gapingvoid: "cartoons drawn on the back of business cards"

a story without love

Just finished the drawing above a few minutes ago. My last one of 2005. And I guess this will be my last blog entry of 2005 as well.

It's been quite a year [here are my highlights]. A lot happened. To all of us.

Happy New Year, Everybody. You guys are the best.

i need v.c. money

english cut predictions for 2006

My predictions for English Cut in 2006 are:

1. Tom will spend a lot less time on Savile Row, more time in Cumbria. This will allow him more time to spend cutting suits, and more time looking after his American customers, at the expense of his London base.

2. Tom will cut back the number of suits he makes by at least a third.

3. English Cut will have a six-month waiting list for new customers by Year's End.

4. Expensive handmade shirts will become the main profit driver by Year's End.

5. English Cut will be approached by at least six potential large investors wanting a piece of the action. At least four will be turned down.

One or two of these predictions will be wrong. Or at the very least, twelve months will prove not to be enough time to implement them.

ten simple rules for dating my daughter (cont.)

I'm not sure if I made myself clear the other day:

You MUST go read "Mr. Yoest's Ten Simple Rules for Dating My Daughter".

If I ask you where you are going and with whom, you have one chance to tell me the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. I have a shotgun, a shovel, and a half acre behind the house. Do not trifle with me.

I just finished re-reading it, tears of laughter rolling down my face.

Do it now. This is not a request.

the kingdom of heaven

i have measured

i am here to find meaning

[The Hughtrain:] "We are here to find meaning. We are here to help other people do the same. Everything else is secondary."

snowballs are particles

From Fred Wilson:

RSS has become a critcal fabric of the Internet, but it's still only something 5-10% of the Internet population knowingly uses. By that definition, "knowingly uses", the percentage may never change. But RSS is going to be used by everyone on the Internet within a couple years and its going to be The Future of Media.

We're used to think of media [especially Big Media] in terms of waves. Now we have to start thinking about it in terms of particles.

[NOTE TO SELF:] Snowballs are particles.

rent-a-roof

The Head Lemur lives under a large airport flightpath in Phoenix.

So he wants to rent his roof out to advertisers.

Heh. Funny.

all you can really do is make it more fun for the customer to tell himself the story

From Kathy Sierra:

Learning music changes music. Learning about wine changes wine. Learning about Buddhism changes Buddhism. And learning Excel changes Excel. If we want passionate users, we might not have to change our products--we have to change how our users experience them. And that change does not necessarily come from product design, development, and especially marketing. It comes from helping users learn.

I have one friend who is obsessed with "our story".

He's forever asking the people he works with, "What's our story?" He wants to break down the story of his business into little pieces, again and again, micromanaging every last nuance, polishing every last nut and bolt like they were precious gemstones. And because [A] I'm a professional "storyteller" of sorts and [B] I've been drinking beer with him for nearly twenty years, I get dragged repeatedly into this.

Sometimes I find it very difficult. I suppose I'm not so interested in "our story" so much. More interesting to me is the story the customer tells himself about his product.

All you can do is make it more fun for the customer to tell himself the story. As Kathy Sierra points out, this is where education comes in.

If you do that, then you win.

"testing a theory of corporate blogging"

From Doc Searls. How come only 4% of Fortune 500 companies have serious blogging cultures?

Ergo: The Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki. With a deserved credit to Ross Mayfield.

I used to think that corporate blogging would one day spread like wildfire. But as I get more involved with it and see how disruptive it can be, I can understand how it wouldn't appeal to corporations. They, like their shareholders, live and die by managing certainty.

And I'm guessing their definition of certainty is far more stringent than mine.

somebody hire ben

Ben Metcalfe, who is working at the forefront of social media for the BBC [I know. Social Media. BBC. Oxymoron. Tell me about it.] is looking for a job in the U.S.A. [I'm assuming Silicon Valley or thereabouts].

Although Ben and I disagree [understatement] about certain things, we actually get along in person rather well [even though yes, I am actually an even bigger asshole in real life than I am online... Then again, so is he].

Besides, he's wicked smart. His CV is here. Or drop him a line.

[UPDATE:] Euan "BBC Social Media Godfather" Semple concurs: Ben and I are both assholes.

take the money, gia

Gia's current day job is writing a blog for a mainstream Hollywood movie. As every blog entry and photograph has to be approved by the PR-lawyer-financer-agent Hollywood micromachine before she can post anything, she sometimes finds the whole process extremely frustrating.

