Tag Archive for 'Business'

The iPhone swizz

http://www.apple.com/hotnews/openiphoneletter/ couldn’t he just have given them all $100 credit? And why will you only be able to redeem your credit against a purchase at an Apple Store? What a swizz. Seth says he steps up to the plate, no chance.

Webtogs – An etail startup

Webtogs, is a new etail business, selling “the outdoors, online”. At the moment they’re due to open (according to their holding page) in Summer 07 and have taken the interesting step of documenting their progress towards their launch. I haven’t read all of their blog but what I’ve read makes interesting reading and is a good way of garnering interest pre-launch. Maybe we can expect to see more of this type of prelaunch writing to get us emotionally attached to a brand before it goes live, particularlywith the bigger brands. Some e.g. Topshop and New look have done it with Kate Moss and Lily Allen respectively but this seems very much the domain of fashion orientated businesses rather than businesses generally.

I think they’re missing the boat without an email sign up on their holding page and their logo’s lousy but that apart there’s a few good tips on the design and planning process. It’ll be interesting to see if they make the transition from internet people to retailers. If/when they do become retailers they’ll no doubt understand that when they say …

“The basic rule of successful ecommerce for us, is this: “If someone wants to buy a backpack, sell them a backpack, don’t try to sell them a tent”.

… is of course hopelessly wrong. Cross merchandising, upselling, increasing basket spend are all absolute requirements of succesful retailers, online or otherwise.

Topshop & web 2.0 retail

The buzz continues to roll for Topshop and the Kate Moss collection. Of course it will sell out practically straightaway perhaps even make the obligatory appearance on ebay. At the end of the day they’ve made it happen for which they must get a gret deal of credit.

Originaly there was much gossip about wether Kate Moss had precipitated the resignation of Jane Shepherdson, former head honcho at Topshop. This really signalled the start of a (viral?) PR and marketing campaign that will culminate on the 1st May with the launch of the Kate Moss collection. Yesterday’s Topshop stylenotes email included a link to a new Kate Moss Topshop website, a one page site along the lines of a Myspace page to whet our appetites.

Kate Moss Topshop website

Topshop it seems are getting it right online. Not only this quick preview type of website but also their ’style notes’ retain the interest every week, an RSS feed of their top 10 ‘Daily fix’, a Style Blog with competitions a video podcast site and more. There’s been much talk of retailers embracing web 2.0 and what it means to them (I know … let’s have a forum) with even a 16 page pullout in Retail Week. But, Topshop it seems are ahead of the game, especially since two thirds of UK fashion retailers don’t have a transactional website yet. I know it’s only April but are they going to miss out on online sales at Christmas again?

As the antithesis of Topshop’s multi stranded online marketing model Primark launches a new store in Oxford Street this week. Their website doesn’t exactly celebrate this, no doubt it’s in construction but it does let down what is otherwise a good value fashion retailer.

Primark's website opening pagePrimark's website click through page

Can design make a difference?

Recently we attended a new business meeting with a prospective client. Previously we’d sent them some of our marketing blurb material and had been rebuffed. however since then we’d had a phone call to arrange a meeting, so off we went.

This is a business that works in fashion retail and considering they’d invited us we assumed that the answer to the question at the top of this post was a given, i.e. of course design can make a difference, and rather a big one at that. The Design Council has even got a whole website dedicated to the difference design can make, even going as far as to say “Every £100 a design alert business spends on design increases turnover by £225.” That’s a huge fact, multiply that investment by a few thousand or hundred thousand pounds and it’s pretty good odds that some of that turnover will be profit, if it’s done right of course, and of course there’s the Design Effectiveness Awards. So, when in our meeting, we came across the question of design actually making a difference how did we answer? Well, not very well actually. We’d made an assumption that an invitation to meet meant this prospective client had an understanding of retail design (since that’s what we do) which rapidly became apparent that this wasn’t the case, even though his business is a reasonably succesful fashion retailer with a chain of 40 shops nationwide and a very succesful standalone e-tail business. We’d done our research, visited a few of his stores, spent quite a few hours going through his websites, even shopped on one of them, but what were totally unprepared for was the scepticism that we encountered about our industry and retail design in particular.

So although we know the answer to our initial question, can design make a difference?, perhaps the real question should be how do we educate someone who is so cynical about what we do? Do we go into a meeting armed with Design Council facts and figures? I suspect that’s not immediately going to win someone over, especially at a senior level. His reasoning was that they were doing pretty well thank you, why should we ‘add some design in’ or some ‘nice graphics’ as that sounds a bit risky.

Of course the answer is his business already uses design, the problem is it uses it very badly so his experience of using design is not a good one. It already pays money for bad design, and bad marketing material which is inconsistent and amateur. This in turn makes them look cheap and unauthentic, (as opposed to a true value proposition) and doesn’t make the difference to his bottom line that good design would. I suspect the cost of his bad design is roughly similar to the cost of good design but the true cost of the bad design might be his turnover is less than it should be, he alienates some customers because they don’t want to shop in his stores or when they are in them can’t find what they want, see the product well enough or find a way to purchase it. The longer term cost might be that soon his stores will look tired and dated, in fact some of them already do, and newer, fresher more vibrant and entreprenurial businesses in the same retail field will come along and take his ground, or even established retailers looking for a move into a growth market will take his profit margin and he won’t be able to compete because he won’t have a strategic vision that includes a joined up retail design strategy because he underestimates its importance.

All retailers know they constantly need to look over their shoulders as well as being able to reinvent, renew and constantly evolve which is why a good relationship with a design company that understands a business can be worth its weight in gold; quite literally.

Make friends with your consultant

A good view on Retail Bulletin about how to use we ‘consultants’. We often have a different view, not necessarily better, mainly because our angle of attack and our view of the world may be different.