Looking back to when I started this blog, it would have been reasonable to expect an inevitable march of retailing from offline to online. Amazon was on a tear and search advertising volumes were increasing year on year. By the time I was at Yahoo! search advertising (focused on online retailing) counted for about half of all revenue for the company.
At that time Yahoo! had a Spotify-like subscription streaming music service that was viewed as a threat to Apple’s iTunes download only offering. When I worked there Yahoo Music was the number one online music site in terms of audience reach and total time spent by consumers on the site. Also display advertising was much bigger for brands than it is today and Yahoo! was guaranteed a good share of the online marketing spend from any movie launch at the time.
The reality of online retailing, was slower than our expectations. While COVID drove an increase in online retailing there has also been corresponding innovations in retailing as well.
Amongst the pioneers in this change have been luxury brands like Burberry and Nike, who brought digital into their stores to provide a superior customer experience.
Adidas brought manufacturing into its stores with its speedfactory experiment, allowing for fast time to market and customisation.
Supreme changed the cadence of retailing with the Thursday morning ‘drop’ which saw queues outside stores. Every Thursday became a launch day as far as their customers where concerned. The queue has moved from Apple’s annual cadence, to every week.
Very Ralph is a documentary that celebrates the career of Ralph Lauren. What’s interesting is Lauren’s lack of expertise in fashion and design. Instead Very Ralph captures Lauren’s childhood ability as a stylist and art director to eventually create a Ralph Lauren world. Very Ralph became a descriptor of a style and a lifestyle. It’s a very unique way of brand building that you usually see from the likes of Muji rather than many luxury brands.
If Apple could have a ‘Very Ralph‘ moment their role in luxury tech would be cemented beyond the Mac and the iPhone. Charlie Rose’s seminal interview with Ralph Lauren is also worth watching.
Living wake
A generation before me in Ireland, living wakes were a thing. Usually it was when a member of the family was migrating to the United States, Canada or Australia. Michelle ‘Mike’ Ng’s living wake was because she had state four cancer. The film is an emotional rollercoaster.
Miss Goddess of Beauty
A lot of what keeps Hong Kong (and Singapore for that matter), is the hundreds of thousands of domestic helpers who run middle class households. They cook, care for the elderly, clean the homes, do the shopping and bring up the children. While being cheery and sociable people they largely remain unseen and unheard; except for Sundays when they congregate in public spaces.
Despite the western view of beauty pageants as objectifying women by MEN, Miss Goddess of Beauty is different. It allows these women to to be seen and creatively express themselves. The entire event is organised by the community of domestic helpers. Although the ladies are predominantly Filipinas, there is at least one Indonesian participant in the pageant – a solidarity built on a shared experience in Hong Kong.
Quentin Tarantino on going to see The Matrix
Tarantino recalls how the TV spots, rather than reviews or word-of-mouth drove the viewership of The Matrix. The power of advertising to build a world that excited the heck out of the audience before they saw the movie.
The luxury sector is undergoing a transformation, and nowhere is that more apparent than in the world of boutique e-tailers. I am of a generation that grew up with boutiques, carefully curated fashion looks from multiple brands.
As a child, my Mam would get me jumpers as I grew up from different small stores like this. To this day, the ultimate compliment she would give any item of clothing was that it was ‘exclusive’.
As I started buying my own clothes I pivoted between sports shops for my footwear, Ellis Brigham for layers, Caran D’Ache – a menswear boutique in Birkenhead at the time for jeans and ‘going out’ clothing. (Having known the owner/manager quite well, I suspect that the store was named after the Swiss writing instrument company, rather than the pseudonym of French satirist Emmanuel Poiré). This was where I got my first down jacket (by Naf Naf), Oshkosh B’gosh dungarees and Champion sweatshirts. At the time Ellis Brigham was a sea of Polartec and Gore-tex with no down jackets in sight.
I started venturing further afield and went to Quiggins in Liverpool, Affleck’s Palace in Manchester and what’s now the Victoria Quarter in Leeds. I’d also started coming down to London with friends to find brands I couldn’t get at home.
Famous high-end boutiques like Browns built a reputation for championing up and coming womenswear designers like Hussein Chalayan and Alexander McQueen. They also helped the likes of Ralph Lauren, Jil Sander and Calvin Klein start seeing in London. At their best boutiques moved culture as curators and taste makers. I got my love of American workwear from Caran D’Ache and Japanese streetwear from the late lamented Hideout which was just off Golden Square.
