Back in 2006, we covered an ancient commodity that was being marketed in a fresh way—mastiha, made from resin of the mastic tree, which is mainly cultivated on the Greek island of Chios. As we pointed out, mastiha (or mastic) is used in a wide variety of products, and Mastihashops—founded by the Chios Gum Mastic Growers Association—carry everything from mastiha-flavoured coffee, biscuits and liqueur, to toothpaste, cosmetics and chewing gum. All well-branded and sleekly packaged.
So we were pleased to hear that Mastihashop has made it to New York, its first retail outpost west of Greece. The shop, located at 145 Orchard Street, was opened by two sisters, Artemis and Kalliopi Kohas, who spent many childhood summers on Chios. The New York store sells an extensive range of edible goods and skincare products, from the raw material—'tears' of mastic resin—to mastiha eye cream. Naturally, there's still plenty of room for mastiha expansion. Sao Paulo or Singapore, anyone?
Website: www.mastihashop.com
Contact: info@mastihashopny.com
In Denmark, as in many other countries, consumers pay a refundable deposit on bottles. When they return them through a retailer's collection machine, it prints out a slip of paper that states how much they'll receive at the cash register. Generally, these aren't large amounts, but they're enough to get people to return their containers.
One of Denmark 's largest consumer goods retailers has now added a charitable twist to the process, adding a button that lets customers instantly donate their bottle money to charity instead of collecting it for themselves. A partnership between Coop Denmark, UNICEF Denmark and DanChurchAid, the 'push to donate' system was launched in September 2007 in 14 of Coop's Kvickly xtra stores. In the first three months, customers donated over DKK 120,000 (USD 25,750), proving that tiny donations add up to significant amounts. This year, Coop will be adding the option to 1,200 bottle collection machines in its other supermarket chains.
If you want to entice consumers to be charitable, make it easy for them. One for other retailers to be inspired by? (Related: Reverse vending.)
Website: www.coop.dk
Spotted by: Frida Berglund
Last November, we featured Picnics on the Piste, a high-end catering firm that organizes gourmet meals for skiers right on the mountainsides of plush winter resorts in Austria, France and Switzerland. While affluent travellers increasingly seek out memorable experiences of the kind Picnics on the Piste offers, an even larger market exists for companies that can make it faster and easier for vacationers to buy everyday foods and household supplies for their holiday abode.
A new UK firm, Snowman’s Larder, is helping pioneer that niche in two neighbouring French ski resorts: Val d'Isère and Tignes. Customers can order online before they leave home, select a delivery time, then wait for their order upon reaching their apartment or chalet. To be sure, provisioning services have been around for a long time. Whether you’re vacationing in a time-share unit, motor home or sailing yacht, companies can set you up with food and supplies in just about any major resort area. But Snowman’s Larder is unique in several respects: the company says it can save travellers money by shopping in resort-area supermarkets instead of the higher-priced convenience stores at the resorts themselves, which shows how it has taken a business model skewed toward the affluent and adapted it to average vacationers. Snowman’s Larder’s also caters specifically to UK travellers, providing them with foods they’re familiar with.
Plenty of variations could work with this model, of course. If British food works in the French Alps, for example, kosher meals might just as easily work in the Colorado Rockies. The trick, in either case, is finding potential customers without spending much on marketing. Solve that issue and you might find yourself running a profitable company in the kind of location others can only dream of. (Related: Helping parents travel lighter.)
Website: www.snowmans-larder.com
Contact: info@snowmans-larder.net
Spotted by: Katie Rowen
We know that many of our readers like a good vending machine story. In the past, we've featured machines that vend everything from umbrellas to hair straighteners, but we feel we've let you down on the vending front lately.
Which is why we were happy to spot a new automated selling device in London: Onitsuka Tiger, the Japanese sports brand, launched a sneaker vending machine on Carnaby Street today. Sneaker vending isn't entirely new—it's been done in Japan, of course, and Reebok sold shoes from a vendomat back in 2004. Reebok's machine, however, was a bit of a let-down: the sneakers were packed into a seemingly standard, drab box. Onitsuka Tiger, on the other hand, put some effort into custom-building their machine, which can sell 24 pairs of shoes at a time, in 6 sizes.
Following its London debut, the machine will travel across the UK to bring convenience-buying to the rest of Britain's sneakerheads. Fun bit of brand promotion (this marks a UK first for sneaker vending) and consumers should enjoy the concept, too. "What, these shoes? I just got them from a vending machine down the street." To us, that sounds like a status story ;-)
Website: www.onitsukatiger.co.uk
Contact: info@onitsukatiger.co.uk
Convenience-seeking city-dwellers have access to speedy delivery services for everything from Chinese food to legal documents. Wakozi, a new service that delivers beverages and munchies throughout Manhattan, promises to be different in ways that start-up enthusiasts should take note of. The company itself carries no inventory. Instead it works with popular (convenience) stores throughout Manhattan. Wakozi doesn’t hire delivery staff, either—delivery is handled by the stores, usually within an hour. Plus, Wakozi has its own niche: deli food along with wine and spirits. The clincher is the Wakozi website, which lets logged in users order items with just a mouse click or two, although product choice seems rather limited for some stores.
