The Premise. No matter how hard people try, it seems like once high school and university are complete, it’s hard to maintain the same level of friendship with people. As friends move away and professional and family lives become more prominent, keeping closely in touch with people grows more difficult.
The Product. The Feeling Skin is a case for iPhone 5 and 5S that aims to bring back that simple, honest level of communication by creating simple, easy-access notifications. The display light on the Feeling Skin glows either blue or red to show when friends are in a good or bad mood respectively. To display a mood, users record a video of their current location and situation and display a mood to it. For those that want to be proactive, a button is available at the bottom of the case to ping added friends to post their current mood. Additionally, the Feeling Skin acts as a battery pack for the iPhone, offering an additional 80% battery life.
The Pitch. The team at Twelve Monkeys Company are eager to show off how intuitive and easy using the Feeling Skin is to keep in touch with friends. The campaign explains something that isn’t addressed in the video — the Feeling Skin app is available on the major mobile platforms, but the skin itself is only available for iPhone 5 model phones at this point. Twelve Monkeys wants to raise $40,000 to complete tooling, testing, and mass production.
The Perks. Backers can get a Feeling Skin for just $49 as a limited deal. All rewards are expected to ship in July.
The Potential. The chances of the Feeling Skin finding a foothold in the mainstream market are pretty slim. At first, the idea of having a private little inner circle of great friends sharing videos and moments with each other sounds tempting, but like any social network, this one would inevitably be filled with people that sat in adjacent desks in homeroom. Having extra battery power is a nice add-on, because if it was just the mood network or the battery pack, there wouldn’t really be anything here worth buying. Everything this device does is pretty much already handled just fine, whether by phone call, text, Facebook, or Instagram. At least it allows users to charge an iPhone with a microUSB cable.