Winnipeg Free Press

Winnipeg Free Press (Newspaper) - June 26, 2012, Winnipeg, Manitoba C M Y K PAGE B6 B 6 WINNIPEG FREE PRESS, TUESDAY, JUNE 26, 2012 BUSINESS winnipegfreepress. com EXCLUSIVE MEDIA PARTNER The $ 100,000 Grand Prize will help Zane implement his innovation project and take his business to the next level. BDC thanks all Canadians who voted: you've helped support the work of some promising young entrepreneurs! View the video of the winning project at www. bdc. ca/ yea or by scanning the QR CODE. CONGRATULATIONS TO ZANE KELSALL , WINNER OF THE $ 100,000 BDC GRAND PRIZE FOR INNOVATION! A N online design contest to create a logo for Canadian website TimesSquare. com that has $ 10,000 on the line for the top submissions, has garnered close to 3,000 possible designs. For Lorenzo Tartamella, chief executive of TimesSquare. com, crowdsourcing its new logo has provided a vast range of art options. " It's incredible.... An ad agency would have never been able to give us the diversity and the choice that we've been given the way we have with this contest," he said. For lean startups looking for cheap and fast logo designs, the crowd may provide access to affordable art. But some design experts say the savings aren't worth the expense of not having a long- term brand strategy. Tartamella's contest is running on DesignCrowd. ca, which launched this month and is the latest crowdsourcing platform to hit Canada since the online process for obtaining freelanced graphic work took off three years ago. " DesignCrowd. ca and crowdsourcing help fix a number of problems with the traditional design process, which is slow, expensive and risky," said Alec Lynch of Design Crowd, the Australian parent company. The platform allows small businesses to host contests, in which freelance designers compete by submitting designs for logos, websites and mobile apps. Once a contest is opened with a description of the business's needs, designers around the world can submit a creation in hopes of getting selected. Lynch said his service is " essentially outsourcing on steroids," since it gives customers a vast amount of speedy responses, on their set budget, with no cost risk if they aren't satisfied with the results. However, some marketers see the one- off process as counterproductive to building a lasting brand. A decade into its existence as a premium pet- food company, Petcurean Pet Nutrition recognized the need for a long- term branding strategy so it hired Vancouver- based Subplot Design Inc. in 2010, which resulted in the launch of new product packing earlier this year. Petcurean credits its relationship with Subplot principals Matthew Clark and Roy White for the company's image makeover. " They are our partners. We would never have gotten where we are today without their expertise, absolutely," said Jaimie Turkington, Petcurean's marketing manager. " It's a critical relationship." She said it was vital to get real data on market research and an evaluation of the company's identity. " A crowdsourced logo will likely have none of those things, and it might look beautiful on paper, but it's just that." Subplot helped Petcurean build a comprehensive brand strategy, Turkington said, by establishing a " brand bible" that the company can use if it wants to outsource future design work. The other downside to crowdsourcing, from Petcurean's perspective, would be having to reveal brand strategy secrets to the crowd. " Now that we have our brand standards manual, could we work within different applications to get people to contribute creative thinking? Sure. But I don't know if crowdsourcing would be the way to go because then I would have to reveal, in a public way, the strategy behind the brand," Turkington said. The graphic design industry is not thrilled with the use of crowdsourcing either, which results in designers producing work " on speculation" that their efforts might be selected and paid for. " Crowdsourcing in general is a lose- lose proposition all around," said Adrian Jean, president of the Society of Graphic Designers of Canada. " The clients lose because they don't get the best value out of the process because they didn't engage a designer in any proper indepth consultation or research. Crowdsourcing participants waste valuable time and resources developing designs that they may or may not be paid for." Producing work on spec is against the society's policy and code of ethics because it erodes the industry by devaluing designers' work, Jean said. Some designers who compete worldwide, however, see the value in the flexibility and access to clients provided by crowdsourcing. For the Canadian designer known online as Buck Tornado, DesignCrowd. ca is a platform that allowed him to rebuild a career in design after