I think it's great that Gia's trying to forge ahead in this brave, new, unmapped world. Still, what works in Hollywood and what works in the Blogosphere are two different things. And that isn't going to change any time soon.

Hopefully Gia will just take the money, do the best job she can, learn, and move on.

blogging doubled stormhoek sales in less than twelve months

[The original brochure that came with the bloggers' Stormhoek bottle. To read it in full, click here.]

[UPDATE: Stormhoek is sponsoring "100 Blogging Dinners in 100 Days", May-August 2006. If you're a blogger who likes wine and throwing parties, please go read this. Thanks.]

A journalist phoned me yesterday about an article she is writing about business blogs for one of the large UK trade mags. I gave her this little nugget, which I've only just been allowed to go public with:

Blogging doubled Stormhoek sales in less than twelve months.

We're talking tens of thousands of cases, here.

To recap: Earlier this year I sent out a hundred or so complimentary bottles of Stormhoek wine to bloggers, just to see what would happen.

Three Provisos:

1. The bloggers had to live in the UK, Ireland or France. They needed to have regularly kept up a blog for at least 3 months previously. Their blog could have a readership of three or three thousand- size or status didn't matter, just so long as they were genuine bloggers.

2. They had to be of legal drinking age.

3. They were under no obligation to say anything about the wine, good or bad. If they just wanted to snarf the wine and say nothing, or say something negative, that was fine. It was their call.

As it turned out, a lot of them ended up writing about it. A meme of sorts was created, and it spread.

I have been saying this for years, and still not everybody believes me: "Blogs are a good way of making things happen indirectly."

No, bloggers and their friends didn't start suddenly descending on supermarkets, buying the wine in large numbers. That's not how it works.

What happened is that by interfacing with the blogosphere, it fundementally changed how Stormhoek looked at treating their primary customers (the supermarket chains) and the end-users (the supermarkets' customers).

i.e. It caused an internal disruption, both within the company and the actual trade. Wine drinkers' basic purchasing habits didn't change because of the meme, but the meme allowed Stormhoek to align itself more closely with said habits.

I've also been saying this for a while: How Robert Scoble's blog affects Microsoft [his employer] internally is a far bigger story than how his blogging affects external sales. This insight, which I started figuring out at the beginning of 2005, was instrumental in how we planned the Stormhoek stratgey.

The Stormhoek wine meme didn't sell more bottles, any more than Scoble's blog increased sales of Dell computers. That's not what this game is about. What matters is "The Porous Membrane". What matters is the internal disruption.

You have to remember: there are hundreds of thousands of vinyards in the world, all trying to sell to the twelve or so mass market wine buyers in the UK. So you need a story that cuts through the clutter.

And the best stories have market disruption baked-in.

With the disruption, came a new and different story that the supermarket buyers and the importers wanted to hear. Telling the story made the sales process easier. With easier sales, the curve was raised.

So my advice with business blogs is not to think of them as sales channels, but as disruption channels. Much more effective.

[NOTE TO SELF:] "Blogging as a marketing tool is easier when you think of it as a chemical catalyst, not as a hammer and nail."

[PODCAST:] Johnnie Moore and James Cherkoff interview Jason Korman, the CEO of Stormhoek. Great background on the story.

[UPDATE:] Decanter Magazine picks up the story.

the three second rule

Aha! I was right. From the BBC:

Label 'influences' wine purchases.

Labels remain important to many wine buyers UK drinkers increasingly see themselves as wine connoisseurs - but many people still select a bottle because of its label design, research suggests.

I call it "The Three Second Rule." You have three seconds to sell your bottle to the average person walking down the supermarket aisle. Giving yourself any more time than that is a costly and wasteful business.

Hence label and bottle design becomes very important.

"it's the tech savvy who influence everyone else in our society"

A very salient point from Steve Rubel:

A quick glance at Boing Boing's December site stats reveals that more of their visitors now use Firefox than any other web browser, including Microsoft's Internet Explorer. As much as I love Firefox, its fan base is still dominated by geeks. Does this mean blogs aren't important? Hardly. It's the tech savvy who influence everyone else in our society.

I agree with the last sentence wholeheartedly. I also believe these people's influence is growing at the expense of the "media savvy" e.g. TV folk, filmmakers, novelists, screenwriters, journalists, actors, painters, advertising agents...

...and cartoonists.

[BONUS LINK:] I like this tailor's policy:

At Davies and Sons, we are always happy to visit our customers, anywhere in the world, providing we receive an order for at least £15,000 [approx. $30,000 US].

