Juicies Second Act a Hit on Kickstarter

One of Hawaii's earliest Kickstarter projects is back with a vengeance. Juicies+ is the follow-up to Juicies, a set of colored smartphone charging cables launched in 2011. And while that first project hit a few bumps in the road, the numbers for the sequel show solid confidence that founder Laurens Laudowicz will deliver.

With 10 days left to go, and only one stretch goal to give the project a boost, Juicies+ blew past its $40,000 fundraising goal in under 26 hours, and has now raised over $226,000 in pledges from over 6,500 backers.

Of course, the original Juicies project also saw a strong start.

Launched on Kickstarter on Earth Day in 2011, Laudowicz was looking for just $5,000. He ended up raising over $22,000 from over 1,600 backers. Burt Lum and I featured Laudowicz (and Fernando Pacheco of Pimpbot) on Bytemarks Cafe the following month in a show exploring the crowdfunding phenomenon.

Unfortunately, it would take more than a year for those colored cables to be manufactured and shipped, during which time Apple announced that it was changing its device connection hardware from the 30-pin design it had used since 2003 to the current Lightning cable design. With the 30-pin Juicies prematurely relegated to older devices only, Laudowicz argued that they'd still be useful for a couple of years, and introduced 30-pin USB versions mid-stream, making the cables work for other devices as well.

Suffice it to say, the delay drew a fair amount of criticism, and when all the colored cables were finally shipped, Laudowicz bared all in his final update.

"I had never manufactured electronics before, I didn't know the actual cost of the products I was going to manufacture, [and] I was afraid to share what was going on when things got hard and took longer than expected," Laudowicz admitted. "I am very glad that I started the Juicies project when I did, and I will never regret it."

"I gained so much experience from it and I am very proud that I did not give up," he adds.

Now, Laudowicz is building upon those hard lessons and his proven persistence with a new-and-improved charging cable. Taking its cues from the industrial design of the latest Apple iPhone, Juicies+ are heavy-duty, tangle-free woven anodized aluminium cables. They're described as "simply the cable Apple should have made."

And to go with the new gold-colored iPhone, the stretch goal (unlocked when fundraising blew past $120,000) introduced a gold-colored cable.

Thanks to the contacts and procedures from the first go-round, Laudowicz is confident the new cables will earn the coveted certification of Apple's MFI program. But for non-iPhone users, MicroUSB cables will be available out of the gate.

Juicies+ has netted coverage across the web, from Techcrunch to CNET to Cult of Mac. And with the Kickstarter campaign running through Oct. 31, you have until the end of the month to put in $18 for your own Juicies+ cable.

Extra: Listen to Laudowicz and fellow Kickstarter veteran Mike Bond of Ti2 Design discuss their Kickstarter experiences on the Sept. 18, 2013 episode of Bytemarks Cafe.