These five Kickstarter projects range from vulgar to outrageous to ridiculous, but they were all successfully funded through the crowdfunding website Kickstarter.
World’s Most Super-Amazing 100% Awesome Cat Calendar
The title pretty much says it all.
Cats are supremely popular on the Internet, and one Milwaukee woman’s goal to dress cats up as magical creatures was supremely successful on Kickstarter. She asked for $3,500 and received a whopping $25,183 to produce a calendar with cats dressed as unicorns, werewolves, and other kinds of fantasy beasts. The project was successfully funded last April.
Titanoboa
It sounds like something from a B-movie, but it actually happened: A man from British Columbia received $10,560 on Kickstarter to build a giant mechanical snake to use at the Burning Man music festival. There’s even video of the 5.5-metre contraption “slithering” through a swarm of roller-skaters in the desert.
Period Panties
The Period Panties project demolished its $10,000 goal in well under 28 days earlier this year, racking up a total of $404,763 to produce a line of women’s underwear covered in radical art and period puns. The panties are meant to be worn while a woman menstruates, and were pitched as an alternative to the “ratty or granny pair” women sometimes wear while on their periods, the site says. “Half the world menstruates, so why not have fun with it?” the Kickstarter page says. With designs featuring vulgar phrases and angry, amped-up cartoon versions of vampires, sharks, zombies and unicorns, Period Panties were a tremendous success.
Hands-free umbrella
Why hold your umbrella like a sucker when you can wear it on your head and look like a comic book villain in the process?
A Boston-based inventor hit and slightly surpassed his $10,000 goal last year to build a backpack-mounted umbrella that folds out into a clear, protective dome over the wearer’s head. Its designer says he created it to solve the “huge unmet need of viable hands-free weather protection.
Potato salad
Earlier this week, Zack “Danger” Brown earned thousands of dollars more than his initial $10 Kickstarter ask to fund a potato salad. Brown’s potato salad was approaching $60,000 in pledges on Wednesday morning, all thanks to a viral Internet presence and a simple pitch: “Basically I’m just making potato salad.” He plans to use his extra pledge money to hold a potato salad party.
