Hammer & Nails, the Nail Shop for Man-NAMs

                                                                                                                                           pic: LA Times
Given the increasing rigors and need for perfection in managing major accounts, it is vital that male and female NAMs operate on an equal footing...

This new service in LA is designed to ease sore muscles of athletic and active men. The Sports Pedicure features hot stones, Hammer & Nails Signature Scrub, foot and leg massage, reflexology, and a hydrating mint clay mask, which stimulates blood circulation. It also includes nail trimming and shaping, cuticle oil and grooming, moisturizing, hot towel wrap, and paraffin treatment.

In fact, all those little things that make a difference to the busy man-NAM, who may feel that out-of-sight is out-of-mind...

Too busy?
For those NAMs not wanting to sacrifice an entire afternoon in a busy schedule, the salon owners have responded to requests from loyal clients who want to stop by and receive a quick treatment before a big meeting, by designing the Express MANicure/Pedicure, that includes nail trimming and shaping, light cuticle grooming, and moisturizing treatments.

Hammer & Nails currently have 1 outlet in LA, with plans to open further branches throughout the US.

Hopefully, it won't be too long before the company respond to pent-up demand by increasing their foot-print to include the UK...

Amazon penetration....

Yesterday I took delivery of a package from Amazon.

It was due between 1230 and 1330 so at 1130 I did a parcel-check to find that ‘Leo’ was currently four streets away on delivery 30, and still had 33 deliveries to make before reaching me at 1245…

Scarey….in terms of both coverage-density and numbers of their deliveries…

7-Eleven bringing real convenience to the UK?

Given the news that 7-Eleven may be re-entering the UK market, it would be unwise to assume that this will simply be a re-iteration of our UK experience in the nineties...

In fact, it could be said that the only way to anticipate their potential influence is to visit some branches in Tokyo...

My personal memories may lend some insight:

There, in the same small outlets you will find a comprehensive range of goods and services catering for every convenience need, with hyper-efficiency.

With 75% of the range permanently in stock, the remaining 25% is rotated up to three times a day, based on customer need:  milk for the school-kids in the morning, bottled water for office workers at mid-day and alcoholic beverages for tired NAMs on the way home in the evening....

A bank of ATMs and terminals for paying utility bills, a small microwave oven for heating snacks line one wall, with newspapers, magazines, books and mail-order pickup facilities lining another.

Outside a home-delivery moped is parked, ready to deliver even 1 SKU orders when required. Whilst the 3,000 SKU shop stocks a handbag-size hairspray, a nearby sub-depot stocks all sizes and variants, allowing the shop to offer a range of 60,000 SKUs to those wanting home delivery...

Oh, in terms of convenience, you will find a branch at the base of most high-rise apartment blocks, with the occupants referring to 7-Eleven as their refrigerator, as convenient to access (a lift-ride away) as the correspondingly small refrigerator in their kitchen...

Frictionless commerce - what other businesses can learn from Amazon

With the move to smoother, quicker, and easier transactions using a combination of f-commerce and mobile payments, to virtual wallet options and NFC, frictionless commerce is becoming widespread.

However, whilst retail may appear to be leading the way in many cases, it can be easy to underestimate the lead that Amazon has gained over all other players...

Using data collection and one-to-one correspondence that would be intrusive were it not the fact that it is so accurately focused on real need, Amazon has become an indispensable buying-tool for many...

Moreover, by perfecting their 1-click approach - and combining it with Prime status to eliminate delivery costs - their model optimises impulse purchase

In fact, in my own case, I have had to remove the Amazon UK icon from my home page in order to cause me to think a fraction longer about real need while I source the site via Google...

However, as online practitioners strive to emulate their rival's 1-click KPI, Amazon's real USP has to be their frictionless returns policy...

In fact, any aspiring online operation has to experience a heartbeat-missing moment when they realise that Amazon's returns process is easier than 1-click, the ultimate online standard... 

Shop where you borrow instead of buy - making do via the sharing economy...

                                                                                                                                  pic: Leila Berlin
According to The Guardian, the most popular items in Leila, Berlin's first "borrowing shop*" are the electric drills.

