Creative Inspiration at Re:Make 2015!

We were thrilled when we got a call from Brit + Co with an invitation to attend the Re:Make 2015 summit and festival in San Francisco this past weekend.  We had a blast and, although it was a bit of a scramble to get out there, we are so glad we accepted the invite – such a creative, fascinating group of people!

Re:Make is a two-day celebration of the maker movement with amazing and inspiring speakers at an invitation-only summit on the first day. Day two featured an all-access festival of makers offering their products and providing hands-on creative opportunities for the 10,000+ attendees. We’ve been so hard at work trying to keep up with all of our iFetch orders, plus getting everything lined up for the upcoming launch of the iFetch Too (for bigger dogs), that it was a real treat to get out of the office and put on our creative thinking caps for a few days.

In addition to Brit Morin, the founder of Brit+Co, some of our favorite speakers at the summit were:

• Scott Belsky, Vice President of Adobe’s Products-Community and co-founder of Behance, the leading online platform for creatives to showcase and discover creative work, discussed the characteristics of productive, creative people.  It takes doers and dreamers to bring innovative ideas to life and now we know who’s who at iFetch 🙂
• Suzanne Gibbs Howard, founder of IDEO U, who discussed how to apply the concepts of design thinking to lead to creative solutions to some seemingly intractable problems.
• Matt Van Horn, CEO and co-founder of the June oven. Think Nest thermostat meets counter-top convection oven.  Since Debbie can’t cook without actually burning herself, we are SUPER excited about this one!
• Brit had a hilarious conversation with Sophia Rivka Rossi, co-founder of HelloGiggles, a positive and safe online community for young women.

As interesting as the summit was, some of our favorite moments took place the following day during the festival.  Over 100 artisans participated and offered attendees opportunities to try their hand at creating.  Bay Area residents are so fun and inquisitive! From engineers and coders, to creators and families with little kids, everyone loved interacting with the iFetch and offered very positive feedback.  Some of our favorite overheard quotes: “This thing is awesome!” … “I have to have one” … “My kids would love playing with this with our dog.”

It was a great weekend in San Francisco and we really appreciated being invited to take part in such an inspiring event!