[WONDERFUL:] "Mr. Yoest's Ten Simple Rules for Dating My Daughter".

Rule Two:
You do not touch my daughter in front of me. You may glance at her, so long as you do not peer at anything below her neck. If you cannot keep your eyes or hands off of my daughter's body, I will remove them.

belated merry christmas etc

Hope everybody had a nice Christmas etc.

Stormhoek is currently gearing up for its American launch. A lot of the work recently has been going into sorting out the new American distributors- one in New York, the other in Seattle. I think the brand will sell more easily in the US than in the UK, the way it's being marketed [i.e. as a form of business porn].

Having been in the wine business for about a year, my initial hunch seems as true as ever i.e. that most wine marketing is done rather badly. My job for the next two years will be finding out where the edges are, and hopefully pushing them.

This is the advantage of living somewhere cheap and easy- you can afford to take risks. No country club memberships to pay for. No Tribeca lofts to maintain.

You can afford to piss people off.

[BONUS LINK:] Jason Calacanis has a wonderful list of his "Predictions for 2006."

A year ago I felt much more clued in with internet trends than I do now [Basically, it was a time issue- I could either spend more time following the net or selling suits; I chose the latter]. Jason's extremely clued-up list brought the fact home, sharper than ever.

"tell the truth and the brand builds itself"

Thomas and I were driving into town the other day, talking about our business.

THOMAS: "We're so lucky we don't have to create the brand out of thin air. We just tell the truth and the brand builds itself."

Marketers, take note.

[Bonus Link:] From the New York Times: New York is in danger of losing its "creative class". Though I loved living there, I never found New York that "creative" a place to be. Too much mojo went on keeping up with the pace [see cartoon above] and paying rent. Eventually it gets repetitive. Eventually you realise that you're watching the same movie as everyone else.

Of course, I was working in an ad agency back then. So I suppose deserved to suffer.

"onward, slush warriors"

August 21st. This was probably my favorite gapingvoid rant of 2005:

So yeah, there's happily still plenty of money to be made slushing around for a while yet. So have fun with it. Impress the girls with your valiant tales of slush. Slush is good. Slush is your friend. Slush is what will sustain you and your dreams from here on end.

Onward, Slush Warriors.

"o come off it, all ye faithful . . ."

Nice article by Magnus Linklater, saying yeah, Victorian Christmas Carols may sound corny to our secular, postmodern ears, but boy, compared to the dreck that passes for spiritual literature today...

Richard Holloway, the former Bishop of Edinburgh, who has written a new introduction to the Canongate collection of the books of the Bible, confesses that, throughout his ministry, he preferred modern translations of the Bible, “because they give it the false gloss of factual discourse”. Now, however, he realises that resorting to simplistic language was an easy way out — a superficial form of communication with no lasting effect. The King James version would, in his view, have been a far more effective way of communicating the word of God, because it conveys “the dark beauty and tragic depth of ancient myth”.

I actually met Richard Holloway about ten years ago... at Magnus Linklater's house, funnily enough. Interesting guy.

king's college choir

Just a reminder: The King's College Choir annual carol service will be broadcasted live on the BBC World Service at 1500 GMT (10am NY Time) this Saturday.

It'll also be on BBC Radio 4 at the same time.

In the US, a lot of Public Radio Stations also carry it, so check your local listings. [UPDATE: More NPR info here.]

This is one of the UK's most beloved musical traditions, and thanks to the BBC it's broadcast live globally. As a former treble in one of the best US church choirs (don't even ask), I can say this is as good as it gets, the top of the tree, if you're into this kind of thing.

An old friend of mine sang in this choir as a boy, before receiving a music scholarship to Oxford. Imagine being eleven years old and having to reherse this stuff, six hours a day, five days a week, nine months a year. Very hardcore.

I hope you'll give it a listen.

$4000 baby tux

Ever seen a $4000 dinner jacket (tuxedo) made for a four-year old boy?

Well, now you have.

[PS: And that's just for the jacket, not the suit.]

can i crash?

Lovely idea from Henriette:

“Can I Crash ?” has been launched…

“Can I Crash ?” is a project that I initiated for Toothless Tiger which allow you to lend your sofa to fellow bloggers. OR you can post that you want a place to stay in a city you are bound to head for.
this is only a beta project, and I am looking forward to hear your opinion about it…

"does web 2.0 actually exist?"

