The Shops at Target design partnership programme aims to recreate the ambience and personalised customer service of five independent stores selected by the Target in-house design team: The Candy Store in San Francisco, Aspen-based cosmetics store Cos Bar, Boston’s Polka Dog Bakery for pet accessories, Connecticut-based Privet House for homewares, and The Webster, a luxury fashion boutique from Miami.
This new style of retail collaboration shows that Target’s product offer is aligning with people’s desire for micro- instead of macro-inspired merchandise. To appeal to this changing consumer behaviour, retailers need to adopt a more personalised approach.
3D printing has taken a sweet new turn with the development of the ‘Choc Creator 1’ – a printer that creates custom 3D treats. Designed by Choc Edge (headed by Dr Liang Hao from the University of Exeter), the printer will begin retailing on ebay for £2,500.
Dr Hao also has plans to extend his chocolate experiments into cyberspace with a chocolate-oriented website. He explains, “Chocolate has a lot of social purpose, so our intention is to develop a community and share the designs, ideas and experiences about it.”
As the fashion of rugged refinement grips the menswear scene, grooming products have had to accommodate a new cosmetic: beard oil (one especially for Fitzrovian hipsters Oli and Nile.) Part cologne, part conditioner, beard oil has become a popular alternative to cream-based conditioners, adding just the right amount of shine and musky fragrance to manly mugs.
Coca-Cola deserves a round of applause for its latest mobile effort: The Cheering Truck (tx Elliot).
Outfitted with a recording booth, the red Coca-Cola truck drove throughout Argentina, stopping in select spots and inviting fans (sometimes whole school’s worth of them) to step inside and have their cheers captured on tape. As more sound files were stowed away, a digital sign outside the truck counted the number of cheers as it crept towards the one million mark.
When it came time for game day, Coca-Cola’s cheering truck drove inside a stadium and played a multi-track recording of a million-plus voices melding together in a cacophonous roar of affirmation.
IKEA Australia wanted to encourage people to use their catalogue throughout the year instead of throwing it away. So the retailer offered to rent space for the catalogue inside customers’ homes, emailing monthly rent cheques redeemable in-store.
NYC’s Bloomingdale’s has installed six interactive window displays where people can try on sunglasses virtually. The displays have LCD screens that identify the location of a viewer’s eyes and place a selection of sunglasses onto their face. Each window is dedicated to a different designer, from Marc Jacobs to Gucci, with four sunglasses available per screen. If the window shopper likes what they see, they can press a print button which sends a picture of themselves in their desired glasses to the ‘Sunglasses Style Bar’ where a sales-assistant will help them purchase the real thing.
Palace X Umbro is a unique collaboration between English sporting legend Umbro and London skate brand, Palace. The two have teamed up for a twist on football classics, like a re-issue of the famous Italia 1990 away World Cup jersey. Palace has also created a promo video of nostalgic VHS footage re-enacting the second semi-final match between West Germany and England. The short video is set in a traditional British boozer and superbly captures the vibe and excitement experienced on that day.
Two Budgens stores in London are selling blocks of hope for £1 to raise money for the Alzheimer’s Society (Cheers Dominic, Asda).
Each block is made from recycled wood and branded with the word ‘HOPE’. They’re displayed above shelf barkers that urge people to ‘Buy HOPE for people affected by dementia.’ Once the blocks have been brought to the till and paid for, they’re returned to the shelf for new customers to buy. Over a hundred people bought hope on the first day of the pilot scheme.
As part of its National Reading Plan, the Catalan Government Railways has teamed up with Random House publishers to get more passengers into a good book.
On ten services, posters on the outside of middle carriages encourage commuters to join the ‘reading train’. Once inside, posters offer a selection of first chapters from 40 popular novels, which can be downloaded with a QR code.
Authors on the list include Spanish language writers such as Ildefonso Falcones, Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, as well as translated works by John Le Carré and Umberto Eco. The scheme is set to run for two months and will be repeated three times a year until 2016, with hopes to expand to include works from other publishing houses.
The scheme publicises books while entertaining and improving the literacy of passengers at the same time.
Mike Caswell, an industrial engineer and former Starbucks executive, dreamed of bringing new levels of freshness and choice to coffee lovers by consolidating every aspect of coffee-making under one roof. (Cheers Jules, NY). His idea was to transport beans throughout a coffee shop via a labyrinth of clear tubes with pneumatic pressure, sending raw green beans to the roaster, roasted beans to holding chambers, and small amounts of precisely measured roasted beans to Swiss-made brewers for grinding and brewing. After building a prototype out of vacuum cleaner parts, Caswell has brought his vision to life in New York City with a patented system called Roasting Plant Javabot™.
At the Roasting Plant, you can order coffee or specialty espresso drinks by the cup to any specification – single bean or blends, caffeinated or decaf, or a mix of each. With Javabot, customers have their choice of just-roasted beans – say, one part Guatemala, one part New Guinea, and one part Longberry – all automatically blended and delivered in less than 30 seconds. The high level of automation means the customised cup can be sold at a reasonable price.
