Minneapolis is a bike town. Portland is a bike town. Venice Beach is a bike town.
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Hey, what’s with all the bikes?
Category: New Ideas Blog Comments Off | July 29, 2010
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Tarot card entrepreneurs
Further proof that people are being blindsided until they’re bleary-eyed by the steady downstream of change (and they don’t know what the f*ck is going on) is that fortune-tellers are sprouting up faster than tattoo shops. Not the world’s oldest profession, we’re just going to claim that crystal balls, tea leaves and reading tarot cards is the second oldest entrepreneurial art. Any man or woman with two chairs, a folding card table, and a moustache can start their own pop-up shop. Which is what has been happening. We’ve spotted them in their ancient Manhattan and Venice Beach haunts, of course. And now also in the Plain Old Plains States of Kansas, Minnesota, Wisconsin and elsewhere.
Category: New Ideas Blog Comments Off | July 28, 2010
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Billionaire Boys Club
This brand has caught our eye from Bleeker Street to Santa Barbara. Billionaire Boys Club and Ice Cream are two lines of luxury clothing established by Pharrell of The Neptunes and Nigo, founder of BAPE. The lines consist of T-shirts, polos, sweatshirts, knits, denim, suits and shirts; outerwear in leather, down, cotton, and technical fabrics; hats, sneakers, underwear, socks and accessories. The items are produced in very limited quantities and are usually sold for high prices and manufactured in Japan.
http://www.bbcicecream.com/
Category: New Ideas Blog Comments Off | July 27, 2010
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Cotton On. Au.
One of the most interesting things about retailer Cotton On, located on the Santa Monica Promenade, is that it’s from Australia—a nation known for its wool. (In fact, a gross amount of Australia’s gross national product has historically been wool.) The first impression walking in, is that Cotton On is an Urban Outfitters knockoff. And it may be. But after shopping around, visitors understand that CO brings its own perspective into the store. In fact, some items are even design-edgier than UO.
Category: New Ideas Blog Comments Off | July 26, 2010
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Cotton On. Au.
One of the most interesting things about retailer Cotton On, located on the Santa Monica Promenade, is that it’s from Australia—a nation known for its wool. (In fact, a gross amount of Australia’s gross national product has historically been wool.) The first impression walking in, is that Cotton On is an Urban Outfitters knockoff. And it may be. But after shopping around, visitors understand that CO brings its own perspective into the store. In fact, some items are even design-edgier than UO.
Category: New Ideas Comments Off |
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K. Frank in Santa Barbara, CA unloads huge amount of splendid.
We have spotted this shop on State Street during prior trips and it continues to amaze. Despite the distraction of a Mardis Gras-esque summer solstice parade festival happening outside their doors (and World Cup soccer playing in all the bars), we found a killtacular collection of men’s clothing. Never seen before artisinal jackets by Robert Comstock, Gimos ($1500), Robert Graham shirts, and other things we like. What’s it like? Think mini-Fred Segal (but with a staff who looks like they can actually afford the clothes when their quarterly trust fund checks arrive) or a Barney’s Mini-Me, without the tude. Go. Now.
www.kfrankstyle.com
Category: New Ideas Blog Comments Off | July 22, 2010
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High, wind-powered and lonesome.
I am on the Danish peninsula, a green land dotted with milk cows, hedgerows and housewives pedaling black bicycles steadily into the wind. The airstream blows incessantly off the Atlantic, which is why it is unremarkable yet surreal to find a giant ten-story high white propeller slowly rotating in the wind. Of course, the Danish have been using wind power for centuries to sail ships and turn millwheels. It is probably more remarkable to spot a wind turbine on Union Square, which is exactly what I did yesterday during a eco-friendly symposium. And then a few blocks down in the café at ABC Carpet, a friend started telling me about plan to install wind-powered air conditioners in Manhattan, a plan that was in full eco-smart swing until the city changed its zoning laws to prohibit utilities hanging from New York City windows. Even if they’re just trying to catch the westward breeze. Now I am flying 10,000 feet over eastern Pennsylvania on the final route into LaGuardia and looking down below, I spot dozens of wind turbines. The line of white stands in contrast to the green mountain slope. Even at altitude, their momentous size dwarfs the trees. White props rotate serenely, like the giant automaton hands of cheerleaders begging the crowd to join in.