Stowe Boyd chronicles the argument (for and against) rather well.

Web 2.0 has become widely used as an indicator that something different is going on with recent innovations on the web. It is being adopted by a wide range of people, including marketing weasels and earnest technologists, each of whom have their own reasons for adopting the term.

[Afterthought:]

The age-old battle is not "Geeks vs Marketers".

The age-old battle is "Geeks vs Markets".

shirts and los angeles

Yesterday I told Thomas to stop making so many suits. He'll burn out at the rate he's going. We're cutting back. We've already got too many customers.

Shirts is the next chapter.

Last night I had a dream about Los Angeles. It wasn't a particularly pleasant dream. All to do with being stuck in traffic with a bunch of advertising execs, missing our United Airlines flight out of the city.

I lived in LA briefly in the late 1990s. Didn't care for it. It all went horribly wrong.

So I woke up thinking maybe there was this connection between the shirt thing and LA. Maybe LA is where we should market the shirts. Lots of studio execs wear jeans to work. Our shirts will look good with jeans.

Maybe with shirts, my old big-media days and my new Savile Row days are suddenly colliding. Maybe that explains last night's dream.

[UPDATE:] Antoin has been following this shirt thread (no pun intended) and offers some really excellent ideas himself. We've had some similar thoughts ourselves, but it's nice to see we're not the only ones thinking along the same lines.

I'd urge anyone interested to go and give it a read. Very groovy.

zoho

[click on image to enlarge]

Zoho just published his favorite 10 gapingvoid cartoons. I really like the format. Thanks, Zoho!

english cut's next u.s. visit: feb-march 2006

["Rock of Eye". One of Thomas' freehand patterns.]

English Cut's next visit to America has just been announced.

Saturday, 25th February till Tuesday, 7th March.

Chicago
San Francisco
Atlanta
New York

We may not have room for new Savile Row suit customers for much longer, the way business has been growing. I'm not exactly complaining.

[Bonus Link:] "Thomas' Top Ten". The most popular and informative English Cut articles.

how do you get to be "number 1" on google?

[ANSWER:] Pay a buttload for your URL.

blog begging

if you can't re-invent yourself

[This is one of the cartoons I did for Craven's.]

partied every night

get thee on the hampster wheel

lift: geneva february 2-3, 2006

I'll be speaking at Lift in Geneva, in February.

Robert Scoble, Cory Doctorow and Euan Semple will also be there. Rock on.

Also, as my new English Cut suit just arrived (navy blue 3-piece, with bright blue, f-you pinstripes), I plan to be wearing that, instead of my usual scruffy outfit.

the t-100

These are Technorati's "Top Blogs" i.e. the 100 blogs with the most people linking to them.

Here are the T-100's I read regularly:

1. BoingBoing. "A directory of wonderful things". Rocks.

2. Post Secret. People mail in postcards with their kinky secrets written on them. Thoroughly entertaining.

17. Gawker. For the New York celebrity whore in all of us. It used to get a lot of attention from the bloggers I read. Not so much any more.

18. Kottke. One of the early celebrity bloggers. Here's a guy who makes some kind of living mostly by linking to "cool stuff". Nice work if you can get it.

34. Maddox. I wish I was this funny and offensive.

47. MAKE. A blog about people making ingenious, home-made gadgets.

51. Robert Scoble. Microsoft's Chief Blogger. Proved to me how one guy and a blog can amke a big difference to a large company.

52. Jeff Jarvis. Writes about new-media and the effect it has on old-media. If you want to know how blogging works at its best, read this guy every day for a month.

63. Micropersuasion. Steve Rubel seems to have become "The Voice" for the PR industry in the Blogosphere. Good for him.

69. Seth Godin. Probably the most distinctive and lucid marketing blogger.

75. Doc Searls. The man is a genius and a visionary. He understands the future of the web better than anyone else I know.

january sales

Dennis Howlett askes me the following question, regarding my initiative to start selling $300 shirts. To paraphrase:

So what happens when the January Sales come along- Can I pick up one of your "bespoke" shirts for $90-110... like I probably could from others in and around Jermyn Street?

Sorry Dennis, but you can't have a shirt, even at full price. Serves you right for being such a cheapskate. Ha.

when I hear the word "conversation", i reach for my earplugs

Henriette is not pleased that suddenly all these corporate folk are turning up at blogging events and [GASP!] paying for things.

