



From the moment of its unveiling on September 1st, 2010, Scott Wilson, a self-described watch fetishist and former Global Creative Director for Nike, felt the desire to build a watch band for the 6th generation iPod nano. Not just any watch band, "Everyone is going to make a plastic one," said Scott whose goal was to make a band that he wanted to wear and maybe sell a few hundred to other watch geeks along the way. "Other people, even people in the studio didn't believe in what I was doing, they thought I was wasting my time."

A few months later, Scott took a chance and placed his TikTok + LunaTik project on Kickstarter, earning more than $6,000 in pledges on its first day. An impressive start driven by the project’s appearance in a November 17th Co.Design article written by Cliff Kuang. "There's nothing more validating," says Scott, clearly in awe that so many Kickstarter patrons would endeavor to help him bring his concept to market. "I was coming off a pretty rough emotional partnership failure literally weeks before where I lost a year's worth of fees and development time," he laments in the matter-of-fact tone that comes from having a deep emotional wound healed with time. "It was amazing," he said, reinforcing Scott's belief that artists and designers sometimes do their best work in times of upheaval. "Let's see where this goes."

What happened next is the stuff of crowd-funding legend.

"One of the other guys from the studio was in the brainstorm with me, and we're like, thumbs up — I mean, holy crap!"

"We took a pool," said Scott, now speaking in the eager cadence more customary to this serial entrepreneur, "expecting it to hit $7,000 or $8,000, or maybe $10,000 by midnight." Feeling confident that he'd reach his modest funding goal of $15,000 well before the cutoff still a month away, Scott joined a friend at a bar for an interview. He left at 5:45pm, arriving at the bar by 6pm. Scott was greeted with a text from his wife as he entered saying the project was now at $22,000. "You're looking at the wrong project," he responded with a laugh. Minutes later the project had reached $30,000. Scott paused the interview to open the web browser on his phone, thinking "what the heck just happened?" What happened was a blog post by Kyle VanHemert of Gizmodo under the headline "The iPod Nano Watches to Rule Them All (Trust Me Here)." A few giddy drinks later it was at $50,000 and time to celebrate. "I called all the guys and we went to a bar by my house. The pledges were just pouring into my inbox, I just kept refreshing. By the time we went to bed, it was at almost $80,000."

One month later, the project would close with $942,578 pledged by 13,512 backers across 50 countries. Thousands of people who, by way of their credit cards, said "I like what you’re doing Scott, and I’d like to be a part of it." Scott would sell 21,120 units on Kickstarter alone, selling more than 20,000 additional bands through his lunatik.com site.

Then, on October 4th, 2011, Apple's Phil Schiller would stand in front of a 50-foot projected TikTok watch band as he revealed several new iPod nano watch faces to the world's media. "I was in the middle of a brainstorm, a client workshop, and my phone started going nuts," Scott recalled, "I was like, I have to look. One of the other guys from the studio was in the brainstorm with me, and we're like, thumbs up. I mean, holy crap!"

Scott's now ramping his watch bands in preparation for the holiday season, even adding a new premium model and a modular watch insert in response to demand. He recently returned to Kickstarter with his second project: the LunaTik Touch Pen — it was funded after just three days into the 60 day campaign.