Tweet More than 4.5 million Facebook “friends” like Zara, described by Louis Vuitton fashion director Daniel Piette as “possibly the most innovative and devastating retailer in the world”. A retailing house which within two decades has become the indisputable & most recognizable brand of the Inditex empire, overtaking Gap as world’s largest apparel retailer 2 years ago.
Zara’s Cinderella story has always been a business case study: capable of developing & getting a product into stores within 2 weeks (vs 6 months for its competitors), no advertising other than through its bags, no transferring of production to low-cost countries…. (well the advertising bit is not true anymore)….
…and yet the clothing giant despite all their copy&paste fashion trend strategy, despite their logistics innovation, is one of the last players to launch an on-line store. They’ve been thinking & planning it for years unsure about the future of the on-line shopping business which always had massive growth expectations that never seemed to materialize.
Tweet Although Britain is not the most bike-friendly country in Europe there are a few cities within the Island that have quickly started to promote & gain a much needed citizen bike-awareness …. in some sort of way. Apparently, our beloved Bristol should be considered as the most successful example coming first in a recent study carried out by Cycling Plus magazine about big bike-friendly UK cities.
A city like Bs, whose public transport is quite lame (expensive buses, infrequent trains…) leaves no other alternative for many than to use such an old & versatile vehicle as the bike, and although this way of transport has become one of the most affordable tools (you can get a refurbished one for around £50) there are still many Bristolians & collectives who cannot afford such a basic tool.
And so, starting 2 years ago in December 2008 James Lucas and Colin Fan (2 landscape monitors) materialised an idea that has already taken off in a few other countries and that had a clear demand in a city like Bristol where the most economic way of transport (many times the fastest) is this pedal-driven one.
Colin & James could be considered as a couple of self-taught bike geeks “just two passionates doing their own mechanics and repairing their own bikes” who despite never being in the industry (they’ve mainly worked in recreational sports & outdoor activities) have become some sort of bike referent in the Bristol area… Read More »
Tweet The king, knight & queen are finally dead (well… the king might yet not be) and we’ve apparently come to the end of one of the most successfully-viral music enigmas of the last few years which was initiated back in January!
By now we all know iamamiwhoami is the personal twisted dark fairy tale Jonna Lee & co have been imagining for us with hundreds of hidden messages, animal sounds and visual cryptograms. Something many believed to be a Gaga-Aguilera or even a Madonna splendid new pop transformation. Fortunately not.
The 29 year-old Swedish artist Jonna Lee (with a couple of albums that completely differ from the synth-pop style by Iam.. and which haven’t managed to make much noise in the international panorama) may well have become this year’s electro-pop sensation with a series of 13 dramatic & visually engaging puzzles.
An experiment in between art & viral that has managed to attract more than 100.000 viewers per video (only on youtube), proof that the glacial & celestial Swedish sounds are kicking harder than ever in the international panorama….
Tweet And finally with a bit of hype and the exact amount of bizarreness Sincerely Yours has managed to pull out another virginal instrumental diamond: White Magic. The solo debut album of CEO (Eric Berglund) former member of the fresh duo Tough Alliance (and also co-founder of the label) comes to complete that magical chain of sounds Sweden keeps delighting us with, but that aren’t spicy enough to be full flavored… so many snow clean white blended harmonies we could rest in peace for eternity if we didn’t have to pay our bills.
We first got to know Eric’s solo project last May when he released that first single & video “Come with Me“, the good-evil fight that kept sounding too TTA for us, too many elements of the old duo with those steel drums and piano figures, nothing changed to keep succeeding. We were not convinced, although we welcomed the single as Nordic breezes of air are always needed in hot sunny days like today….
Take 3 random young hipsters (don’t have to be all girls) and let them face the horrors of a war. Result? A rather meaningless but always impressive video that may have no message but looks very cool…
Wherever I am there’s always Chew, there’s always Chew and Me. Whatever I do he wants to do, “where are you going today?” says Chew: “Well, that’s very odd ‘cos I was too. Let’s go together,” says Chew, says he. “Let’s go together,” says Chew…
There are soooo many on-line trend websites, magazines, “inspirational rooms” or however you want to call them… we won’t deny we visit them from time to time when we lack our own resources and / or to see what’s being commented on the “coolsphere” right now…
Monarco is a chimpanzee (mono in Spanish) and a monarch at the same time…. like most modern rulers. Prinzipez, Pesk…. Esteban Loeschbor an Argentinian young illustrator who keeps trying new techniques while expressing the opinions of his interior demons….
Internal competitions to boost competitiveness while keeping the corporate culture intact is something (we can tell you) not easy to organize. Yet here we find a rather creative competitive approach Jonathan Rosenberg decided to bring to product management inside Google…