I don’t care if there’s corporate bloggging - the can use the tools as they want. What is essential for me is that bloggers shouldn’t be marketed at, at a geek dinner venue. A geekdinner in my opinion is conversation. Period.

Oops. There's the dreaded "Conversation" metaphor again. Can we invent a better one, Somebody, please?

I'm not sure if I agree with Henriette. For the Blogosphere to work well, it has to somewhat mirror the real world, not some geeked-out, fantasy Cluetrain utopia.

slave mode

Alan Gutierrez muses on why big, mainstream, non-techie companies can't get their heads around corporate blogging. Good stuff.

As a former employee of one of the largest ad agencies in the world, I started asking myself similar questions a year or two ago. Eventually I gave up. Basically, I stopped caring.

There's something about working for a large company that often alienates one from the concept of "Free Will". Starting a corporate blog just highlights the fact.

[NOTE TO SELF:] Some people thrive in "Slave Mode". Whatever. Nobody cares.

gapingvoid highlights 2005

I'm downsizing my workload for the next few weeks, as the Christmas thing starts kicking in. Looking back, the last 12 months have not been dull.

gapingvoid 2005 Highlights:

January 19th. "My friend Thomas Mahon, one of the most qualified English Bespoke Tailors on the planet (Top 20, anyway) has started a blog."

February 8th. "Meaning Scales."

As Buddha says, there is no one road to Nirvana. Enlightenment is a house with 6 billion doors. While we're alive, we intend not to find THE DOOR, not A DOOR, but to find OUR OWN, UNIQUE DOOR.

And we're willing to pay for the privelege. We're willing to give up money and time and power and sex and status and certainty and comfort in order to find it.

And guess what? It'll be a great door. It'll add to this life. It'll resonate. Not just with us, but with everybody it comes in contact with. The door will useful and productive. Alive and kicking. It'll create wealth and laughter and joy. It'll pull its own weight, it'll give back to others. It'll be centered on compassion, but will be intolerant of dullards, parasites and cynics.

It may be modest, it may not. It could be a little candle shop; it could be a software company with the GNP of Sweden. It could involve politics or working with the elderly. It could be starting a design studio or opening a bar with Cousin Mike. It could be a screenplay, oil paints, or discovering the violin. It doesn't matter. Meaning Scales.

March 26th. Getting Dave Parmet on the English Cut team.

So after that we bounced a few e-mails back and forth, till this one time I just asked him out of the blue if he would fancy trying his hand at generating PR for English Cut.

He e-mailed me back, saying, hhhhhhhhmmmmmmmmm.... he was very tempted, as he had always had a thing for Savile Row suits, ever since he first saw Brian Ferry wearing them on the MTV videos of his yourh.

So I e-mailed him back, saying, "Funny you should say that. Thomas [the tailor behind English Cut] used to cut for Brian Ferry."

April 23. In Paris for the Les Blogs 1.0 conference. Met Doc Searls in person for the first time, among many others.

May 3rd. The gapingvoid t-shirts are launched. May 9th. "The Porous Membrane: Why Corporate Blogging Works." May 27th. The Stormhoek Blogger's Wine Freebie. Sending out bottles of free wine to bloggers for no other reason than to see what would happen if we did.

June 7th. My first London Geek Dinner with Robert Scoble. June 10. The amazingly wonderful/groovy Reboot 7.0 in Copenhagen.

July 13. A crazy-ass week where I found myself doing the London Marketing Geek Dinner with Seth Godin, dealing with a terrorist attack in London and on the same day ending up on a VERY large yacht in the Mediterranean.

August 8. "This is what Madison Avenue's main job is, from now on. Handling the multi-billion dollar suicide pact between clients and television."

September 18. English Cut makes the New York Times. Sales remain basically unaffected, re-confirming to me the utter uselessness of big media for marekting etc.

October 11th. The Global Microbrand Rant. October 23. "Bernbach Was Wrong." [ALSO:] October 24th. Big blogvertising campaign for Budget Rent-A-Car. [ALSO:] October 27. "The future of marketing is being able to create stories other people will want to tell."

Which brings me to the major point of this post. Reduced to the most basic level, the main reason English Cut is currently growing as a busines is simply because people like telling the story to other people. Because they like telling it, that's what they do. Ergo, the story spreads.

So ask yourself this question: Do people like telling your story? Seriously, when people talk about what you do for a living, do their eyes light up?

If not, you've got a bit of a marketing problem.

November 29. Business Porn.