Department stores were the first aggregators of boutiques with a mix of single brand and multi-brand concessions under one roof. Brands like Selfridges, Harvey Nichols, Isetan, Lane Crawford, Mitsukoshi, Neiman Marcus, Saks Fifth Avenue, SEIBU and Shinsegae.
These established businesses have their place, indeed LVMH owns a number of selective retail businesses like DFS (often known as T Galleria), Le Bonne Marché and Starboard Cruises. So multi-brand distribution has a place in the luxury retail mix. Over time the premium department store brands and LVMH’s select retail brand would both have boutique e-tailers within their brands providing an omni-channel experience.
In the run up to COVID, multi-brand retail counted for 57 percent of luxury sales, management consultancy Bain expect this to decline to 36 percent of luxury sales by 2030.
Online
Online continues to disrupt retailing over a quarter century after it landed. The first casualties were book stores and music stores. Twenty years ago, one of the most enjoyable activities that I did in my spare time was rifling through record store shelves, digging for surprising or elusive vinyl records, CDs and DVDs.
Some of the places were I did this are long gone, like Tower Records in Piccadilly Circus. On the flipside, new businesses sprang up to be online first, or online only. Amazon started as a book store and eventually became the modern-day equivalent of the Sears Roebuck catalogue.
Luxury was no exception and a variety of dedicated boutique e-tailers sprang up:
Matches
MyTheresa
Net-a-Porter
YOOX
Farfetch
In the same way that mobile operators were the key determinators of whether mobile phone shops were successful, luxury brands had the whip hand over multi-brand boutiques. Phones4U died when its relationships with EE and Vodafone came to an end. The FT article The implosion in luxury ecommerce implied a similar pivotal moment between Farfetch and Kering, but with Farfetch managing to sell itself to Korean e-tailing business Coupang instead of going into administration.
One brand / one store
Luxury brands have looked to gain more control over their customer experience and get closer to the customer overall. This has seen many brands open single brand stores. Up until the 1980s, Louis Vuitton sold mostly through department stores, now it’s mostly through its own brand channels. Some brands like Audemars Piaget, now only sell through their own single brand showrooms.
The big name department stores continued to hold a position in the marketplace due to their own brand power, even while smaller mid-market stores in provincial cities folded.
Over time, brands extended their shop front into the online sphere. This was done once two things were able to happen:
An all-up online and offline view of a given customer and CRM systems allowed this to happen. This wasn’t for efficiency reasons to go online only, but to provide an omnichannel service to match customer’s omni-channel lifestyles.
Getting this all-up view will also help with future EU legislation moving towards a circular economy.
The ability to provide a high level delivery experience for online purchases. This mattered less with fragrances than it did with watches and handbags. High security logistics providers like Ferrari were able to provide this to the main luxury brands.
One small chink of hope for multi-brand stores is that single brand stores may be forced to either change business practices, or insulate themselves from legal action via authorised dealerships. A court case brought by two women against Hermés in the US claims that having to buy other products to get a crack at purchasing a Birkin bag is a violation of antitrust laws.
The obligation to buy other products first, is what the women claim is an ‘illegal tying arrangement’ which is why Hermés might be in violation of antitrust laws. Other brand who have authorised dealers rather than their own showrooms are less likely to be at risk.
Compressed middle-class
One of the first things that I learned when doing LVMH’s INSIDE LVMH certificate was that the bulk of luxury purchases are made by the middle classes.
Robert Gordon’s Rise and Decline of American Growth outlined how the middle classes in America (but also many other western countries). Income inequality, automation and globalisation drove a stagnation and decline in middle class numbers, even as the number wealthy increased.
Globalisation elevated a new middle class in Asian countries like Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Thailand. Energy drove middle class growth in the countries surrounding the Persian gulf and Nigeria. Louis Vuitton opened their first show rooms in the US in 1914, in Japan in 1978 (though department stores had been selling their products for years). The first Korean shop opened in 1984 and China eight years later.
Over the past few decades this was compensated by new middle classes growing. They don’t necessarily have the earning power of a middle class westerner, but the purchasing power level may vary considerably. So a middle class consumer in a country like Thailand, Malaysia or Singapore might have more disposable income than someone in the UK.
Japan’s middle class quickly reached stagnation due to the lost decades of economic growth after their 1989 asset bubble. Korea has gone through a similar challenge, it has seen raised consumption, but recently this is driven by household debt rather than prosperity.
