Abundance. Choice fatigue. Insperiences. Curated consumption. Get ready for another year of buzzwords hinting at a huge market for curators and editors, helping uber-critical yet time starved and sometimes bewildered consumers make the right choice.
Which is why we like US-based Vino 100, whose wine stores offer their customers an easy to digest “one hundred great wines for USD 25 or less” (EUR 21/GBP 14).
The experience-style stores showcase each of the limited edition wines on its own pedestal, accompanied by the Vino 100 Wine Barometer (a dummy-proof wine rating and information system). In true tryvertising– style, wine-tastings are part of the experience. In Vino 100’s own words: “Wine stores are all too often intimidating, snobbish and expensive, or are designed as wine “superstores” where the quantity of wines is overwhelming and the quality of wines and the service provided is under whelming.”
Vino 100 is expanding fast, using an aggressive franchising strategy: it has 29 stores across the US, and is planning to open another 17 in the next few months. The franchise fee to own and operate a Vino 100 is USD 30,000 (EUR 25K/GBP 17K), while the average cost to develop a Vino 100 store is approximately USD 150,000.
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Hardly a week goes by without another company unveiling a new service (often based on barcode or RFID scanners) to facilitate the interaction between people and physical objects. Still, Dutch ShotCodes has managed to take a original shot at this market with a visual approach that will appeal to consumers because, well, visuals always appeal to consumers.
What is it? In their own words: “Today, businesses cannot get people to use their mobile phones to browse the internet. This is because typing in domain names on a phone is a time-consuming and frustrating process. ShotCodes change all of this, radically. ShotCodes are offline web links. When captured by a mobile camera, ShotCodes instantly and effortlessly take users to any desired location on the internet on their phones. ShotCodes are easy to make and can be tied to any web address.”
Businesses can make their own ShotCodes and add them to existing print media or turn them into brand new tools for sales and customer interaction. End users can download free software (via sms/texting) and install it on their mobile phone. This software, which is available for major mobile phone brands and types, enables phones to act upon ShotCodes. For a demo, see: www.shotcode.com/data/movieformat.”
The company makes money from offering integrated solutions to corporate users, charging 27 euro cents per successful scan. It counts Heineken amongst its first clients, who used ShotCodes as part of a pub-based game in The Netherlands.
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There are still plenty of stale service industries that would benefit from a Starbucks-style overhaul. Which, for true Springwise enthusiasts, spells endless OPPORTUNITY. What, for example, about laundrettes and dry cleaners, often synonymous with sloppy service, harsh chemical treatments, not to mention quit a bit of hassle? (Don’t get us started on missing socks, sweaters going from XL to S, or red magically turning into orange…)
Giving it a spin are New York based Slate and LaundrySpa, two laundrettes/dry cleaners offering new style luxury cleaning, and adding a nice dose of convenience and eco-friendliness, too. (Source: PSFK.)
Slate is an all-inclusive laundry service for NYC residents available through the web. Customers sign up for a weekly flat fee of USD 50-60 (GBP 29-35/EUR 42-50), receive a Slate hamper, then choose a pick-up time. Which means no standing in line, no counting and itemizing, no financial surprises: Slate does the sorting, and determines which garment needs to be cleaned by which process (anything from hydro-carbon, wet-cleaning, hand washing, to regular laundering). Cleaned clothes come back wrapped, tagged, and good as new. The environment also gets a gentler treatment, as the company uses a combination of bio-degradable and organic agents.
In Slate’s own words: “You are dealing with someone who speaks your language. You bought USD 250 dollar jeans and you are taking them to be cleaned where? To the run-of-the mill cleaner in his dreary shop down the block, who doesn’t care as much for the clothes as you do? We speak the same language: fashion. When your clothes come back, they as new as the day you bought them at Barneys. On the surface we are a clothes cleaner, but underneath we are a fashion label.”
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