Jon Bird Archives - Inside Retail Asia
Jessica Alba could sell Honest for US$1 bn
Jessica Alba is considering selling her Honest retail business to Unilever for US$1 billion.
Jessica Alba could sell Honest for US$1 bn
Jessica Alba is considering selling her Honest retail business to Unilever for US$1 billion.
Retail roars at the Cannes Lions
Jon Bird looks at retail’s presence at the recent Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
The age of the shopper is now
The iconic television series, Mad Men, recently ended its seven-season run.
The Honest Co: a company for today?
Jon Bird takes a glimpse at a trail blazing celebrity with an honest to goodness retail business strategy.
Field of screams
“If you build it, he will come.” So said the disembodied voices in the iconic 1980s baseball fantasy, Field of Dreams. The response of Kevin Costner’s character to the whispers emanating from his cornfield was to build a baseball stadium in the middle of his farm. While the movie had a happy ending, retailers venturing to ‘build it’ in other pastures have not always been so successful. In the last week, US discount department store, Target, has announced a retreat from Canada …
Starbucks’ breathtaking ‘Shrine to Coffee’
Lovingly carved into a handsome thick timber bench at the new Starbucks Reserve Roastery & Tasting Room in Seattle is a Victor Hugo quote: “There is nothing like a dream to create the future”. It serves as a mantra for this ambitious ultra flagship, meant to be the forerunner of 100 Roastery cafes across the US. For this indeed is a dream brought to life with breathtaking scale, incredible quality, and painstaking detail. The “shrine to coffee” (as it was referred to in Wired M…
In the trenches on Black Friday
Out the door at 6:36am on a rainy (what else) Seattle morning, I was already late for the Black Friday sales. Close on 24 hours late. What used to be a one day post-Thanksgiving Day ritual has snuck forward in recent years to form what the media are calling, Grey Thursday. Online Black Friday sales started days or even weeks earlier. Just like we’ve experienced “Christmas creep” with the silly selling season starting in September, retailers went as early as they dared to get the jum…
World’s best festive commercials
Forget the Grinch stealing Christmas. This year, it is a cute little penguin called Monty that not only steals the show, but also the hearts and minds of the UK populace (and softies everywhere). British department store, John Lewis, has done it again, with a £1 million commercial (A$ 1.8 million) that tells the story of a boy and his penguin pal, on the search for a flippered mate. At the start of the two minute spot (more of a short film), we are led to believe that the animal is real, …
Subscribing to success
I was one of those early adopters (my wife would use the less technical term ‘idiot’) who paid £150 (that’s about US$240) for a Nike Fuel Band – one of the first of the wearable devices. It tracked steps and distance traveled, compared my efforts with the rest of the Nike Fuel Band user community, told me the time and looked, well, cool. I loved it, for about a year until it broke – just out of warranty of course. Since that time, prices have come down, and features have gone…
On the wild side: South African retail
There’s a word for South African (SA) retail: wild (which can be both positive and negative, as I’ll reveal later in this article). It’s unlike anything we see in mature Western markets like the US, UK, and Australia, which seem relatively staid and tame by comparison. On a recent trip to the southern tip of the African continent, I learned that SA retail marches to the beat of its own drum with a sense of energy, edge, and remarkable diversity. The sweep of retail starts with the…