Wise Words- Inspiration Through Design.”
Jordan Bishop, Michael Gagliano and Josh Nezon are the creators of Wise Words, and came up with the idea to create postcards which showcase 40 inspirational leaders from the past and present.
“We’ve categorized them into three different groups, thinkers, inventors and builders because we thought…those specific groups had an exceptionally large impact on the world,” Bishop explained.
Kickstarter, according to Bishop, is a crowd-funded platform website that allows creative people to launch new businesses. Since being on the site for three-and-a-half weeks, their product has raised $6,000, surpassing their original goal of $5,000. They have now extended their goal to $10,000, but will only be raising money on the site until Dec. 5 when the Kickstarter is over.
“We wanted to make something cool to get people excited about and get value from,” Bishop said of their reasons for starting the venture. “After that, we know that it’s a smart thing we can transition out of creating a cool product and turning it into a business.”
“It stemmed because myself and the two guys that I’m working with, Michael and Josh, all have something that we’re looking for, you know a product that we were looking for that we couldn’t find on the market that was a well-designed portrait of people that inspired us,” Bishop continued.
Bishop, Gagliano and Nezon started researching inspirational people who they thought should be put onto their postcards. They turned to their friends and family, and used social media sites such as Facebook to compile the names of people they thought were the most inspirational.
However, Bishop explained that they did not want the list to be full of the most obvious names in history. They wanted to dig deeper and discover inspirational people who have been overlooked in history because, as Bishop said, they wanted the postcards to function as a learning tool as well. As such, one of the ways Bishop sees the product being used is by teachers to hang on classroom walls.
One of the people Bishop highlighted as being ‘overlooked’ in history was Nikola Tesla, the man behind the brains of Thomas Edison
Bishop continued, “You know Thomas Edison was someone who received a lot of praise for what he has done. But if you dig a little deeper, you’ll find that Thomas was just the person who executed onNikola Tesla’s ingenious ideas. So we’ve decided to put in Tesla, because he was the one who was really the science and thought leader behind it all, whereas Edison was the guy that commercialized it.”
According to Bishop, they decided to use Kickstarter as their platform due to the exposure it grants them.
Now that the project has backers from Israel, Germany, the United States and Canada, Bishop, Gagliano and Nezon are looking at success and a new business.
As of December 5 they will be selling postcards on their website, thecraftingshop.com.