Yipao contest in Colombia

These impressive load of Jeep parade are a real tradition in Colombia, especially in the Coffe area (Eje Cafetero), department of Quindio. After ww2, the americans sold massively the Willy Jeep to latinan countries. These jeeps fit well for the difficult landscape of Colombia.

Local farmers used to say "bring me back a Jeep of bananas"... From Jeep to Yip then Yipao and the tradition keeps intact to see these full loads in the chaotic roads of Colombia. It's now totally part of the coffee culture.

Gracias Ceci por el valioso aporte !

Law of complexity with Cadbury

In our complex world, it's useful (and trendy) to go back to simplicity. Fashion, design or trends tend to favour simple and pure systems that are easy to understand and replicate for everybody.

In a total opposite way, I have always been amazed by Rube Goldberg machines. Rube Goldberg (1883- 1970) was a great cartoonist and inventor, creator of complex mechanism designed to complete a very simple task. Just before Eastern, Cadbury launched a contest to promote one of its bestseller, the Creme Egg. Customers and fans addict are asked to deploy the strangest, weirdest and creative way to break the Egg. One of the best home made video is this :

a must see !

This is the official ad from Cadbury (not as cool as the former one, IMHO...)

Wal Mart growth animation

Fascinating animation about the development of Wal-Mart in the US from 1965 (first store in Bentonville to the 3176th in 2007).

Click HERE to see the animation

It spreads like wildfire especially from the 1980's years. What's interesting is that you can see that Wal-Mart has developed his stores through logistics.

First build a warehouse then stores around to maximize transportation and supply chain costs.

Second golden rule, absolute priority to rural places before entering downtown (the legend says that it comes from Sam Walton spouse strongly attached to her rural roots).

5 rules for retailing in recession (HBR)

In the last issue of the Harvard Business Review, you can find an interesting article about the "Five rules for Retailing in a recession" by Ken Favaro, Tim Romberger and David Meer (all working in Consulting Company).

What's new with the big crisis for retailers ?

The authors are determining 5 key rules of conduct in order to strengthen retailer's position in a downturn market:

1) Go where the headroom is

Headroom is defined by the market share you don't have minus the market share you won't get. In short : avoid to multiply the initiatives but rather focus on protecting your most loyal customers as #1 priority.

2) Close the Needs-Offer Gap

This approach favours to expand the average basket spending rather than convincing new customers to come in. Usually you analyse what you sell but seldom have a loser investigation on what you could sell.

3) Go after bad costs

Key point is to establish a link between retailer's costs and each aspect of the offer. Drop dead the classical ABC costing for a customer-benefit costing.

4) Cluster Store

A recession inevitably will lead you to differentiate your stores. Tailoring your offer and concept will help you to stick with your local customer base. Take care of no adding too much complexity in the process that could withdraw the benefits of the clusterisation.

5) Retool Core Process

To be consistent and gain efficiency it's important to change some key process : customer research, merchandise planning, performance management and strategic planning. When a retailer is usually asking for : who is our customer ? should switch to the "why are customers shopping our stores" and "what do they buy from other retailers" questions.

Thank's Chris for the tip !

this is why you're fat dilemma

thisiswhyyourefat is one of these strange and funny web site where anyone can participate and post the most calorific meal one can encounter. In case of diet, a daily visit is highly recommended just to keep away the apetite.

In the same time, Wired magazine got the idea to calculate the Body Mass Index (BMI) -you can calculate yours here- of the Playboy Playmate through the years. They also made a comparison with the evolution of the BMI of the average American women...

The problem ? While Playmates have evolved from 19,4 to 18,2 in forty years, the average American woman from 20 to 29 years old has gone from 22,2 to 26,8 !

The gap between the "ideal" woman (as defined by Playboy magazine) and the reality of the average American women seems to be each time larger and larger !

Behind the new Pepsi logo

Pepsico just released a new logo for his famous soft drink.

Lawrence Yang is a young industrial designer living in San Francisco who has a very personal interpretation of the logo, with a belly button in the middle of the white surface for a stunning result : obese man...

You can buy the tee shirt with the logo parody here.

More interesting is the Design Brief from the Design Agency Arnell Group that can be found here. It's a must read !! You'll see in this "Breathtaking" presentation (that's the title) that the new Pepsi logo is inspired by the golden ratio, the Parthenon, Mona Lisa, the magnetic fields of the earth, etc.

A monument ...

