Before you start thinking about how weird me re-blogging this image is, allow me to explain.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been fascinated by retail design. Going on shopping trips with either or both of my older sisters that would sometimes last for 8-11 hours, especially in an age before iPods and wifi, led me to wonder at and study how different stores would take the same blank spaces and grammar of “The Store” (checkout, fitting rooms, etc.) and transform them into wildly different-yet-similar-enough-to-navigate lands of buying sweaters, jackets, and dresses that I couldn’t really tell apart.

Now, I haven’t gone on one of these shopping trips in years, so do let me know if some stores do this already, but the above photo seems like an ideal way to arrange things to and sort of cross-promote: instead of separate sections for dresses, accessories, etc., it seems like a store would sell more and make shopping easier by grouping matching items together like this.

It’s an idea that was introduced to me, and brilliantly executed at, Marks & Spencer (first on Oxford Street in London, but the same system was also used in two locations I visited in Leicester with slightly different layouts), where apparel is organized by colour: there’s a green section, blue section, red section, etc., with matching shoes, bags, necklaces, etc. in the middle of the each one. It’s just a win-win in my eyes: as a store, why leave “what goes with what” all up to the magazines? You have people right there and ready to buy, and what they’re looking at gives you data on what their tastes might be like, much like browsing habits online. I’d definitely love it if I could go into a menswear department with matching items in the same area— it’d take the guesswork out of dressing fashionably, a constant first-world worry for too many people that could be mitigated without deletion. Full outfits could be offered for a better deal or just a combined price like Ikea does for living rooms, or magazines do for the outfits they feature; not everyone will want to buy the combos presented, but the choice is theirs to make. 

At some point in the past, stores figured out that you can increase sales by putting example outfits together on mannequins. But many of them miss the point, requiring too much effort to go find all the individual items yourself. Plus, simply keeping similar items together still allows for a certain amount of mix-and-match to allow for personal taste— the image above, for example, could, if it was a section in a real store, offer flat shoes or different dress lengths as well. 

So I don’t know where this image originally came from, or if I’ve even been coherent it what I’m trying to say. But what it is, in a way, is the bringing of certain characteristics of online shopping: personalization, ‘people who bought this also liked…’, reccomendations, etc., into the real, physical world. And if combined in a sort of online-‘realworld’ loop, customers can even choose what’s grouped together by rating and commenting on the store’s site or a dynamic mobile app as they walk around the displays: with location and demographic data applied, the possibilities are truly endless.

Which begs the question: what are some other ways the online and ‘real’ world’s can inspire each other or work together? What about outside of retail, and into other types of business, non-profits, or religious organizations?  

passionmeetsfashion:

A

A few weeks ago, Gary Vaynerchuk put up a contest to design the cover of his new book, The Thank You Economy. I really should have posted this before to prove that I made it before the June 18th deadline, since I didn’t get an email acknowledging my submission. 

Either way, here it is, my first attempt at a book cover design!!! And here’s the cover of Gary’s 1st NYT + WSJ bestseller, ‘Crush It!’ for comparison.

While this whole quote is totally true, I (and I think we can all) relate with that first sentence. That said, however, too many people try to randomly hit on creativity without paying attention to that need for life experience.

texturism:

creativity is just connecting things – steve jobs [ via sebastianwaters ]

So all-caps, non-serif writing is the new official way to get people to notice that a film has a star in it? Cool. I bet there were a bunch of meetings to decide on that one, a.k.a free market research for all of us.

The above hard-to-see image is from Apple Trailers.