Does your blog suffer from low traffic? It's probably because there's not enough porn on it. Sex Porn, Real Estate Porn, Wine Porn, Biz Porn, Emotional Porn, it doesn't matter.

Porn = Traffic.
Porn = Marketing.
Porn = Sales.

With Porn, all things are possible.

December 7. Les Blogs 2.0 rocked. December 10. London Geek Dinner with Robert Scoble 2.0. December 14th. Getting my readers to help redesign the Stormhoek bottle. December 17. English Cut moves into the $300 shirt business.

$300 shirts

As I've said before, the trouble with English Cut is that making hand-made ("bespoke") suits doesn't scale. We can only make 5-6 suits a week, tops. Even if we find more customers, there are only so many sewing tailors on Savile Row, and they're all already busy.

And we don't want to make cheaper, mass-produced suits, either. If you're making "the best suits in the world" for $3000, and suddenly you're cranking out $400 ready-to-wears, suddenly your suits are no longer "the best".

Big. Scaling. Issues.

So we decided to not touch the suits. We'll keep making them the way we always have- by hand, bespoke, with a 3-6 month delivery time [Heck, we're even thinking we'll have to eventually impose a six-month waiting list on top of that, just to get an appointment etc, if business keeps growing at the current rate].

We're scaling the business in other areas, namely, shirts.

A lot of our customers want shirts. So we'll sell them shirts. I've just gotten off the phone with one of the major Jermyn Street shirt wholesalers, who supply all the major London shirtmakers- Turnbull & Asser etc. They want to work with us.

So... anyone want to buy a $300 shirt with an English Cut label?

Before you give me the "this will never work" treatment, here's a story.

One of our customers had his suit fitted last week. He wanted some shirts to go with it. You know, the full-on, fancy, bespoke, hand-made kind. Retailing for about $300.

We're not in the shirt business, so we referred him to a shirtmaker friend of ours.

He placed an order for 117 shirts with our shirtmaker friend that very same day.

One. Hundred. And. Seventeen.

At $300 a pop.

Yeah, I was up all night, just thinking about the possible opportunities.

Watch this space.

[UPDATE:] English Cut's next visit to America is in late February/early March 2006. We launch the shirt range in time for that. Official.

campaign to get preston reed blogging

“Widely thought of as the world’s most gifted acoustic guitarist” -Total Guitar

I just sent an e-mail to uber-virtuoso acoustic guitarist, Preston Reed, urging him to start a blog.

I first saw Preston play at a small gig in Austin, Texas back in 1987, which utterly blew me away. Years later, around the same time I started gapingvoid I found out he now lived only a few hours North of me, in Scotland, so we started swapping e-mails.

A year or two ago Preston and his wife stopped by my house for tea. And we talked about art, media and business. The conversation ended up being pretty seminal for me.

Preston used to have a major record deal with one of the big lables. But he never felt he was getting much bang for his buck from them, so as soon as his contract expired he went indie.

The thing you have to know about Preston is that he's really, really good at playing acoustic guitar. Far better than Pat Metheny, for example [That's just my opinion; so all you Pat Fanboys, get off my back].

What Preston realised is that what paid his bills wasn't percentages on record sales, but the relationship he had with his audience.

So he and his wife built up a nice wee "Global Microbrand", which includes lots of playing, lots of touring, lots of real time connection with people who dig his work.

Like I said, this conversation was pretty seminal. Turns out what a lot of bloggers are now trying to do online, Preston was already trying to do the same via live music. His philosophy certainly helped confirm what I was trying to do with my work, back in those early blogging days- bypassing big media, building one's own sovereignty from the ground up etc. Even though I'm not a musician, his hands-on M.O. proved to be a real long-term inspiration for me.

So I wrote him an e-mail earlier today, telling him he'd be a perfect candidate to bring some music into the Blogosphere. Maybe I get him to play live at a Geek Dinner, blog confab or something. Just an idea.

Anyway, I hope you'll check out his website. I'll let you know what he says about the blogging thing, if and when. No worries if he doesn't go for it, he's a busy fellow etc. Like I said, just an idea.

Rock on.

[PS: This is my favorite Preston Reed CD. All his CDs can be bought online here.]

[DOWNLOADS:] Some Preston Reed music samples.

recently overheard:

"It isn't the spammers and the trolls that piss me off the most. They're easy.

"It's the fucking pedants that make me want to kill someone."

[Bonus Link:] The Kryptonite story just refuses to die.

