Category: Uncategorized

Mass Customisation Comes to Shirts

Original Stitch

As someone who takes a keen interest in shirts and tailoring I read this Techcrunch article on a site called Original Stitch with enthusiasm.

It’s basically a huge shirt-building configurator which steps you through the design of a shirt with the majority of options you’d be asked in person by a tailor, although sizing is only brought into it post-purchase, which is sensible considering it would lengthen the checkout process and reduce conversion.

There’s a huge range of choices and of course the ability to get things very very wrong as well as design the shirt of your dreams. However the most interesting thing is the business model and how as the founder states “we’re a technology company”. Essentially they’ve built a platform which can create one-offs but with the speed and scale of larger volume – and of course their route to market is just a great website backed by strong reviews and testemonials.

Certainly an interesting trend to watch, but I’ll keep my powder dry on that lime green and pink shirt I just specced – for now.

Everything facebook Launched at f8

Everything facebook Launched at f8

A nice wash-up of the f8 conference here. My salient take out / conclusion:

“Zuckerberg said Facebook wants to be a “cross-platform platform” that rides across iOS, Android, Windows Phone, the web, and more. That’s a convenient framing of the fact that Facebook doesn’t own a mobile operating system.”

That’s clearly something that keeps Zuck up at night.

One other element which peaked my interest was AppLinks to allow users to load content held deep within apps as opposed to having start at the top level.

Apple’s Second Quarter Sales Numbers Show iPad Fever Is Cooling

Apple’s Second Quarter Sales Numbers Show iPad Fever Is Cooling

The usual mind blowing revenue numbers from Apple and as with the title of the article a slowing in iPad sales makes for some interesting forecasts on where the tablet market is headed (if anywhere). Personally I still view the iPad as grossly overpriced when you compare it to quality Android alternatives like my own favourite, the Nexus 7.

Also worthy of contemplation is that figure of just 3million iPod sales in the quarter, down from 23million in 2008. A device which changed the world and sold in such insane volumes (both in terms of hardware and media) is selling just 10% of what it did six years ago, I certainly can’t think of any precedent for that kind of drop off for such a mass market device.

A Progressive CMS – Project Feather

I spent Monday in London with Telerik, the company behind Sitefinity, the CMS that powers AstonMartin.com. Lots of good discussion around their future roadmap and some nuggets on current functionality which we aren’t using – very worthwhile.

On my roadmap (as with many others) is to develop our site towards being full responsive, we currently have a mobile site but alongside most in the industry who are more brand than transaction lead, we are working towards being fully responsive. The challenge we have is to blend the power of our CMS with the flexibility of Bootstrap which we have used to build our latest launch microsite for Vantage N430.

The great news is Project Feather is on the horizon, if we can blend the flexibility of a bootstrap front end with the power and breadth of our CMS then we’ll be in a great place.