getting laid off from his full- time gig at Yellow Pages in 2009. An industry veteran of 20 years, he now works part- time in a traditional industry job for a firm that does health- care company logos and stationery. He said crowdsourcing has allowed him to successfully freelance on the side in a highly competitive field. " For the past year, it really started to snowball. A lot of these contests are startups so they don't have a lot of money," he said. Since 2010, he said he has sold more than 100 designs on DesignCrowd, earning more than US$ 22,000. The designer said after winning logo contests, he has been hired back by some of the companies to design their business cards and stationery. Tornado said he agrees with the society that the crowd process can undervalue design work, but has accepted it as a modern reality of the competitive market. " I agree with them. But as Bob Dylan once sang, the ' winds of change are blowin' and you do what you have to do to adapt," he said. After trying several other platforms, he said he is sticking with DesignCrowd because it is set up to be " blind" - meaning other designers can't see his work and steal ideas. Working with small businesses, he said he also sees the value of the crowdsourcing process from his clients' perspectives. " Its such a dog- eat- dog world now for startups and it gives them a huge chance to start out positively because they don't have to inject this huge amount of capital," he said. - Financial Post New world of design awaits Outsourcing through online contests brings many options By Julia Johnson ENTREPRENEUR Coffee project brings a sweet taste of success THE votes are in and this year's BDC Young Entrepreneur has been chosen. Zane Kelsall, founder of Two If By Sea Caf� in Dartmouth, N. S., stood out among the eight finalists for Anchored Coffee, an innovative project to launch the first roastery in Atlantic Canada that will buy all of its coffee direct from farmers at ethical prices. Kelsall worked in other people's caf�s for a decade before he followed his desire to make the exceptional cup of coffee and launched Two If By Sea Cafe. Founding Anchored Coffee is an extension of his drive to deliver on that. " Our obsession with quality has led us to wanting to control every step of the coffee process. We see it as the only way to expand around the world," Kelsall said, about how the project came about. However, the return on investment the project will bring is not lost on him. " Between our two caf�s we're going through 40,000 pounds of coffee a year. So just supplying our own caf�s, we'll see a complete return in approximately 19 months," Kelsall says. And that doesn't include offshoots like being able to sell to other caf�s. Another benefit of Anchored Coffee is having consistency of brand, a key component of growth in the food industry. " Being able to control the coffee roasting will give that to us. If we wanted to open a caf� in another city or in the same city we have everything coming from a centralized location that we have complete control over," Kelsall said. The $ 100,000 grand prize will, in large part, go to equipment costs to set up the roastery with the best equipment; in addition it will pay for inventory, trips to coffee producing countries to meet farmers and promotion and branding. " It's essentially our complete budget for the startup," he said. Besides the grand prize, there are other benefits to being part of the contest. Kelsall says it forced him and his team to do checks and balances to make sure the idea was going to work. " With an organization as thorough as BDC looking over our plan and saying ' yes, you're a finalist,' it's a reaffirmation that what we want to do is smart, well thought- out and we're ready for it. " We started out thinking we wanted to do a roastery in the next couple of years; getting told we should really apply for this shows we're totally ready and the project makes sense," Kelsall said. The Young Entrepreneur Award was created by the Business Development Bank of Canada in 1988 to recognize successful entrepreneurs 18 to 35 years old. The selection process narrowing the field to the eight regional finalists is based on a wide range of criteria, from project plans and objectives, to their feasibility and sustainability. To view the interview with Kelsall and the live chat held Monday with him and FP Entrepreneur columnist Rick Spence, go to financialpost. com/ innovators . - Financial Post By Nancy Truman BDC Young Entrepreneur Award Zane Kelsall SIMON HAYTER / NATIONAL POST Roy White ( left) and Matthew Clark, the people behind the Petcurean designs and brand. Their company faces increasing competition from crowdsourced designs. B_ 06_ Jun- 26- 12_ FP_ 01. indd B6 6/ 25/ 12 6: 58: 29 PM ;