But it's not worth that person buying their own tools, said founder Nikolai Wolfert. "The average electric drill is used for 13 minutes in its entire lifetime – how does it make sense to buy something like that? It's much more efficient to share it."

Scarey...

Members can borrow anything from board games to wine glasses, fog machines to hiking rucksacks, juicers to unicycles. All they need to do to become members is drop off an item of their own.

Virtual tour of Leila here

Borrowing shops are under development in several Berlin districts, with similar projects being set up in Kiel and Vienna. In Berlin-Wedding, 80 artists are working with recycled materials to build Berlin's first "indoor treehouse", which will eventually serve as a "local public thinktank". In Neukölln, the Trial & Error culture lab organises swaps for artists' materials and fashion items.

At the more commercial end of the spectrum, Deutsche Telekom recently helped launch the social network wir.de, which allows neighbours to swap tools and services and sets up communal "toy boxes" in playgrounds around Berlin.

Whilst the idea of the "share-economy" is developing well elsewhere (i.e. Airbnb, which matches travellers to people with rooms to rent, and car2go and even M&S offering customers discounts in exchange for unwanted clothes, which are then donated to Oxfam) there is a sense that the shift away from ownership towards functionality is nowhere as tangible in Europe as in Berlin.

If you add share-economy drivers to consumers increasingly ‘making do’, it may begin to explain the difficulty of driving demand above flatline levels in many categories, everywhere…

And going back to drills, it is well known that drill manufacturers sell millions of ¾ inch drill-bits, not because people want drill-bits, but because they need ¾ inch holes, however produced...

In other words, the most insidious competition can be a product or service that replaces traditional ways of meeting needs. Therefore, training ourselves to focus on functionality and real need instead of want, can help us to anticipate and survive the shock of third-party innovation, hopefully….

* See video on how Leila works in practice here

'Ndrangheta mafia' made more last year than McDonald's and Deutsche Bank, combined...

Study finds crime network made €53bn (£44bn) from a combination of drug trafficking (€24.2bn), illegal rubbish disposal (€19.6bn), and other activities.

The report is based on analysis of documents from Italy's interior ministry and police, parliament's anti-mafia commission and the national anti-mafia task force. Its activities are believed to involve a workforce of as many as 60,000 people worldwide, the report said.

Extortion and usury last year brought in a substantial €2.9bn, while embezzlement earned the mafia €2.4bn and gambling €1.3bn. Arms sales, prostitution, counterfeiting goods and people-smuggling were less lucrative, bringing in less than €1bn together.

Organisationally, the 'Ndrangheta mafia' has a tight clan structure which has made it famously difficult to penetrate, or to leave?

In terms of business relationships, their negotiation flexibility appears to be limited to offers that tolerate little scope for refusal, and they appear to have very few issues with compliance...

A potential template for NAMs and KAMs everywhere?

Art and the brand - how Mondrian 'made' LEGO into a building block for modernism…

                                                                                                                            pic: Andrew Sullivan
In 1946, Lego creator Ole Kirk Christiansen became the first toymaker in Denmark to buy an injection moulding machine, and began experimenting with cellulose acetate construction blocks.

His son Godtfred Kirk simplified his father’s brick design, perfecting its signature clutch power and switching plastics to the even more durable acrylonitrile butadiene styrene. For his colour palette, he looked to Dutch modernist Piet Mondrian’s Composition series: bright yellow, red, blue, and white. He patented the brick on January 28, 1958, and from that moment only looked forward.…

Given that modernism is based on making ideas new, repeatedly, these unprecedented times provide modernist NAMs with the opportunity to renew their markets and initiatives, over and over again, while others rely on more of the approach that worked in the old days, but is now patently inappropriate…

Likewise, making it new (over and over and over again) is an inextricable part of Lego’s DNA: just six two-by-four-studded pieces can be configured in 915 million ways….

Incidentally, if you are still in doubt about Mondrian and LEGOs’ mutual debt, ask yourself if you will ever again look at a Mondrian, without seeing the LEGO studs…

More here

Saturday Night Top-up?

                                                                                                                                        pic: Brian Moore