Wakozi’s business model greatly minimizes the capital needed to launch, and neatly avoids the high staff and inventory costs that doomed other delivery services, most notably Kozmo, which we wrote about in 2006, noting that the company had burned through millions of US dollars in funding before collapsing shortly after the dot-com bust. Wakozi not only operates on a much leaner business model than Kozmo, but also enters a market where almost every consumer is online, and most feel comfortable ordering products online. Especially if it saves them time or money. One to copy to your neck of the (urban) woods!
Website: www.wakozi.com
Contact: support@wakozi.com
We've written before about platforms for minipreneurs that aggregate the offerings of many merchants in a single online or offline space. A few weeks ago Rumplo stepped into the fray with a t-shirt-specific site that helps consumers find the coolest t-shirts from independent makers around the world.
Brooklyn, NY-based Rumplo aims to make it easy to browse, search and subscribe to artist-produced tees from around the globe. Users can browse categories such as color, typography, slogan, photography or gradient (in addition to the more obvious "new" and "most popular"), and Rumplo serves up a selection of matching submitted shirts from independent producers all over the planet. Designers, stores and registered users can all participate in submitting links to t-shirts they love, and users can subscribe via RSS (e-mail delivery is coming soon) to their favorite designers, tags or topics. All t-shirts on the site are open to comments by registered users, along with designation as "faves." What users won't find, however, are the works of any on-demand printing sites, which Rumplo's founders have deliberately exluded.
It remains to be seen if Rumplo will charge sellers any kind of fee in the future, but meanwhile plans are apparently in the works for advertising support. By focusing on independent producers (and excluding others), Rumplo takes a partially curated approach that is sure to help users wade through the clutter and find the gems in the online t-shirt marketplace. A model to emulate in other markets!
Website: www.rumplo.com
Contact: www.rumplo.com/contact
Spotted by: Josh Mervis
One of the big advantages supermarkets have long had over consumers lies in the sheer number of products they offer—with some priced higher and others priced lower than the competition, it's near impossible to say that one store offers consistently better (or worse) deals every time. Well, supermarkets, those protected days may be drawing to a close. A new UK-based site provides a central way for consumers to compare prices as they shop online and then place their order with the cheapest store.
mySupermarket is a free shopping and comparison website for supermarket shoppers that links the online portals of the UK's four main supermarket chains and compares prices on the fly. Consumers begin by choosing their favourite store—Tesco, ASDA, Sainsbury's or Ocada—and shopping through mySupermarket's lifelike online shelves. Grocery departments are displayed across the top of the screen, and clicking on any one reveals the shelves within. For each product, mySupermarket displays the weight or volume, price, special offers and price per unit; for foods and beverages, it shows the ingredients, number of calories, an overall traffic light rating, and detailed nutritional information. The best part is that as consumers shop, the site's Trolley Checker scans their trolley and displays its current total cost at each of the four supermarkets. The Price Checker, meanwhile, suggests swapping some products for others that are a better value, while the Health Checker makes suggestions for healthier substitutions. Once consumers settle on their product choices and store, they simply send their trolley for checkout at the supermarket of their choice.
Rumours suggest that a like-purposed site may be coming soon in the US from Grocio.com. Once sites like these give consumers the long-desired ability to comparison-shop for groceries, there will be no turning back. Transparency tyranny strikes again—better get in on this one early if you're in retail!
Website: www.mysupermarket.co.uk
Contact: enquiries@mysupermarket.co.uk
Spotted by: Junaid Kazi
Thanks to the rise of "fast fashion," discarded clothing finds its way into landfills at an alarming rate, including one million tonnes of the stuff each year in the UK alone, according to the British Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. While there are many charitable organizations that collect used clothes for resale and reuse, two global retail chains have launched initiatives of their own to give the clothes they've sold another life.
Japan's Uniqlo chain, owned by Fast Retailing, began recycling its fleece jackets back in 2001, and has since expanded the program to include all Uniqlo garments. Collections are held during the months of March and September each year at all Uniqlo's Japanese stores. Items that are still wearable are distributed to developing countries through the Japan Relief Clothing Center and other like organizations. Items that are no longer usable as clothing are either recycled into fiber and used to make thermal insulation, work gloves and cotton rags, or they are converted into power-generating fuel. As of March of last year, almost 800,000 items had been recycled, roughly 90 percent of them for use as clothing.
UK-based chain Marks & Spencer, meanwhile, launched an effort with Oxfam just last month to encourage consumers to recycle their worn clothes. Consumers who donate clothes—which must include at least one Marks & Spencer item—will receive a voucher worth GBP 5, valid for one month, to use with their next purchase of GBP 35 or more on clothing, homeware or beauty products at M&S. Donations can be made at any of Oxfam's 790 stores across the UK and Ireland, where they will be sold to raise funds for Oxfam's work in global relief. (From February 20–24th, M&S and Oxfam will also host a 'Fashion Amnesty' on the lawns of the Natural History Museum in London, which brings to mind IKEA’s furniture swap in Amsterdam.)
Whether it's printer cartridges, beverage containers, cell phones, eyeglasses, plastic bags or clothing, recycling the products you've sold benefits not just the environment but also pretty much everyone involved.
Website: www.fastretailing.com/eng/csr/environment/recycle.html — plana.marksandspencer.com
Contact: taono@uniqlo.co.jp — www.marksandspencer.com/gp/contact
Spotted by: RK
