The LimeRibbon.com Blog

Branding LimeRibbon was equivalent to dressing a bunch of distracted six year-old boys for a party.  Good thing I have a six year-old boy, so I knew what we would be getting into. From the start, LimeRibbon bounded through the door and pounced in our laps as an evolving idea – a gift registry site utilizing social media to drive interest and be very, very lime.  Lime color 389U to be specific.  Most importantly, it was to be ready for a launch party by year’s end.

Go forth and design, right? Easier said than done when you’re not sure what you are designing.  How will the site function? What are all the pieces and parts? Will users have avatars?  Will there be advertising?  What is the content? And again, how is the social part and the shopping part going to tie together, exactly?

Sometimes having no limitations can feel very limiting. But by plunging into the visual design of LimeRibbon, we in turn developed a twist to the initial concept.  In the process of needing to fill a design with content, we started to ask ourselves why not integrate social media directly into the LimeRibbon platform? By thinking about LimeRibbon in a new way, we were able to design an experience of friends shopping together—socially, on the web.

At that moment the design started talking back to us.  Hey, “Bought anything juicy lately?™ Shop socially with us. What’s on your LimeRibbon?”  And thus the identity exploded like a kid who just ate a bunch of lime jellybeans. When we presented the concepts to the team, the developers saw LimeRibbon shoot to a whole new level.  The door was open and they knew where to take the technology behind the design idea, and then some.

Since then, LimeRibbon has been bouncing around in all kinds of crazy, imaginative ways, and we’ve been busy tackling it, dressing it and shoving it out the door for a great big launch party.

Whew!

Julia Briggs of Blue Star Design (www.bluestar-design.com) and Board Member of LimeRibbon.com.

LimeRibbon.com spokesperson – John Heaney will be featured on story of holiday shopping trends. Michael O’Mara, reporter from WKYC-Channel 3 (Cleveland’s NBC affiliate) contacted LimeRibbon to discuss the trends of shopping behavior between bricks & mortar retail and e-commerce sites. Of course, we just had to detail how LimeRibbon.com plays into all of this. So stay glued to your TV this evening from 6pm to 7:30pm for the story.

Kudos, John. You are a big shining star!

In the coming days, weeks and months I suspect you will be hearing more and more about a beautiful, little experiment that is percolating in good old Cleveland, OH. The experiment is a new model, a new paradigm, a new Baedeker for entrepreneurship and new business creation. Sounds like something out of an MBA class for sure. But if you were to be part of this I think you may understand the wonderful consequences of what we have laid out for ourselves. We (see the All-Star Start-Up Roster below) are a small, but devoted group, of entrepreneurs who have it in our wee, little heads that we can create, develop and launch social media and mobile application companies in a unique and amazingly satisfying new way. The end result will be the launch of LimeRibbon.com, an online social shopping network built specifically for the social media generation. (A landing page is available for you at www.limeribbon.com. And hey – join us on Twitter and Facebook, too!)

It all started over a beer. And don’t most exciting endeavors begin over a good libation? (For my sake, I hope that is true). I was commiserating over the lack of truly world-class support for local entrepreneurs when one of my dear friends – Doug Hardman – challenged me to come up with an idea that we could collaborate on. I dig Doug – he is truly one of the great original personalities. And he was right to challenge me. Instead of bitching about the perceived local problems with entrepreneurship – let’s do something about it – like create a brand new company right in the middle of the Great Recession. (Best decision I think we ever made, truly. LimeRibbon.com has become a passion for all of those involved.) Over the next few weeks we reviewed a number of ideas and finally decided on a concept of a social shopping network. But before Doug and I went any further with the concept we decided on a few rules:

• All investors had to be local. And cool people. No one really wants to work with someone you cannot trust or people you don’t enjoy being around. So…we picked an All-Star Start-Up roster for LimeRibbon.com (see below). People we wanted to work with and who were easy going in life, but motivated to make a good investment in a beautiful little company. Additionally, the board, the marketing company and the development company all had to be from Cleveland, OH.
• The idea had to be simple AND have a revenue model.
• This was to be a true collaborative. We weren’t going to run LimeRibbon.com like a typical start-up and impress an unruly corporate culture on top. Everyone on the team had a voice. Everyone had a vote. But at the end of the day when the decision was made to do this or that, we would all run with the bulls to make it so.
• We would share the business model with others so as to start a chain of other social media companies in Cleveland.

Four pretty simple rules in my mind. And as we approach the launch of LimeRibbon.com (stay tuned, my friends), I am happy to report that we have followed these rules religiously. We have made sure that the creation of this beautiful little start-up would be a cool experiment on how business should be created and nurtured. We hope the launch of LimeRibbon.com will be a cool thing for Cleveland. This City needs more victories – no matter how large or small. But I firmly believe that we are creating a mindset that is larger than the launch of a good company. We are working on a new business model, a new philosophy of commerce and engaging the community at the same time. Simply put, this is our “Happy, happy fun time.” So come join the revolution.

And by the way, many kudos to the All-Star Start-Up Roster. This team rocks! I love each and every one of them. They are friends and family. We comment to each other regularly about how cool it is to be working together. It is an authentic feeling.

The Cleveland All-Star Start-Up Roster

• Michael C. DeAloia – LNE Group (www.lnegroup.com) & Former “Tech Czar” of the City of Cleveland
• Doug Hardman – CEO of Sparkbase  (www.sparkbase.com)
• Geoffrey Hardman – President of Sparkbase (www.sparkbase.com)
• Julia Briggs – “Chief Pirate” of Blue Star Design (www.bluestar-design.com)
• John Briggs – Vice President of Blue Star Design (www.bluestar-design.com)
• John Heaney – Principal of Orange Envelopes and All Around Social Media Ruffian (www.orange-envelopes.com/blog/)
• George Nemeth – Revolutionary and Social Media Expert (www.brewedfreshdaily.com)
• Thomas Mulready – President of CoolCleveland.com (www.coolcleveland.com)
• Matt Dickman – The “Techno-Marketer” (http://technomarketer.typepad.com/)

So in the coming weeks, check back with this blog and occasionally visit the LimeRibbon website. We are going to launch the site soon and would love to have you as one of the early guests. Many of the upcoming blogs will be about the site and the trials and tribulations of getting this cool site up and running. But today I wanted to give you the “philosophical primer” behind our little experiment. Send us some good karma, my friends.

Regards,

Michael C. DeAloia

Co-founder/Board Member

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