Dog Safety Lights Go Fashion. Discover Disco Dog.
Lolli, the Disco Dog
What if you could take night time visibility of your dog to a whole other level? What if this solution could also give you the ability to showcase a positive message to your community? I came across this innovative dog coat on the cutting edge of pet technology-inspired products that I have to share! It’s called the Disco Dog vest and it takes dog safety lights into the fashion arena.
Picture this. A cute little Dachshund is trotting down the street, oblivious to the blazing billboard on its side, proclaiming hello to the world. She wanders too far from her caretaker, and a message then flashes saying, LOST DOG, and where to call. Colors change, patterns can be programmed and the LED lights can be as dazzling as you’d like. A bit over the top? Maybe. But one day, something like this may be used to communicate important, even life-saving information about your dog. Check this out, then read about the innovative, dog-loving company that created it:
The Disco Dog vest was created by a very cool NYC-Tokyo company called Party, who’ve worked with brands like Google, Intel, Universal Music Group, MTV and Louis Vuitton, among others. I discovered them via their now-closed Kickstarter campaign and reached out. Parts of my interview with Jamie Kim, the Managing Director and Executive Producer at Party, is here.
B&S: Describe the company and what you do.
JK: A creative lab is the best way to encapsulate what we are, because we do a variety of things in a variety of formats to answer any challenges presented to us.
B&S: So, brands come to you to find creative ways to present their products or services?
JK: Yes, but we do other things, too. Someone could come to us with a business challenge, like a commissioned work, or we can act as a lab, where we go inside an organization and shake up that organization with new ideas from the inside. Finally, we also do self-initiated projects like Disco Dog. This is the most exciting part of our company’s make up because we are, by nature, creators. We’re this unique group of writers, coders, animators, technologists…we’re able to dream up whatever we want and put it on the table and examine whether this is something we can do ourselves. Disco Dog is a perfect example that started as a conversation one afternoon and then became a wide-eyed moment.
How Disco Dog came about
JK: One of the guys around the table said he had an idea to create an LED vest for dogs to make them very visible at night. So, yes, it solved a problem for dog owners but, on the other hand, it was really out there. I said, ‘What do you mean, an LED vest for dogs?’ And, he drew it up. I saw it and said, ‘Oh! a disco dog!’ So, now it had a name.
A creative screen shot of the designers behind Disco Dog
Designers Masa Kawamura, Qanta Shimizu, Jamie Carreiro, Eiji Muroichi and Kenta Watashima put their heads and talents together, and three weeks later, they had their alpha model of the Disco Dog. I love the pop culture, kitsch factor of this vest, but I also thought about important information something like this can relay. Can this be streamlined to act as another tool to get lost dogs home? It could.
Behind the scenes tidbits on the making of the Disco Dog vest
Jamie Kim described the process of creating the Disco Dog:
Jamie Carreiro is the resident maker of the vest. My Dachshund dog, Lolli, was used as the model. Jamie used one of Lolli’s vests from home for measurements, then we ordered a simple vest online to use for the coat. He mapped out how many LED lights can fit on the vest; how they would be attached. We have a space in his home that acts as our DIY studio. He hand-wove the LED strips into the vest. Then, our Chief Technology officer, Kenta Watashima, built the app for it and we decided what colors, patterns, flashing frequency we wanted.
Jamie is a huge animal lover, and basically wore the vest on his arm for hours a day to make sure it didn’t get warm or was at all uncomfortable for the dog. Instead of animal testing, he did human testing!
Getting it out there
Once the sample was perfected, they got a great response from their selective outreach.
JK: The animations were done within those first three weeks. After we did beta testing, we took it to the SXSW Tech festival [in Austin, Texas]. We didn’t buy tickets; we decided to launch our Kickstarter campaign the first day of SXSW with Lolli. It did really well; we got a great response.
Launching a Kickstarter campaign made sense for a number of reasons, one being who Jamie Kim’s significant other and Lolli’s daddy is. He’s none other than Yancey Strickler, the founder and CEO of Kickstarter.
Yancey, Lolli & Jamie
They exhibited Disco Dog at the opening of the Usagi Gallery in DUMBO, Brooklyn, where TV Tokyo came to film for their program, World Business.
Bark & Co, creators of the Barkbox subscription service and savvy social media stars, was an early adopter. They had them over to their offices, put it on an employee’s Dachshund and played disco music. In typical, irreverent Bark & Co fashion, they had fun with it.
Jamie also told me they had two different adoption agencies get in touch, requesting a number of the vests to use to promote dogs up for adoption. Good Morning America put Lolli in a vest on the show for a big adoption day segment, resulting in a number of dogs getting adopted.
But, taking this to the next level means mass manufacturing, not something Party does or necessarily wants to do.
JK: We’re not a company that does that. This is a limited thing while we learn what we’re doing, as this is all new to us. If it takes us into mass manufacturing, it will take some time.
So, for now, Party created a very limited number of vests, about 34, which were offered to investors only. But, people from all over the world are asking for it, with requests from Italy, Holland, Japan, Australia and the U.S., thus far. It seems only a matter of time before we can have our own Disco Dog, combining a very bold fashion statement with an innovative pet safety device.
(photos courtesy of Party.NY)
Would you buy a Disco Dog vest for your dog?