China
Quantity is a quality of its own, which is a reason why Chinese consumers have been so important to luxury brands since the early 2000s when China joined the WTO and its economy took off. Once there was even a small growth in middle class numbers that represented a big increase in global luxury sector sales. The decline in economic growth due to the property sector bubble has dampened luxury sales to China. It is not only about the decline in ability to purchase, but also the decline in being seen to purchase western luxury goods.
This less conscious consumption started early on during the Xi administration’s desire to combat corruption and aspire to a more equal society. Gifting declined. Economic decline accelerated this Chinese macro-trend.
COVID and after
COVID changed consumption. Money that would have previously been spent on experiences such as restaurant meals or travel transferred into things. Both single brands and boutique e-tailers got a lift in this environment. But a wider economic effect is still working its way through the economy. This effect is known as the bullwhip or Forrester Effect.
This resulted in a number of economic distortions:
Partial shutdown – Consumers no longer went to work or high traffic retail hotspots. Non-essential workers didn’t go to work. Logistics systems buckled under the weight of packages and luxury businesses diverted production to support medical needs such as LVMH’s perfumes businesses making hand sanitiser.
Unusual increase in demand – Home working drove an increase in demand from media consumption and home improvement to buying more stuff from all that money they saved from not going out.
Supply chain disruption – Air cargo prioritised medical supplies while existing stock sat in empty shops.
All of this disruption which drove inflation, this reduced demand as consumers had less to spend.
Luxury brands focused on their inflation proof ultra-high net worth customer base and raised prices to compensate for the reduction in sales volume. The fight for that reduced volume pitched multi-brand boutique e-tailers against their suppliers and the results weren’t pretty.
Boutique e-tailers are going to the wall, or consolidating to weather the fiscal storm until such time as middle class consumers can start spending aspirationally again.
Some of these businesses can’t be saved. Matchesfashion, which was bought out by Frasers Group didn’t have much chance.
Welcome to my March 2024 newsletter which marks my 8th issue.
I am glad that I have moved to the eighth issue. In between St Patrick’s day happening in March, and the number 8 being lucky according to the Chinese in a good place – I figure its a good omen for this issue. 8 symbolises prosperity, joy and infinity. In Chinese pricing strategy 8 holds a similar role to 9 in western markets, so $58, $88 and $688 are frequent pricing points.
St Patrick’s day is particularly lucky for one Chinese city above all others: Yiwu in Zhejiang province is often called Christmas town. In reality it’s a city selling ‘small commodities’ better known to you and I as tat. The Christmas town epitaph came from it being the centre for the global Christmas decorations trade. It’s also where most of the St Patricks Day decorations are made including the leprechaun hats popularised around the world by Irish pubs.
New reader?
If this is the first newsletter, welcome! You can find my regular writings here and more about me here.
Things I’ve written.
Razors for strategists – how we can apply the principle of philosophical razors to aid faster solutions for client work, while also bearing in mind their limitations.
AI two-step – corporate leaders reluctant to admit AI-related job losses.
Books that I have read.
A Hacker’s Mindby by veteran technologist Bruce Schneier provides a guide to the different way people have found loopholes to ‘hack’ systems. Schneier is trying to write a social movement book,, but while it’s interesting enough to read on a plan, it will be harder for it to get people moving as he intends.
I picked up this book from Scheltema book store just off Dam Square in Amsterdam during a work trip, with a bit of time-off bolted on the end. Browsing the English language book section of foreign book stores often gives recommendations that you wouldn’t otherwise look at. Tales from the Cafe: Before the Coffee Gets Cold is book two of a four-book series by Japanese author Toshikazu Kawaguchi is difficult to characterise in terms of genre. It’s a time travel novel with distinct rules that keep its universe coherent. It’s a book that is suitable for children, but not aimed at children- in this respect its more like the childhood books that I read growing up than are popular now as the ‘young adult’ genre. It’s about love lost, but not a romance novel – the love covered is a mix of loneliness of a widower, an orphaned child and a past romance. There is something delightful about the book, especially as it captures the minutae of everyday Japanese life.
Historian Dan Jones portrayal of medieval wars in his Essex Dogs series is very well written and accessible. It’s an ideal holiday read, if you can handle the grim subject matter. The Wolves of Winter is a richer story with greater intrigue in the plot line.