[Bonus Link:] The Scottish Wikipedia [NB: It's written in "Lallans"- the mostly unintelligible, Lowland literary style/dialect of "Trainspotting" fame. Hugh MacDiarmid, eat your heart out etc. Oi, Vey.].

update:

[The Stormhoek "Freshness Indicator".]

I updated the "If I owned Stormhoek" blog post from 2 days ago, by adding the following:

3. I would change the copy below the freshness indicator to read: "The yellow indicates when to enjoy Stormhoek at its freshest and brightest." Just so there can be no doubt etc.

Dennis Howlett thinks people already know enough about wine to where the "fresh-o-meter" won't tell them anything they don't know already. I disagree with Dennis. Most wine buyer's knowledge is pretty sketchy, especially at the $10 mark.

[NOTE TO SELF:] Wine porn and wine selling are NOT the same thing.

do you know what loss is?

english cut notes...

[Thomas working away with some classic 10-ounce Wool Worsted.]

Nick Hart, another Savile Row tailor, was in the Telegraph today.

Nick makes cool stuff. I'm not sure how good a hardcore tailor he is, compared to the ubertailors- Anderson & Sheppard, Huntsman's, Welsh & Jeffries, Kilgour's etc. Still, Nick's "brand" is pretty groovy.

I'm seeing how he's running his business, reading between the lines. I can tell he's spending a lot. I'm not sure how much he's making. Profitable? Who knows. Maybe, maybe not. Maybe it's still early days. He's got financial backing, at least. Good luck to him, regardless.

English Cut now has all the bespoke business we can handle. Now we have to decide whether we want to just continue doing what we're doing, or find some clever fashionista way to grow the company, like how Nick Hart is doing.

The thing is, I don't want to do it the way Nick is doing it. Too obvious. Too expensive. Too many other people trying to do the same thing. Using other people's money. Taking other people's orders.

So the plan is to keep growing it organically. Slow is good.

horse bliss

Horse Bliss. A real horse whisperer/trainer/cowboy started a blog all about riding horses properly.

A secret recipe to horsemanship is to create curiosity. Rather than you approaching the horse try drawing it towards you. This may take time depending on the horses� conditioning. Horses that have not been exposed to human interaction or have had negative encounters with humans may let the fear drive them away more than a horse that has been handled humanely by humans.

Here's a guy in Colorado living in a trailer, who has about a dozen or so customers, doing the global microbrand thing.

I believe that having a good product and a well-written blog is a fairly easy way to fulfil one's potential, however you define it. That's what a global microbrand is all about. It doesn't have to be big. It just has to be worth talking about.

I think it's exciting. I think we live in very exciting times.

if i owned stormhoek...

[The Stormhoek "Freshness Indicator". Right now it's small, and on the back label. I would make it bigger, prominently on the front label etc etc.]

I work for Stormhoek, I don't own it. So they can listen to my ideas, or they can tell me go bugger off at their leisure.

But if Stormhoek was my baby, here are a few things I would do.

1. I would put it in a very expensive bottle. One thing we're not getting across clearly enough is the "quality" angle. I think Robert Scoble was actually surprised when he tasted the wine last week to find out hey, yeah, it's actually not bad stuff. What Robert, you thunk it was ALL MARKETING?!!!.

2. I would put the "Freshness Indicator" prominently on the front of the bottle. Right now it's small, and on the back of the bottle. The Freshness Indicator is the little graphic device above that tells the guy in the supermarket when the wine is best drunk. Most wines don't taste better with age. Some do, certainly- Bordeaux, Burgundies etc- but not at the $10 mark. I think the graphic device telegraphs the Stormhoek schtick pretty instantly. I would also have the indicator redesigned. Right now it doesn't look "upmarket" enough.

3. I would change the copy below the freshness indicator to read: "The yellow indicates when to enjoy Stormhoek at its freshest and brightest." Just so there can be no doubt etc.

4. Any marketing literature would be made smart and to-the-point. I despise all that "hummingbirds gathering nectar in the morning light" heterosexual-girlyman vinyard lifestyle-porn crap.

5. Unless you're willing to spend tens of millions of dollars (dream on), the way to market to people outside the wine trade is not as "potential customers", but more like "potential kindred spirits".

I market Stormhoek to the Blogosphere not because it'll help drive up the sales curve (although yes, that is a good side effect), but because I think coming in contact with "Blogospheric DNA" is healthy for the brand. In return for letting me bore the Blogosphere to death with all my Stormhoek crap, I share with them my marketing insights I learn along the way. I think it's a fair trade. If they don't think so, they can go read someone else's blog.

