Kata Dream Bag Challenge

Kata Bags have announced their new competition for 2009/10 - the Dream Bag Challenge. This is an opportunity to submit a design or designs for your dream photo bag. For the duration of the competition each design submitted will be judged by a panel of experts and posted on the Dream Bag Challenge website http://www.dreambagchallenge.com/

In return you could win a mega prize of your dream bag being made by Kata and filled with $5000 of photo gear including a Canon EOS 5D MkII camera body, lenses, Gitzo tripod & Litepanels LP Micro Pro LED light source. Currently, the competition has been announced by Bogen Imaging in the US, but not the UK.

If you have an original or radical idea for a camera bag, look very carefully at the Terms and Conditions before submitting your idea - the prizes may look attractive, but if you submit a design*, you will in all probability be loose any rights to ownership of the intellectual property for the design or designs. The T & C's have been written (from what I can see) for the US Law. You may want to check validity with an English legal advisor before entering your design to the competition. If you belong the BIPP or Federation of Small Businesses in the UK, their legal advice telephone services may be able to help.

You could also look at this another way; no doubt all the other camera bag manufacturers will be looking at the designs submitted to the Dream Bag Challenge. Who knows what the outcome could be?

*I haven't looked to closely, but have any of the competiton design authors exerted their IP (Intellectual Property) ownership of their bag designs submitted to Kata?

Here's the link to the competition T & C's.

Good luck with your entry! I've an idea or three, but I'm holding back...

Comments

  1. Hi Ian

    Thank you for raising up the legal rights issue.
    Answers to your concerns and more information
    can be found in The contest web site under "About the challenge" botton.

    I'm attaching few of them:

    The Dream Bag Challenge Kata wish to clarify:


    Are Kata fishing to steal anyone's great ideas?

    No we are interested in hearing what our market really needs.
    At Kata we design products first and foremost for the photographers/videographers. Market feedback and constant contact with our users is a key factor in our R&D process and after years of research and development we all realize that it is impossible to meet all the requirements of all the photographers in the world, for the simple reason that each photographer is unique and has different needs. So our philosophy is: 'there is no such thing as the perfect bag so it is our job to make bags for different users and uses!'
    With this challenge we simply want to find out what you our users really want and need.
    The time, effort and financial investment we are putting into this project is ten fold more than our R&D budget, we could simply go on designing as we have for years calling on our trusted testers for their opinions but we believe that in opening this channel to the general public greater advantage is actually for you the photographers out there who never get heard and whose ideas can help us make products that meet your actual real needs.


    Is it fair for us to ask you for your ideas and not pay you for them?

    Kata are a fair and honest company and the winners of the contest will be receiving high value and very rewarding prizes for their great ideas.
    Should we wish to use designs (not ideas) that did not reach the top 3 we will be in touch with the designer and rest assure that we will not leave him/her empty handed and disappointed.
    As someone wisely pointed out for most of you your great ideas never become a reality and you do not see a farthing for them, so what is better; that you keep them to yourself or share them in the hope of one day seeing them in a real product which you and many others can use and benefit from?
    It is your choice of course, we clearly state our intentions in our terms and conditions and if this doesn't suit you simply do not participate.


    Will Kata take ideas and manufacture them in mass?

    This contest is definitely so that Kata get more in touch with market needs, so good ideas are something we will use, whether or not in the exact design submitted in the contest, it is impossible to say until the challenge is over.
    This is the place to state that from our experience even the greatest and most detailed idea is still a great distance away from becoming a real product, and this distance is something we cover with our experienced design, engineering and manufacturing teams.


    Best regards

    Guy Sprukt
    Kata

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi Guy,

    Thanks for the detailed response. It's good to see that Kata do care about their customers and IP.

    I look forward to seeing the results of the contest. I will submit my ideas/designs as you'll see from a previous blog entry, I have a real issue with the design of carry systems on backpacks.

    Ian

    ReplyDelete

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