Back in the early 1990s chaos theory was very much in the public zeitgeist in a rather similar way to the internet from the late 1990s to early 2000s and artificial intelligence now. I have noticed mentions of chaos theory has started to pop up again as an idea in email newsletters. Fluke Chance, Chaos and Why Everything We Do Matters resurrects chaos theory as an analogy and hypothesis for everything from global politics to emotion-driven behaviours. The author Dr Brian Klaas is a social scentist by training and has taken a few leaves out of the Malcolm Gladwell school of writing with stories to pull in the audience. I would liked to see a bit more evidence-based findings in the book. But it is a good read.
Things I have been inspired by.
TheOrangeblowfish, a Shanghai design-led agency did an amazing retail / out of home activation for Arc’teryx museum on what looks like a 3D OOH execution a la Ocean Outdoor’s Deepscreen sites in the UK.
Oliver’s white paper on How Brands Can Build Customer Trust looks at how brands can communicate about sustainability in their marketing. It’s a nice first step as a discussion document. There are a few areas I would like them to explore further:
Tonality on sustainability communications is immensely important, given the rise of climate despair amongst some consumers.
The gains earned by behavioural science are argued about, with practitioners relying on models that are often seen as overly complex and stacking of marginal gains. It has footholds in trying to drive meaningful changes in health, where small gains on paper mean a big change in lives saved, or made better. This LSE discussion on how it can be used to make democracy work better was interesting, especially given how many elections will be taking place in 2024.
Finally this paper on the polarisation of popular culture is likely to affect the way marketers think about product choice, media and culture over time. Media buying itself becomes a political act, beyond advertising on overtly political media channels and indicates a widening of the lived experience gap in society. We could see this already in the UK with Brexiter favoured brands.
Things I have watched.
The Knockdown – A Chinese drama where a Chinese Communist Party team goes to investigate a business and runs into widespread corruption. The corruption is centred around a fishmonger who gets tired of thugs and the grind of graft – he then reinvents himself as a gangster within the system. While it’s not Breaking Bad or The Sopranos, it is a good insight into how the Chinese government wants to see itself.
Flic Story – Alain Delon plays a detective pursuing a dangerous criminal in post-war France. This is based on the true story of criminal Emile Buisson who terrorised France. I did wonder whether the roof top chase scenes influenced Jackie Chan’s classic Hong Kong film Police Story in terms of plot and tension rather than his acrobatic skills?
Season 1 of Mr Inbetween had been recommended to me for years, people would rave on about it in the same way you hear about Breaking Bad or The Wire. A friend eventually sent me there copy on Blu-Ray. It has elements of Man Bites Dog about it – which makes sense when you find out it was originally adapted from Scott Ryan’s The Magician – a short fly-on-the-wall rockumentary film about a Melbourne underworld enforcer and occasional killer. Unlike Man Bites Dog – the violence is used sparingly in between the tedium of everyday life and office politics. Helen Mirren had apparently recommended it widely at the time. I am looking forward to season 2 which reputedly takes a darker turn.
Useful tools.
Sensia AI
Sensia AI is an interesting set of tools for consumer brands to easily monitor satisfaction and potential problems with their products and that of their competitors quickly, with ease and efficiently. Sensia analyses diverse data, from online reviews to e-commerce; offering useful insights. I was looking at it for consideration with regards an FMCG project that didn’t come off in the end. If you are interested. Check out some sample reports here, and if it looks of interest – contact Iris Chung.
Passport Online
I am an Irish citizen. The Irish government’s process to renew my passport and passport card via an online service was really easy. The service is called Passport Online and I couldn’t recommend it highly enough.
Untranslatable
Not necessarily something that you would use day-to-day; but definitely of interest during digging into market research transcripts or transliteration of campaigns across different markets and languages. Untranslatable is a dictionary of idioms and expressions. The creators are native speakers, so you get the different cultural nuances.
New ways of using Miro
If you work in brand or connections planning or have thought customer experiences you’ve probably heard of Milanote, Miro or Mural. They also came to the fore with COVID-19 as virtual workshops became much more of a thing. Recently, I have been experiencing new user cases for these platforms. To present:
Creative briefs.
Sharing creative with clients.
A quick folder that holds key documents and shows the links between them.
Zettelkasten
Trying to build that vast mental model to then wrap into a narrative for clients. Vicky Zhao revisits the analogue technique of Zettelkasten. Your mileage may vary. It does remind me of the way I use social bookmarking as a data bank and mind maps as a creative process in writing. I can also recommend Umberto Eco’s How to Write a Thesis for similar organisation ideas.
