Celebrating Prepared Serendipity
Wow, the last few days have been exciting here at STARtorialist HQ! We've just had our busiest five days EVER, so I wanted to share how a viral tweet can spark a collaborative success for a small business - but don’t call it luck!
it all started Wednesday night, when Erin Winick, founder of Sci Chic, shared photos of a skirt she had made with the pattern of the Mars 2020 mission parachute, which helped successfully land the Perseverance Rover last month and had the slogan “Dare Mighty Things” encoded into the colors of its panels.
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Touchdown of my Perseverance parachute skirt! When @NASAJPL revealed they hid a code saying "Dare Mighty Things" in the parachute of the new Mars rover, I knew I had to turn that in to something I could wear!
— Erin Winick (@erinwinick) March 10, 2021
Big thanks to @alexknightbooks who helped with the graphic design. pic.twitter.com/BU0cORpdBe
When Erin explained how she had made it, I realized that STARtorialist had the infrastructure in place to make the skirt available to the general public. I sent her a DM asking if she would entrust the design with us, we emailed back and forth to get it set up, and after about 90 minutes, it was ready to go!
Ask and you shall receive! Thanks for all of your interest in this design. It means a lot. I've collabed with my awesome friends at @startorialist, so you can grab your own! https://t.co/KqCwLpTVZN
— Erin Winick (@erinwinick) March 11, 2021
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The traffic to the shop started slowly that night, continued to grow through the next couple days, and spiked on Saturday after a post on Imgur. We saw more new visitors to the site than we have since our launch last summer, people from all over the world are going to be rocking Erin's design, and we're going to make a donation to Black Girls Code. Needless to say we were over the Moon about this success!
I told Kelle and Debbie how lucky I felt to know Erin as a talented designer and trusted collaborator, to have noticed her tweet and seized the opportunity so quickly, even to have had the 90 minutes to sit with my laptop after my kids went to bed to get everything ready. But Kelle pointed out - it wasn’t luck! We have spent years discovering designers and cultivating collaborations, and we’ve spent many months pouring every spare moment into the online shop. We were preparing for a moment like this, hopefully the first of many!
Kelle said it well: “It’s hard to describe the joy that unexpected success brings. Unexpected, but anticipated and planned for success! I am extremely proud and happy to be a part of this team!” We are all thrilled to have even more space fans along for the ride.
