If you haven’t heard of nvohk pronounced “invoke” it is a new “community managed Eco-friendly brand” that is starting to get some press. It is going against the grain and creating a Surf brand that is driven by the community. They are looking for 20,000 members to pay $50 dollars a year, these members will be given control over logo design, product design, and marketing etc… 35% of the proceeds will be given to the community via what they are calling reward points. These points will be redeemed through various means including nvohk merchandise.

It is also an Eco-Friendly brand that will create products from 100% sustainable materials as well as donate 10% of the proceeds to Eco-Friendly charities. Here is an excerpt from their site:

• + build a responsible clothing company that truly puts consumers and the environment in the forefront
• + make high-quality products from 100% sustainable materials
• + provide an ongoing fund raising and support engine for environmental organizations

Overall I think it is a really cool idea, I like different business models, I think this generation is more apt to communities and all of that. I do think that even though the Surf/Action Sports/Environmental industries are extremely large, it may be somewhat hard to get 20k users. Not because the message or idea won’t be accepted but more because a lot of the individuals that make up these demographics are young, poor, and lazy.

I signed up, I was number 96, I think you should as well if nothing but for the birth of a really cool and unique idea. When I signed up I couldn’t help but think of some ideas to help spread the word a little quicker.

Email Address Importing: One of the things they do after you sign up is have a handful of boxes for you to paste in your friends email accounts to share the site with. I only pasted in 3 of my friends cause these were emails I had memorized, and I am too busy/lazy to go to my email and browse through my address book and copy and paste names in. If I did take the time to do that I could of comfortably invited 100 plus people that would of more than likely signed up. What they should do instead is add in an app that is common in social news sites that lets you import from your Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail address books so you can add a lot of emails in a matter of seconds.

Badges: Also they should create badges that show the member count that gets updated every time a member signs up. These badges will link back to the site and be used for people to copy and pase onto their sites, blogs, and social networking profiles like Myspace and Facebook. If you are proud to be a member you will show it and help spread the word.

Tracking: It looks like they have Google analytics enabled on the site, I hope they have conversion tracking set up so that every time someone signs up they can track that to the referring url. This way they can see what brings in multiple sign ups and look for ways to increase that.

Marketing: The did a press release that was covered on Transworld, and about 6 other outlets I could find. They should also look at setting up Social Networking profiles at Myspace and Facebook and network with all users that have surfing and action sports interests.

StumbleUpon Ads is also a great way to target your exact demographics, you can buy traffic for .05 a click. You can set your demographics to those that only say they like sites related to surfing/extreme sports, etc.. you can also set it to age groups and gender. You can set your campaign to get 1000’s of visitors a day.

Also they could go to Google Blogsearch, Technorati, and Ice Rocket to search for blogs that talk about Surfing and action sports and email them asking them if they like the site and if so would they be willing to do a write up.

Those some quick basic Ideas I came up with I think it is a great idea I would love to see it get to the 20,000 member mark just to see how well a community could run and operate a brand.

*If any of you use stumbleupon go to http://www.projectnvohk.com and thumb it up with your tool bar, I submitted it the other day, and a couple thumbs up will give them some sweet traffic for free.

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Posted by Chris on Saturday, December 8th, 2007 in Brands.

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