The sales pitch.
Now taking bookings for strategic engagements from April, or discussions on permanent roles. Contact me here.
Ok this is the end of my March 2024 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and watch out for any April fools tricks being attempted on you.
Don’t forget to get in touch, share and subscribe!
Let me know if you have any recommendations to be featured in forthcoming issues.
My mind cast back to one of the first modules I studied at college. There was a lecture on the role of complaint resolution as part of customer services. The idea was that effective complaint resolution engendered trust in a customer service function and was more likely to increase brand loyalty and recommendation to other people. In reality Ehrensberg-Bass Institute have explored this area in more depth and found that customer penetration is more important than customer loyalty.
US National Archives: Approaching Logan Airport. 05/1973 by Michael Manheim
I suspect that the benefit in complaint resolution is more around a premium brand positioning rather than the business benefits of loyalty. This is an interesting frame to consider AirHelp’s global airline ranking. Unlike SkyTrax that focuses on experience, AirHelp weighs its ranking heavily on complaint resolution.
British Airways came 82nd out of 83 airlines assessed, which won’t be a surprise to anyone who has flown with them over the past four years.
Many airlines that would have a high SkyTrax service ranking, didn’t perform as well on complaint resolution.
So there wasn’t a clear correlation between experience resolving lots of customer complaints or a highly evolved service offering.
Emerging car brands scrutinised by Bloomberg and Grant Thornton | Manufacturer – “Chinese brands are dominating the scene with good products, big screens, and impressive interfaces.” However, the challenge arises when considering pricing, as Chinese EVs like the XPeng’s G9 SUV was 72,000 euros competing against the likes of BMW and Mercedes. So they’re going to find it very, difficult and it’s going to come down to price.” Dean pointed out MG’s success in the UK market was achieved by hitting exactly the right sweet spot in terms of pricing. The MG ZS, the second-best-selling battery electric vehicle in the UK, is priced at an average of £31,000, making it compelling in terms of competitive pricing especially in a country where consumers are not fiercely loyal to specific brands. – interesting reading. The way for Chinese vendors to win would be to have Chinese incentivised lease financing, particularly in a time of higher interest rates a la Huawei in the telecoms markets.
American men are dying younger. – by Richard V Reeves – I just don’t think this can be addressed in the current climate of othering and privilege. It would be like trying to hold a meaningful discussion on immigration a few decades ago.
Xi in Nanning; Shanghai and Beijing real estate tweaks; More Hong Kong bounties; Sim Love | Sinocism – the Hong Kong puts bounty on the head of US citizen who has criticised the Hong Kong government in the US. They are all ethic Chinese. So China and the Hong Kong government think that ethnic Chinese wherever they are should be loyal to their respective administrations – in essence their face is their passport. Not even Israel does something similar with the the world’s Jewish community, or Ireland with our diaspora.
Innovation
Quantum Breakthrough: Caltech Scientists Unveil New Way To Erase Quantum Computer Errors – Researchers from Caltech have developed a quantum eraser to correct “erasure” errors in quantum computing systems. This technique, which involves manipulating alkaline-earth neutral atoms in laser light “tweezers,” allows for the detection and correction of errors through fluorescence. The innovation leads to a tenfold improvement in entanglement rates in Rydberg neutral atom systems, representing a crucial step forward in making quantum computers more reliable and scalable.
Welcome to my January 2024 newsletter which marks my 6th issue – bringing us to a half dozen issues in total. Here’s a quick video introduction that I recorded with HeyGen.
Dozen as a word in the English language comes from the french douzaine – meaning an assembly of 12 things of the same nature. This in turn was derived from roots in Latin. Weirdly enough the use of dozen plunged to a nadir in 1983 and then enjoyed steady growth to reach its most recent peak in 2018.
The sun rises reluctantly over the horizon every morning, disappearing each afternoon, but that doesn’t mean that inspiration stops. But each day is getting slightly more daylight here in London and in a few months we could be complaining about the heat.
Watch Registry – how a confluence of EU regulations and surging crime has driven a new category of online service.
Pebble – micro-blogging service Pebble went under in November last year. Here’s what we lost.
Loneliness – its impact and some of the solutions that are evolving to address it.
Backroom – how one of my photos went around the web and ended up in an online game.
