About Kandi Love
Kandi Love started out as an idea to enable ravers to stay connected and foster deeper friendships and relationships through continued interactions by sharing contact information through the act of trading kandi, as well as enabling ravers to stay connected to their art work and see the amazing people and places their kandi would travel to and meet.
A little history
From the beginning we wanted every raver to be able to take advantage of our technology and build a utility for the community. Our first attempt was built in 2018 where we attempted to leverage computer vision to add kandi to a search index. Ravers would simply need to take a photo of their existing kandi, add it to the search index, and then after trading the owner could search and find the creator. This didn’t pan out, but got us started on our path to building our current version.
During the COVID shut down years QRs where everywhere, and it was during that time that we realized the simplest solution would be to attach QR codes to kandi with unique IDs. So we got to work and we launched our current iteration of the web app in 2018. We printed QR codes on some stickers, put them on beads, and made some kandi.
Now that we had stickers we wanted to figure out how to fund our project. We didn’t want to charge the community a bunch of money for them, because well they where just stickers. So we decided that we would give them away for free and start to build a rave shop. We would use the eyeballs from our kandi app to drive views of our shop, and if ravers liked what we where doing we hoped they would support us buy buying a new rave tank or rave accessory from us. This remains to be our business model, the shop funds the app development, and the app will be as free or cheap as we can make it for the community.
We eventually discovered that stickers do not last forever. It was in 2023 at Pickathon outside of Portland where Kandiman bought a $50 epoxy ring that had an amazing real life sunflower in it that we realized we could make beads out of epoxy resin. So that’s what we have been doing, and it has been so fun creating beads out of different shapes and colors. We decided to call these beads Unity Beads because that was always our original goal, to help bring the community together and unite ravers into new friendships. You can check out all of our creations at https://kandilove.com/collections/unity-beads
What’s next for Kandi Love?
We love to experiment and continue to see what we can do with current technology. We are going to be playing with NFC chips next and put those into our epoxy beads. We also want to enable the community to be creative and see what amazing things you all can come up with. That’s why we are going to be making guides on how anyone can make their own Unity Beads at home with low cost supplies. Additionally, we want to enable kandi artists to use our platform to reach more ravers, so we are going to be adding in the ability for artists to include links to their storefronts from the kandi pages. When kandi you have created gets traded, the owner will get to know who made it and where they can purchase more if they like it.