Empire State of Mind: Geography, Community, and Crowd-funding in Entrepreneurial Fashion

• In Event: 239 - Section on Communication and Information Technologies Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 02. States, Markets and Crowds in Digital Economics

Abstract

Globalization and its flows of people, finance, media, and technologies are creating new environments in the fashion industry with implications for innovation and emerging talent. New York City is one of the global fashion capitals where communities of practice exist in a confluence of different forms of capital (e.g., financial, social, and cultural), within a specific context of embeddedness (the social relations of production). The stocks and flows of capital are often tethered to idiosyncratic regional effects of economic geography. Regarding fashion entrepreneurship, technology is allowing for increased access to markets, but cutting through the media clutter and access to financial capital are still limiting factors. Reward-based crowdfunding offers entrepreneurs a web platform to leverage their social networks to secure money-for-goods financing and develop consumer markets. This ethnographic inquiry complements large scale, cross-sectional quantitative research on crowdfunding successes and failures by generating deep knowledge on organizational processes and contexts on three highly successful crowdfunded projects based in New York City. The preliminary data analysis identifies three emergent themes of successful reward-based crowdfunding: (1) creating enterprise legitimacy, (2) developing a value proposition based on economic and symbolic value, and (3) communication of the innovation concept through media and social media. Successful startups engage in deliberate processes that set the stage for success by developing a configuration including each of the three components, which are compensatory in nature, but only to a limited extent.

Author

• Kenneth M. Kambara, LIM College