Inline, Online, Off

I’ve Moved

After 7 years publishing on Tumblr, I’ve moved over to Medium. Some of these posts are archived over there and I’ll figure out what to do with my URL shortly. 

https://medium.com/@GiGiDowns 

How Homeware Stores Like IKEA, Crate and Barrel and West Elm Are Transforming Retail

Good highlights on what stores are doing to build their place in communities, as brands.

Breathe life into merchandise

The first thing the West Elm president Jim Brett did when he took the reigns in 2010 was to revamp the company’s product lines. According to FastCompany, Brett got rid of their “spiritless” (i.e. dull) products and sourced merchandise with more personality and stories behind them.

He “remerchandised the stores and catalogs to convey a sense of creativity and discovery,” and invested more in handcrafted products.

See if you can do the same thing in your store. If sales are flat, it could be because your products aren’t vibrant or unique enough. Perhaps it’s time to spice things up by introducing exotic designers or sourcing from new artists.

Build communities around your stores

Brett also transformed West Elm’s locations from mere “stores” to “community hubs,” by encouraging associates to forge genuine relationships with their customers.

Rather than just selling them stuff, for example, associates and consultants could recommend great restaurants or other establishments.

In addition, West Elm started running classes that encouraged locals to gather ‘round and learn new skills. These classes were non-salesy; instead of trying to subtly push people into buying products, West Elm focused on strengthening their local communities.

More here

Tuning Out at 33

33 is a mystical number, apparently when people are at their happiness, and yet tragically, when they stop listening to new music.

The study, which is based mainly on data from U.S. Spotify users, concludes that age 33 is when, on average, people stop discovering new music and begin the official march to the grave.

Yep, statistically, this seems to suggest that people in their thirties on the subway are privately loving the same songs those awful teens are bumping in their parents’ rides. 

Musical ignorance bliss. 

The Iteration Effect on Fragrance and Consumer Goods

Having recently become quite obsessed with what the end of scarcity will do to values and markets, I’ve started viewing the current consumables culture through a lens of being one that exists somewhere between fast fashion and 3D printing. Yes, even the slow luxury and/or artisanal industries will be facing a future where abundance trumps scarcity, and demand is upended. 

As I read about Balenciaga releasing a “fragrance upgrade,” I couldn’t help but wonder how long it will be until I can receive or “print” a molecule to drop into my fragrance in order to update it vs. buying a new one. 

As Luxury Daily reported, “French fashion house Balenciaga has already created a reinterpretation of its latest fragrance, B. Balenciaga after its release in October.As the first scent created by then-newly appointed creative director Alexander Wang, the fragrance garnered sizable attention for both brand and designer. Nearly six months later, the fragrance has already been reinterpreted as B. Balenciaga Skin signaling a trend of over saturation in the perfume sector.”

The late 2000s saw some dire times for perfumeries and fragrance makers. Despite and perhaps due to the proliferation of celebrity scents, the industry is facing dwindling natural resources, and an almost anti-loyalty movement driven by tryvertising and subscription services like Birchbox. 

Smart marketers are editorializing their products, leaning heavily on social media to tell stories and drive desire but can this possibly keep pace? 

The tech industry’s penchant for agile, iterative product cycles, I think has trained consumers to expect everything to always be updating. Having researched their values behaviors for a CPG personal care brand last year, I learned that the so-called Gen Y and Z aren’t in the slightest bit phased when their apps, phones, TVs, cars and treadmills reboot themselves to update to improved experiences. And in fact, the expectation that iterative updates will occur is leaking from the Internet to the Internet of Things, and all over actual things. 

The entire supply chain costs from bottling, packaging, distributing, and marketing new fragrances is enough to cripple some brands. So how near are we to a real disruption in this market? Aside from 3D printed make-up maker, Mink, I’ve yet to see big beauty embrace this inevitable evolution. 

Fast Media Requires a Mid-Tempo Approach to Work

So much good in Fast Writing: Ethnography in the Digital Age

“Ethnography in the digital age requires us to avoid conflating the fast with the ephemeral or the vacuous. The aggregative and cumulative dimensions of social media, as well as their far-reaching scope, force us to re-think what constitutes an enduring or transformative social action.”

Robots and Human Interaction

Driverless cars, drones, and AI dominated much of the programming and promotional space at this year’s SxSW Interactive festival. This trend is far from a newcomer to SXSWi but this year the prevalence of robotics went to new and quirky levels this year with the Robot Petting Zoo.

While all of these things are just computers in different types of boxes, the word robot seemed far more enticing to the media and the madding crowd. Despite its presence, robot is a relatively new word to the English language – credited to a Czech playwright, novelist and journalist Karel Čapek, who introduced it in his 1920 hit play, R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots). When he wrote his cautionary tale about unemotional creatures that were taking over humans, he named them in part from the word robota, meaning servitude or forced labor and the word orbus to mean orphaned.

It’s hard not to feel a twinge of pity for these lonely little laborers and evaluate our relationship with them. From the companionable petbots like Pleo, Paro, and AIBO (and that painfully sad funeral), to the more sophisticated humanoids like Pepper and Jimmy and Jibo; and even Geppetto Avatars’ software robot, Sophie, a key factor in a robot’s ability to be social is their ability to correctly understand and respond to people’s speech and the underlying context or emotion.

Hence I had to attend “The Rise of the Social Robot” talk, which promised a group of panelists all of whom are “extending the field of social robots in ways we didn’t think possible a few years ago.”

The brilliant Andra Keay, Founder & GM of Robot Launch/Silicon Valley Robotics deftly moderated the panel wherein Mark Stephen Meadows, CSO of Geppetto Labs, Alex Reben, Founder and CEO of Blabdroid, and Filmmaker Tiffany Shlain asked, “as robots get smarter how important is emotion?” “Can robots ‘understand’ emotion?” and “What are the ethical implications of ‘emotional’ robots?”

I love Alex Reben’s adorable cardboard robots, one of which was perched on the edge of the table, smiling sweetly at us during the talk. His bots, voiced by an unassuming seven year-old boy, have been making a documentary, roaming around asking people questions like, “Tell me something that you’ve never told a stranger before,” “What’s the worst thing you’ve done to someone?” and “Who do you love most in the world?” All of this to test MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum’s “ELIZA effect,” which found that people are inclined to anthropomorphize computers and thus engage emotionally with artificial intelligence.

Tiffany Shlain showed an episode from her new series – a discussion with her husband Ken Goldberg, professor of robotics and automation at UC Berkley, about why we’re making so much technology that’s seemingly getting more creepy. In the short film, she explores the concepts of surveillance, awareness, and the like-ability curve of revulsion from robots that are too human-like, and humans that are too robot-like.

There was an interesting moment in the discussion when someone asked whether the day would come in which the majority of people would prefer relationships with robots over humans. Based on the uncanny valley and for anyone who’s seen Her, that strikes me as highly unlikely but over in another panel about our personal relationship with robots, Dr. Cynthia Breazeal, founder and CEO of Jibo noted, “We’ve been waiting for the time when these robots are going to come into our homes and our daily lives – and I think the time is finally upon us. I will argue that we are at this inflection point; I think, in many ways, because of the mobile computing revolution and the cloud computing revolution, and the drivers on that to make sensors/computation/wireless networking very high-performance and cost-effective, it has allowed us to finally build sophisticated robots at a mass consumer price point.”

Commoditization of robots as consumer products felt like the key takeaway from the festival but the lingering question for me was when it comes to how we categorize robots: are they pets, toys, or friends – because they certainly aren’t appliances or computers.