6. I would make every Stormhoek employee read both The Cluetrain and Seth Godin's "All Marketers Are Liars", which I think is a much more useful and interesting book than his far more famous "Purple Cow".

7. I would leave my comments open, so anyone could add a suggestion below, should they wish. But I guess I do that already. Whatever.

my first mistake

stormhoek design update

[Dave Wheeler is right- Stormhoek is a "WIRED" brand. That's his doodle above etc.]

Just an update on the new Stormhoek Design.

Well, we've taken on board what you guys came up with [a lot of it was excellent], and we've given the info to our head designer. Once the new design is in Beta we'll show it to you, and announce the £1,000 winner.

Here's some of my thoughts on the input we received from you guys. Sorry if not everybody's idea was included, but I may post some more later:

Julien. I LOVE the idea of making the "punt" (the wee divet at the bottom of the wine bottle) in the shape of a grape vine. Rock on.

Michael Fergusson. "Make each bottle an MP3 Player". That is pretty heavy. Wow.

Andy Robert. Designing the wine label to read like computer code. I think that's terrific. Especially as Stormhoek's primary target market is geeks, bloggers and hackers to begin with.

Brock Tice. Putting "Blog This Bottle" on the label. There's something in that.

Dan Gordon. Yeah, I like the "art bottle" idea. Whether that is right for Stormhoek is another question.

Dave Pollard. "Make it something that I can use when it's empty -- a vase, a jogger's water bottle, a reusable flask, a work of art I can display somewhere other than in tacky restaurants and garage sales. No candleholders please, been done and really really ugly." Worth thinking about.

Fishy. Yeah, I think putting strong, honest, direct language and the website URL on the front label is the way to go.

Jared. "Get an information designer, not just a marketing designer." Exactly.

Jessephrenic. "I think it is also very important to show the connection between New Zealand and South Africa that is central to the story of the wine." I agree. Tantamount to the whole "hacker" schtick I'm always going on about.

Jim Corbett. "It's staring you in the face Hugh, literally... your cartoon!" We're saving my cartoons for another branding project, sadly (or not so sadly, depending on who you ask).

Keith McGreggor. Yeah, if only the straight, unpretentious angle worked all the time in the wine business.

Mike. I agree. Make it easy to spot at 20 feet.

Rico. "Make a landing page and have it's URL be visually prominent in the label/bottle." I've been saying that for months.

Sarah. A black bottle? Interesting.

Shaded. "Nothing says disruption like broken glass. Print a photo-realistic label that makes the bottle look broken in half (bar-fight style) with 'Enjoy the Storm' in the center." Broken glass is interesting. Especially if the idea could be stretched to extreme levels of package design.

FrankP. Internet-inspired graphics. Exactly.

Brian Moffat. Very freaky. I love it. Heh.

Jim Duffy. Square bottle? Already been done.

My own thoughts:

If somebody were to ask me who Stormhoek's target market was, I'd say "the groovy cats who came along to the London Geek Dinner last Saturday".

Although all the ideas were pretty different from each other, I saw three thoughts sticking out:

1. It's got to be remarkable. There's got to be a story that people will want to tell.

2. The packaged product has to be an object of desire, in itself. People have got to want to pick it up and touch it.

3. The status quo isn't going to cut it. Amen.

Personally, I'm interested in always taking a "Hacker" point of view. For example, this is what your eyes first see when the log onto the Stormhoek homepage:

new zealand has the best tech for making white wine. but south africa has better grapes. so obviously the "hacker" thing to do was to move the tech over to south africa and see what happens. voila! stormhoek. "freshness matters."

Another example: Bottling the wine in South Africa then schlepping it to Europe or the USA is an expensive business. Far more economical would be just shipping it up in bulk containers, and bottling it nearer where it's sold. Sure, the wine purists would moan and groan, but hey, it's a "hacker" move, and as we have set up a precendent of hacking away, it's consistent with the Stormhoek brand.

Watch this space.

dinosaur meteor

[NB: This is one of the cartoons I did for the Craven's website.]

big plans

[Bonus Link:] A very long, fascinating post from Rick Segal about acquiring Venture Capital.

newflash

[They've even got the water helicopters out!]

There's a fire over at the Stormhoek vinyard. If the wind gets out of hand, then it's "Good-bye, 2006 Sauvingnon harvest".

Intense stuff.

what's blogging's r.o.i.?