Pono closed one of the most successful rewards-based crowdfunding campaigns ever today. Backers numbering 18,220 delivered $6,225,354 to the Pono Music team aiding in a pretail campaign that is queued up to delivery a high fidelity audio player that currently has no peer in the market.
The crowdfunding team was led by Neil Young, but benefited from a profound executive bench and marketing support that executive a highly professional and engaging crowdfunding effort that consistently engaged the audience and rallied community support to spread the word. Rewards were adjusted based on demand and need – final numbers proved a home run with Pono now anchored as the third most successful campaign ever on the Kickstarter global platform. The campaign average over $177,000 in contributions per day during the life of the project. The original goal was almost immediately surpassed at campaign launch.
First edition Pono Players are scheduled to ship this coming October 2014. The device will be manufactured by the well known company PCH International. Actual production facilities are based in Shenzhen, China. The complete project was born of a process that took almost two years in the making after a meeting between Neil Young and Liam Casey, founder and CEO of PCH International.
With the first samples completed, 50 units have been created for testing prepping for mass production. As the hardware and software are finalize production will shift to China – something expected to begin fairly soon.
Once backer rewards have been completed the Pono player is expected to retail at $399.00. I would expect to see presales to commence shortly on the Pono Music web site.
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