Awful Library Books site

Mary and Holly, two public librarians created this funny website Awful Library Books. They publish examples of completely outdated books that remembers us how fast does time has changed. Some titles are pretty difficult to imagine these days... !

Here is a (very) personal selection for your delight !

Paris Photo 2009

Paris Photo is getting each year better and better. Lot of people to admire the selection from worldwide galleries. Here's a sample of the 2009 edition. See you next year !

British Food Standards Agency campaign

The Food Standards Agency from UK has recently launched an ad campaign with funny anthropomorphic food characters talk between the healthy and unhealthy. These funny videos are part of the Eat well, be well program, that helps people to balance the diet and promote healthy food programs.

Interesting in the FSA website, the calorie calculator : calculate how much calories you'll burn depending on your activity (ironing, dusting, cleaning windows,...) !

Philippe Cognée at Daniel Templon

Philippe Cognée presented yesterday at the Flammarion bookstore in Beaubourg his first monography. You can have an overlook of P Cognée work at the gallery Daniel Templon till December 31th 2009. The artist is fascinated by the most banal places like the places of transit. He also realized a serie called "Supermarkets" from which the photos are a sample.

Severe Vodka Warehouse crash video

A russian fork lift driver suddenly lost control of his engine and crashed the whole warehouse. The merchandise is said to be... vodka !

A loss of 150 000 USD has been reported and happy ending, the driver got only minor injuries at his leg. The security camera got all...

Tom Fishburn cartoons

Tom Fishburne is a greaaaat cartoonist that publish on his own blog his ideas about business through cartoons. Mainly about retail, brand management and marketing, his cartoons are not only funny but also very meaningful about new trends and retail strategy. He began drawing cartoons on the back of his Harvard Business School cases. Some may be as valuable as the cases as Fishburne as a sharp and clever view on marketing stuff.

See especially his video : Everything I needed to know about innovation, I learned by drawing cartoons :

Everything I needed to know about innovation, I learned by drawing cartoons from Tom Fishburne on Vimeo.

Barcode Art

The barcode, created in 1948 by Bernard Silver has dramatically changed the way retailers do business, allowing them to increase the number of products sold and managing the inventories. The barcode is part of our modern life in which any product is identified by a scanner.

Here are a sample of interesting use of the famous barcode, mainly found in Oddee.

A Zebra Barcode photo by Tim Flach

D-Barcode is a Japanese Design Agency that creates specific barcodes (that works !) for retail products. A great packaging idea and as their slogans says "Big ideas are small"

A CD holder designed by Marián Laššák

Barcode Street Art in Northampton

Barcode Building Vitruvius & Sons Architectural Studios in St Petersburg

A visit to Patrick Roger Chocolate Factory !

We were very lucky last week end to get an invitation for a private visit to Patrick Roger Chocolate Factory. Patrick Roger is a total artist and probably creates amongst the best chocolate on earth (IMHO). I strongly recommend his Venezuela 75%, Ghana 75% or Indonesia 68% cocoa butter.

From his last creation : the Berlin wall in chocolate :

Insane wiches blog

Adrian Fiorino is the founder of the funny blog Insanewiches where you can see the most creatives sandwiches ever realized. As he wrote, " I started Insanewiches so that other foodies would have a place to waste time, especially during stressful days (...) This site is a great time-waster for fed up foodies who need a little fun injected into their routine."

So relax and admire :

Rube Goldberg Machines

Rube Goldberg machines are always fascinating. Here's one I really liked made with ketchup portions...

RAD : the top of kitsch

RADMAN selfportrait

RADMAN is a greeaaaaat blogger from the Lifelounge magazine. He daily publishes out of the world pics . Very stylish, best of the kitsch and always funny. Visit his site and beware, some pics are impressive of bad taste !

Guitar Hero Trader Joe's and other displays

Trader Joe's has developed very attractive display on its stores. Here's some samples taken in New York, NY and Phoenix, AZ

The ready to eat section in Phoenix

The sampling products section in Phoenix

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Yuken Teruya art

Yuken Teruya is a japanese artist who uses everyday objects (Mc Donald's bags, cardboard toilet paper rolls, pizza boxes...), recycling them with a nice sense of meticulosity. Nothing is added, just transformed to drastically change their meanings. The results is very poetic.

As Teruya writes :

"Pizza Boxes, a McDonald's bag, Flags, Desserts and Toilet Paper rolls... when these items become artworks, they also easily become political, maybe because they are taken from daily life. But if you find unexpected shapes and colors from the toilet rolls, they become something else. (...) I feel that my work shouldn't only have the function of conveying the artist's message. My works have a right to simply be beautiful or offer any kind of attraction."

