Crowdfunding is a real web 2.0 concept. It has been used to refer to the collective cooperation of people who pool their money together, usually via the Internet, to support efforts initiated by other people or organizations.

Crowdfunding is getting more and more popular, especially in the music and sports scene, as a ‘democratic' way to fund projects, and an easy way to raise money. Catwalk genius, an Irish webproject supporting new fashion designers, recently tapped into that trend.

Catwalkgenius.com showcases independent fashion designers and allows supporters of the designer to take part in an Adopt a Designer scheme. That scheme allows supporters of a participating designer to buy shares (which they call elements) in their work.  Once 5,000 of such elements have been sold, the designer is given the resulting  € 70,000 to create a new collection. When the new collection launches, after 6 months, all profits from its sale are split equally among the designer, the funders and Catwalk Genius. 10% of the profits are set aside for those that promoted the designer through ads.

Catwalk Genius is co-founded by Director Helen Brown, a former Head of Customer Service in a financial company, and is based on the idea that people should be able to influence, through funding, the kind of fashion that gets produced and share in the success of the designers they support. Helen told thenextwomen: "I've always wanted to set up something of my own. I came up with the idea of Catwalkgenius.com along with a raft of other options, after reading a ton of books and blogs about consumer behaviour and how businesses are starting to engage with the public. After researching what companies were doing to increase customer interaction in various industries, the fashion industry stood out as having the most opportunities for innovation - hence our crowd-sourcing and crowd-funding initiative."