Travel jacket breaks record raising $9m on Kickstarter

Long-distance love has paid off for the designers of a travel jacket that has now attracted a record $9m from would-be buyers on crowdfunding site Kickstarter.

Hiral Sanghavi, designer of the BauBax jacket, conceived the jacket as a means of solving the dilemma of long-distance traveling while carrying a Best Buy’s worth of electronic equipment. He had originally hoped to raise $20,000.

Two weeks into the campaign in July, the jacket became the most funded clothing item in crowdfunding history after raising $1.25m, surpassing the “10-year Hoodie”, which raised $1.05m on Kickstarter in 2013. Last week, the jacket surpassed $6.4m and became the sixth-most funded Kickstarter of all time.

On Thursday when funding closed 44,949 people had pledged a total of $9,192,055 to get the jacket into production.

While the BauBax jacket was put in Kickstarter’s “product design” category, and not its “fashion” category, a Kickstarter spokesperson said the jacket is its most funded apparel project.

Hiral Sanghavi, co-founder of BauBax, a Chicago startup that focuses on developing creative lifestyle products and manufactures the jacket, travels weekly from Chicago, where he is finishing his master’s at the Kellogg School of Management, to San Francisco to see his wife, Yoganshi Shah.

“These are often eight-hour or longer flights with layovers,” Sanghavi said. “We set out to solve all of the problems travelers encounter by designing travel jackets, blazers, bombers and hoodies/sweatshirts with everything a traveler wants and needs.”

Sanghavi calls the BauBax jacket the “Swiss army knife of travel jackets”. With a built-in inflatable neck pillow, eye mask, gloves and about a dozen other pockets built specifically to carry things like an iPad or a drink, the jacket was created to “appeal to everyone who travels”, Sanghavi said.

Sanghavi credited his wife Shah, who is the chief design officer at BauBax, with the design of the jacket and said the special features originated because he was always leaving behind his travel pillow on flights.

“So she thought, ‘We have to develop a stylish jacket that has a travel pillow built in’,” Sanghavi said. Then they added an eye mask, a cup-holder, built-in gloves and various designated pockets to carry passports, technology, wallets and earphones.

Sanghavi said he had expected the campaign to raise at least $1m, but is “humbled and thrilled” to see the amount of donations that have poured in. Perhaps he should have added another extra large pocket for all the money.