A selection from Art Paris

Aleix Plademunt, from the series "nada" - Olivier Waltman Gallery

Ulrich Lamsfuss, Stockfood 224560 - Daniel Templon Gallery

David Reimondo - Monde
Jurgen Nefzger - Nocturnes

Art Paris is a contemporary art fair where more than 100 galleries present their current artists to the parisian public under the dome of the Grand Palais. Here's a selection of pieces that got my attention, still with a "retail" point of view....

99 ct pricing

Tim Arango wrote an interesting article in the New York Times about .99 price ending. He records the history of .99 prices which seems to have been first published in 1860 by Rowland Macy (1822 - 1877), founder of Macy's Department Store. The success of this promo encouraged retailers to multiply this kind of pricing. Other explanation can be found in the odd fact that prices ending in .99 was a way to fight internal robbery: employees were forced to give change to customers (at least 1ct) and therefore oblige salesmen to register the purchases...

The psychological factor is often used to explain success stories like iTunes or the One Dollar Store chains. Many economists made studies trying to measure the effect of such prices. But the truth obliges to say that the positive effect of .99 prices is still to be demonstrated !

Photo : Denkschema in Flickr

Retail recession in photos in Slate

Slate web-magazine asked his readers to post on Flickr photos illustrating the recession - Great shots of tough times. From the Wall street crisis to the closing of stores such as Circuit City or Linens'n Things, here is my selection from the +170 pics posted up to date.

Play Food

Saxton Freyman is an author and artist, author of several illustrated books made of carved fruits and vegetables. He has a real talent to give human figure and lively expresion to a simple fruit.

Carl Willat realized a commercial for Safeway.com using it's character. Click here to watch it (it's the smiling orange), so cute !

Other retailer to use his talent, the new urban concept from Carrefour : Carrefour City. Located in Paris, the store shows illustration by Saxton Freymann in the fresh products area. Good job Anna !

Excellent ! Home made Trader Joe's Comercial

Trader Joe's is a superb retail concept developed by the Aldi group. Amazing to see how the German Hard Discount chain succeeded in reinventing a concept specifically for US customers (a total "retailtainment" experience) with the basics of the hard discount concept (private label, edlp, strong logistics,...).

Trader Joe's success is also due to the special relationship he builds with his customers. Great example with this video made by Carls Fine Films (CFF), a film company specialized in computer generated and animation movies. CFF is located in San Francisco, close to a Trader Joe's shop. The owner, Carl Willat, were told by a Shop Manager that shooting photos is prohibited. So he decided to make a (not so) short comercial about Trader Joe's with his Treo phone. Result is great ! Trader Joe's should use it for his own comercials !!

PS: You surely recognized the song adapted from Antonio Carlos Jobim Águas de março.

PSS: Want more about Trader Joe's ?

See a previous post here.

Optimizing the number of coins

Cash management is a real pain for retailers. It costs a lot to count and transfer coins and notes to Banks. It also hides cost with the time lost at the cashier when customers need to look for the tiny coins in the wallet trying to get the exact change. Most of the times, it ends by giving slightly more so that the cashier need to look for the small (but heavy in the pockets) coins. All this is time consuming and decreases productivity (a vital criteria for retailers profitability). 

How could we improve this process ?

Jeffrey Shallit  a professor in Waterloo, University of Canada is a specialist of "combinatorics on words, algorithmic number theory, etc...". He wrote a very interesting note about how to optimize the change of coins or in other words, what is the most efficient combination of coins to minimize the handling. 

In the US monetary system you may find just 4 kind of coins : 1 (penny), 5 (nickel), 10 (dime) and 25 (quarter). The average number of coins necessary to make change on 1 USD is 4,7 per transaction (assuming that every amount of change is evenly distributed between 0 and 99). You can maximize this result with a 4 coins combination: 1, 5, 18, 25 to get an average of 3,89. Obama's change for improving efficiency would be to switch the Dime to a 18¢ coin. This proposal would also have the advantage of favourizing mental calculus in the population...

PS: In Euro countries, we have 6 available coins (1ct, 2ct, 5ct, 10ct, 20ct, 50ct, 1€, 2€). This set, for a 5€ change, gets a poor average of 4,6. 

Let's switch our coins for a more efficient combination to reduce costs and waiting lines !

why does the OTHER queue always move faster ?

100 essential things you didn't know you didn't know is a clever book by John Barrow. 