Category: New Ideas Blog Comments Off | July 21, 2010
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Branding lesson from Tide.
Remarks former P&G executive John Lilly (also former ceo of Pillsbury), “You could take out 1% of the cleaning ingredients in Tide every year and no one would know the difference. Until they go out of business.”
Category: New Ideas Blog Comments Off | July 20, 2010
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What century is this, anyway?
Spotted a billboard for a camera in Los Angeles that read, IF IT HAS A RINGTONE, IT’S NOT A CAMERA. This reads as a desperate attempt to hold back the tide of digital apps that are supplanting everything from maps to restaurant guides to newspapers. We are at an inflexion point, and this sorry defense in the camera category is not unlike the protest 10 years ago that digital did not look as good as film. It didn’t, it doesn’t, and nobody cares.
Category: New Ideas Blog Comments Off | July 19, 2010
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Goodbye, Polaroid. Hello, Polaroid?
A couple of years ago, we were led through the deserted offices of the formerly hot hot hot Polaroid Corporation. Set in rolling hills amidst a pine forest west of Boston, the Polaroid headquarters was a mix of buildings rendered in 1950s modern architecture that you guess was probably at one time featured in Architectural Digest. On this day, however, the buildings were hollowed out cadavers of a once thriving corporation. Security guards and spotty maintenance personnel prowled the grounds in golf carts. We were led to an empty cafeteria. A hierarchy chart was fixed to the cafeteria wall that listed the chemists and engineers who had been awarded the most patents. In a small locked room stood racks and racks of brown bottles of chemical compounds that had been invented, designed, innovated and created by Polaroid scientists. Those compounds were worth millions of dollars in terms of time and investment spending, and could be useful in thousands of ways to industries like printing, health care, food science and elsewhere. And you had the feeling that they could all be swept away by an errant or overzealous cleaning crew. What? You mean we weren’t supposed to through those out?
Later we watched a sales team who looked at us with the thousand-yard stare of death camp internees. They shared a descending sales graph reminiscent of a New Yorker cartoon. These days Polaroid was only being in places without digital technologies. Places like Afghanistan, Iraq, and remote communities in India and Africa. And the digital world was closing in fast.
Edwin H. Land was an engineering student when he quit Harvard. Because he had come up with an idea. He thought of a way to make a film that developed itself within a matter of seconds. There were eight substrates to Polaroid film, and they had to be laid on the base in even layers. The only way to do that, Land discovered, was to gravity feed the chemical solutions, and to take his Polaroid film into mass production that meant first putting up a building eight stories high. (The chemical layers tended to pool when put on a traditional conveyor manufacturing.)
Imagine the size of Land’s cojones. “Yes, I have this terrific idea that we can take to market. But first we have to build an eight-story building.” A lot different than contemporaries Hewlett and Packard on the opposite coast who were making up parts in their garage.
Sure enough, promoted by advertising agency Doyle Dane Bernbach, Land’s genius idea took off. People loved Polaroid film. Not only did they not have to take their film to the drugstore and wait a week to get their pictures developed, Polaroid made things like birthday parties, graduations, anniversaries, family reunions, and dates—all the things people like to capture on film, even more fun. Land’s invention was transformational.
Ordinary film scrambled to catch up. Hence the one-hour film processing centers that eventually popped up in every mall strip in America.
As the Polaroid picture grew more and more bleak, a holding company hijacked the brand to slap it on cheap T.V. sets manufactured in China. In 2009, Hilco Consumer Capital and Gordon Brothers Brands. bought all the assets of Polaroid, including the Polaroid brand, intellectual property, inventory and other assets from the bankrupt Petters Group. Let’s see how Polaroid develops from here.
Category: New Ideas Blog Comments Off | July 15, 2010