"You can get ANYTHING at Trader Joe's" slogan made reality !

Entrance of Phoenix Trader Joe's

Where they met...

While shopping at the Phoenix, AZ Trader Joe's (4821N 20th street) this summer, I've found this (great !) customer letter from Ms Gail Petersen to Mr. Winans, "Store Captain" exhibited just close from the cashier. Worth reading ...

"Dear Mr. Winans,

On October 14, 2007 I was shopping at the Town & Country Trader Joe's - a beautiful Sunday afternoon. That shopping trip changed my life forever. I met the man I will be marrying, on October 18 this year (2008), that Sunday at your store. Our eyes caught one another a couple of times and we spoke briefly in the checkout line (the one under the Palm tree) - further conversation in the parking lot led to an exchange of business cards and the rest is history.

This is a second marriage for both of us - we will have a family with four grown children (two girls and two boys). As we have gotten to know one another we realized that we have lived or worked just a couple of miles apart over the last 13 years, know more than a few people in common and have sisters that live just five miles apart in Los Angeles. Alan is a fourth generation Arizonan and I have lived in Phoenix since 1960 - but what it took was a simple trip to our favourite grocery store to bring us together and we would like to thank you.

We shop at Trader Joe's every week and always go to the checkout line under the palm tree. We share our story with the checker and anyone else who is willing to listen. We will be buying the flowers for the bouquets for the wedding at your store and plan to stop by between the wedding at the church and our reception to take a photo under the Trader Joe's palm tree that brought us together 12 months ago.

I am a professor at Arizona State University's College of Nursing & Health Care Innovation and Alan Hock, my fiancé, is a defense attorney in private practice and pro tem judge. We have shared our story with many of our colleagues and friends - and now all of our 'over fifty ' single friends shop at Trader Joe's with the hopes that our joke, "You can get ANYTHING at Trader Joe's" will also become their romantic reality.

Our thanks to all of you who make Trader Joe's such a wonderfully unique shopping experience !"

Gail Petersen

A dream of happy customer letter !

Sam Walton's quotations

about why he established WalMart in Bentonville, Arkansas :

"It was good for me because I wanted to get closer to good quail hunting, and with Oklahoma, Kansas, Arkansas and Missouri all coming together right there it gave me access to four quail seasons in four states."

"We were forced to be ahead of our time in distribution and communication because our stores were sitting out there in tiny little towns and we had to stay in touch and keep them supplied"

" In retail, you are either operations driven - where your main thrust is toward reducing expenses and improving efficiency - or you are merchandise driven. The ones that are truly merchandise driven can always work on improving operations. But the ones that operations driven tend to level off and begin to deteriorate"

"From the very beginning, we never believed in spending much money on advertising, and saturation helped us to save a fortune in that department"

"The way management treats the associates is exactly how the associates will then treat the customers."

"The secret of successful retailing is to give your customers what they want"

"There's not an individual in these whole United States who has been in more retail stores than Sam Walton"

Bud Walton (Sam's brother)

"I was impressed with the giant Carrefour stores in Brazil, which got me started on a campaign to bring home a concept called Hypermart - giant stores with groceries and general merchandise under one roof."

Ready to sell seen by Jasper Morrison

The ready to sell concept was invented and implemented by the Hard Discounters chains such as DIA, Aldi or Lidl. The idea is simple : the box which contains the products act as display. For the retailer, its an important source of gaining productivity, it also helps to maintain the products implantations as defined by plannograms and also is reducing the waste of rug boxes.

Jasper Morrison, the British designer on his website comments his Photo of the month. He gives us interesting thoughts about the ready to sell concept from a non retailer perspective.

"Why go to the expense of buying an expensive shop display system when you can make one yourself? And in this case you don’t have to stack the products on the shelf or even remove them from their boxes. I suppose a certain skill is required to avoid slicing through the merchandise while cutting the window in the cardboard box, but with practice and the help of gravity it would get easier. The question is, is the shop keeper lazy, or tricky, or is he both? Has he calculated that this device will help people to imagine he’s cheaper than anyone else, or is he so bored by the tiny profit each sale brings that he’s decided to visualise his frustration? Or is it his way of personalising what might otherwise be a rather ordinary local shop? Has he discovered that a help-yourself system like this one actually improves sales? Maybe the framing around each box of products does make them seem more special than the ones on the shelves below. Does it help us to know that the shop is in Barcelona, in a not so rich part of town?"

Thank's Alexis for the tip.