The title immediately caught my attention of course : things I did not know I did not know ? The author is teaching in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics in the Cambridge University. He has a real talent to describe the world and life as it is through math principles. How does maths can help us  understand  daily stuff like : how Rugby can help us understand the Theory of Relativity,  the 6 degrees of separation between you and anybody else on earth or why does the other queue is always moving faster.

Everybody has experienced that. After having scrutinized all queues in the supermarket, it appears that you've chosen the slowest one, once more ! 

Why ? 

Simple : just because the slowest lines are the one that have more people in them. In average, just the fact of choosing a line will increase the fact that you have more chances to be in the most crowded line, the slowest one. 

Other point to be considered by Barrow, the fact that even though people are amazed by coincidences, there exist far more non-coincidences that nobody looks at...

Jack Kerouac on Robert Frank photos

"Anybody doesn't like these pitchers dont like potry, see ?

Anybody dont like potry go home see Television shots of big hatted cowboys being tolerated by kind horses."

Jack Kerouac, foreword of The Americans, photobook by Robert Frank

Lost in translation in Chinese retailing

Retailers in China need to develop a translation of local billboards to be understood from foreigners. Well, english is sometimes translated by non english speaker and it may lead to curious interpretation. I especially liked the "Translate server error".

Also, in Chinese, a same word may be used for several signification. It seams also that the same word is used to mean "dry", "to do" or "fuck" depending how it is pronounced. This word is symbolised with this simplified character: 干 . The general use of automatic machine translation created these funny mistakes. 

photo credit : James Fallow and Language Log

the Kola Champagne legend

Obviously, it's not Champagne but Ambassador is a real double fake ! A fake Champagne (well, the bottle helps...) and a fake Kola Champagne. 

Looks like a funny fake mix between two famous drinks, but you're wrong ! Kola Champagne was created by a famous (in Puerto Rico, at least !) Angel Rivero Mendez in the 1920's. Rivero Mendez, founder of the North Pole soft drink company is also well known for having shot the first against the US in the Spanish - American war in Puerto rico in 1898. That war concluded in the control of Cuba, The Philippines, Guam and Puerto Rico to the US...

For those who dare to try, it's highly recommended for Glucose addict...

Photo shot in Publix, Miami

The real Toy story

Did you know that Santa Claus lives in Guangdong, China ?

In fact, 75% of the world's toys are produced in Guangdong, a province of South east China.

Liberty's department store in London (Great Marlborough st.) in the China Design Now exhibition proposed last spring an installation by Michael Wolf : The real Toy Story.

M. Wolf covered entire walls with more than 20 000 plastic toys. Some amazing photos of the workers in the factories were also embedded in the installation, adding a strange human presence.

All the toys had a face and you could see the sharp contrast between the huge amount of plastic toys and the photos of the workers. 

Hema's great web animation

Hema is a Dutch Department Store with a large and nice private label assortment. Acronym of "Hollandse Eenheidsprijzen Maatschappij Amsterdam" to be translated as "Unique prices Company Amsterdam" ... It belongs to the cultural patrimony of The Netherlands (isn't it Chris ?), Hema is established since 1926 and got fame for his pastries and (used to be) fixed prices. 

When you look for Hema on Google, the first entry is this fake (?) and funny website :

http://producten.hema.nl/

Just login and wait !

Was it developed by the company or just a buzz ?

You may go here to buy online (delivery only in the Netherlands)

Photo credit : rheauchyr

The role of human behaviour on web design

John Maeda has theorized the Laws of Simplicity in an eponymous book, a must read. His 10th law is describing the concept of Simplicity as "subtracting the obvious, adding the meaningful". 

An interesting application of the Law may be found in the Fast Company magazine recommended by my friend Chris. This interesting article by Cliff Kuang about the importance of taking account human behaviour in the design of commercial web sites. He relates how a major e-commerce company made minor change to his website that drove to major impact (in fact, $300 M rise in turnover).

What was wrong with the site ? 

Nothing apparently but, after having made your purchases you were asked validate by a click on the checkout button then to login or register. What did the customers say ? We're not here to enter a relationship and later receive tons of newsletter but just buy some stuff. Many customers could not remember their password from previous registrations (how many password do you need to survive in the web 2.0 ?). Interesting facts : 45% of users had multiple registrations !

So what was done ?

Just change the Checkout button by a Continue one. Adding the message "You don't need to create an account to purchase products. Simply click on Continue to proceed to checkout. To make your future purchases even faster you can create an account during checkout". 

Make it simple. 

Don't bother your clients.

It works.