Every old idea is new again – a mix of collective amnesia and the less than perfect memory of the web means that old ideas have their time as new creative.
Books that I have read.
Over the new year, I curled up on the sofa with 2034 by Elliot Ackerman and Admiral James Stavridis. Ackerman and Stavridis plot out a political pot boiler about what a future war with China might look like. The realpolitik of the book feels real, the main issue would be the complete passivity of smaller powers like the United Kingdom and France. The rise of India and the fall of China as a global power at the end is an interesting commentary on the current Xi-led government. The book seems to set out to do a few jobs. First and foremost it’s a call to arms about American preparedness (it isn’t prepared). Secondly, it’s a warning about over-relying on technology, over base skills like astral navigation – something that the advertising industry could learn from as we fumble forward across AI, martech and adtech in a time of declining effectiveness. But the book also irritated me and pulled me out of of the story with magical thinking in Chinese technology and having every part of a plane including an ejector seat open to being hacked and disabled. I could imagine car manufacturers leaving their safety systems open, but would have thought that the military would have been more sensible about their safety equipment.
How Did Britain Come to This?: A century of systemic failures of governance by Gwen Bevan. How Clement Attlee’s administration solved issues of minimal government in the post-war period and these solutions held up until the early 1970s. How Margaret Thatcher’s solution of markets for everything suffered from market failures over the years. All of which resulted in geography as destiny in terms of social outcomes.
Among the Braves: Hope, Struggle, and Exile in the Battle for Hong Kong and the Future of Global Democracy by Shibani Mahtani and Timothy McLaughlin – an interesting portrayal of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement from the perspective of foreign journalists in the region. McLaughlin writes for The Atlantic and is based out of Singapore, Mahtani does a similar role for the Washington Post. The whole society movement of the protests is something that comes out in the books and makes me think that the authorities will have a longer term job to keep their illiberal agenda going. But on the flipside the American foreign policy looks weak and ineffective in the face of China. What most surprised me was how the authors uncovered details inside the government and the police force. Probably the most explosive allegation is that the Organised Crime and Triad Bureau of the Hong Kong Police were monitoring the WhatsApp group chat used by multiple rival gangs to organise the attack on Yuen Long train station. There is a large overlap between rural political committees in the Yuen Long area and triads. We know that the police did not prevent it, did nothing about it when it happened and conducted minimal prosecutions. Chief executive Carrie Lam was getting her news from the television rather than intelligence gathered using open source, human intelligence sources and ‘exquisite‘ means. Some members of the government related to mainland affairs seem to have had an indication of what was coming, but there is no evidence that Lam knew.
Things I have been inspired by.
Swiss International Airlines, the city of Geneva and the Grand Prix D’Horologerie de Genève did a classic PR stunt in October 2023. A flight crew member supervised by a watchmaker assembled a mechanical watch mid-flight between Geneva and New York at an altitude at 30,000 feet. In the idea you have precision, innovation, expertise, professionalism, quality and skill. A solid fusion of complementary brands, brand planning and creative ideation.
Unfortunately, the story seems to have been eclipsed by the Israel – HAMAS conflict in the Gaza region. The uncertainty of the news agenda illustrates the weakest point of a campaign relying purely on earned media.
Etsy and agency The Orchard nailed gift buying with their spot ‘Dad’. The insight that family members often don’t want gifts and are concerned about clutter or the ‘wrong type’ of gifts is on-point. There is the additional layer of thriftiness that comes from being part of an immigrant family – be they Irish or Asian.
The idea also had me reflect on the time I spent helping to sort through my late Uncle’s belongings on the family farm back home in Ireland. There were ‘new old stock’ ties still in their packaging and an Insignia aftershave / shower gel gift set from sometime in the early 1990s in his drawers. Stashed there after being gifted, but unneeded.
Thoughtful gifts are priceless.
While the ad is aimed at Christmas, I saw it as I thought about my Dad’s birthday. My own parents exhibit the traits of not wanting gifts and thriftiness. But in my case, no Etsy-sleuthing was required however, with a bit of cajoling he knew precisely what he wanted from the Toolstation catalogue. The collector gene runs deep in the Carroll family.
https://youtu.be/4VI6rgps_Bc?si=pHQpElVLc_KlDecI
The Orchard for Etsy
While a lot of London had their out of office on until January 15th, New Balance had their skates on previewing Scorpius, Rose Water and Medusa Azúl variants of the 1906R in association with Action Bronson. The clever thing that they have done is that each of the colour ways have a variation in brightness, appealing to sneaker heads of different temperaments. For me this was more exciting than Louis Vuitton’s collaboration with Timberland also announced this month.
7-Eleven Hong Kong did one of the first campaigns that merged generative AI techniques with traditional advertising production values including extensive use of green screens and wire work that would have been more at home in the fantasy martial arts films Hong Kong made famous.
4.5 billion years in an hour. A great way to bring data to life in a way that we wouldn’t otherwise be able to fathom. It also works well as a background for writing late at night as well. It did remind me of Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy for some reason, and that’s no bad thing.
I was looking at the underlying code on one of my flickr photo pages and came across this recruitment advert embedded in the code. I thought it was quite cleverly done in terms of targeting a technical audience.
A bit of a late find for me, the Computer History Museum held a 2-hour event interviewing key people in the development of the Apple Mac, in order to celebrate the 40th anniversary of its launch. There is so much that can be still learned today from their experience. You can watch it here.
Finally, Tom Coates shed more light on what we are likely to see platform-wise from a post-Twitter future.
Things I have watched.
It’s cold and dark and I make no apology for my films being unapologetically escapist and and entertaining to try and counterweight the drab conditions.
Something Wicked This Way Comes – Something Wicked This Way Comes was made in the UK during that many Disney fans describe as the studios ‘dark period’. From 1967 – 1984, the Disney family connection to the business was severed through deaths and a resignation. Film quality declined while shows and theme parks supported the business until Michael Eisner . Something Wicked This Way Comes has a fantastic cast including blaxploitation starlet Pam Grier, Broadway and Hollywood veteran Jason Robards and a young Jonathan Pryce, now better known as David Cartwright, former spook and River Cartwright’s grandfather in Slow Horses. The film is based on a book by Ray Bradbury. The film has a similarly surreal nature to Willy Wonka and The Chocolate Factory.
I sat and watched Wild Palms. I hadn’t watched it all the way through previously and I found it much more rewarding to watch than similar shows like Twin Peaks. There is that slight dissonance and discomfort you have watching it that reminded me of reading JG Ballard’s works.
The Criterion Collection released a sympathetic digital remastering of Frederico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. With a lot of similar projects the work adds little, but The Criterion Collection are no ordinary publisher and the film needed a lot of work. So much so, that it took donations from Gucci and government bodies to ensure that the work was done to a high standards. The results are right there on screen, the sound has had excessive background noise cleaned up as well. It isn’t excessively loud like the audio on the remaster of Sergio Leone’s crowning achievement Once Upon A Time in the West, but it does benefit from the clarity provided. The films commentary on the hollowness of the media industry is timeless as is its tour of Rome: ancient and modern.
Michael Fassbender’s Road to Le Mans – Porsche sponsored online film series that goes through Michael Fassbender’s journey to drive the Le Mans 24 hour race.
I am a huge fan of French police dramas from the 1960s to the present day and was really impressed by Netflix show Blood Coast. It features Olivier Marchal on some of the writing and directing duties. Marchal created Braquo, which ran for three seasons until 2016.
Not exactly something to watch, but the Hot Money: The New Narcos is an amazing high adrenalin podcast with the Kinahan family and the Dubai Super-cartel at the centre of it all.
Useful tools.
ABBYY Business Card Reader.
ABBYY Business Card Reader allows you to convert business cards into contacts.app entries on your iPhone or iPad – this then syncs with my Mac as part of iCloud services. While I don’t receive as many business cards as I used to, this is still a really useful time-saver.
WolframAlpha.
WolframAlpha is a handy shortcut for data points that Statista, WARC etc. doesn’t or won’t have.
Beeper.
Beeper is a multi-protocol messaging client. You can have Slack, LinkedIn, iMessage, WhatsApp and Discord all in one client. It works on both Macs and iPhones.
WaveAI Note taker.
Wave AI is an app that provides call note taking functionality using speech to text conversation. It is based on a freemium business model. Give it a try to see if it works with your style of working. An alternative to consider is Vienna Scribe, both seem to give better results than otter.ai
Portable second monitor.
When working away from the office or home, I have found a second monitor to come in handy. The one I use is from ASUS and comes with a protective cover that doubles as a stand.
Ok this is the end of my January 2024 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Gong hei fat choy for the forthcoming Chinese new year. It will be the year of the dragon on February 10th.
