We’ve written here before about how smart retailers can move beyond price-driven retail and become community hubs. In doing so they market themselves, diversify their revenue streams, improve market share, keep their fingers on the pulse and have a helluva lot of fun in the process.
Based in Austin TX, Mellow Johnny’s Bike Shop is Lance Armstrong’s spot. Calling it a bike shop doesn’t really cover it though.
More than a retail box, Lance and his friends aim to make the shop a hub of cycling life, commuting, social activity, fitness, and a temple of two-wheeled living….To serve the bike community is our job, but to convert people to a bike life is our mission.
In practice that means a retail store, a coffee shop, storage lockers for biking commuters, a regular schedule of events and classes on everything from maintenance to traffic skills, a “state of the art training and testing facility led by 6-Time Tour de France rider Kevin Livingston” and even something of an art gallery downstairs, housing photographic exhibitions.
This is retail as shopping destination, service provider, educational organisation, community hub and general fun place to hang out. It’s a movement.
How could you create this same kind of effect in your industry and scaled to your local market?
So Google have unveiled their App Inventor, which allows users to create Android-based mobile apps using a simple drag and drop interface.
“To use App Inventor, you do not need to be a developer. App Inventor requires NO programming knowledge. This is because instead of writing code, you visually design the way the app looks and use blocks to specify the app’s behavior.”
When this same kind of idea was applied to online publishing we ended up with tens of millions of blogs and a new industry. When it was applied to web design we got businesses like SquareSpace. Audio recording: podcasts. Low cost video cameras and simple eidting software: YouTube. Print-on-demand: Blurb, Lulu and Newpaper Club.
Whenever you take something that used to required technical skill or access to expensive equipment and make it accessible to the masses, the masses seem to grab hold of it and run – creating all kinds of weird and wonderful things in the process.
App Inventor is the first big step in doing exactly this for the mobile app market (there are other DIY app tools out there but nothing with this kind of clout behind it). Expect to see two things happen:
Individuals creating simplified, personalised apps to help solve their own daily needs or just for fun – some will break out and become hits
New structures, like marketplaces for DIY apps, to grow up around them
Hyper-local apps, which previously wouldn’t justify the cost of creating them, will become more common
Of course, this is really just a first tentative step and there’s a lot of ground yet to cover.
App builders will need to become even simpler and probably cross-platform. Apple will no doubt have something in the works too but the next big thing in this space may be a well-branded, well-back startup – something like a SquareSpace or possibly even an Open Source option, a WordPress for apps.
Whatever the format and whatever the timescale, it’s hard to imagine that DIY apps won’t become much more common – and that inevitably means new opportunities for creative entrepreneurs.
We’ve covered a host of travel related business ideas and Unlocked Guides – the newly launched series of the children’s travel guides – sit firmly in the ‘it must have been done before’ camp.
And it has, but not a lot and often not very well.
Unlocked Guides deliver a kids’-eye-view of cities like London and Edinburgh containing interesting facts, places to go and plenty of illustrations – all developed in conjunction with kids and parents through regular workshops.
“all over the world, parents are researching trips without getting input from their children. We like children, and we decided they deserved better, so we started to write our Unlocked Guides”
Started by a couple of ex-management consultant twenty-somethings, Factfinder, the company behind the guides, also produces kid-friendly travel guides and fact sheets for travel and tourism companies.
Every industry has its own underserved niche – where will you find yours?
I don’t normally dedicate entire posts to linking to someone else’s, but I thought this particular article by ex-Dragon’s Den investor Doug Richards was both relevant and a good read to boot – and he says f**k twice.
I have never understood the antipathy that otherwise rational people have for the so-called “lifestyle business”. Quite recently I heard someone in a position of responsibility in the small business community disparage lifestyle businesses. They weren’t real businesses, he said. They only enriched the owner, he said. What the f**k, I thought to myself? …
The heart of the issue is this question: what constitutes business success? In an age of growing awareness of carbon footprint, in a time when the fastest growing businesses are social enterprises, at a point in the economic cycle when we need to drive entrepreneurs to help solve social issues; we no longer have time for these false dichotomies.
ReFound is a Belfast-based artistic collective who turn found, donated and otherwise unloved furniture into one-off works of art.
And building on this idea of reusing and reimagining things, they’ve also taken a stab at reusing and reimagining urban spaces with a four-day pop-up shop event.
“Using unwanted and past-its-prime furniture as the canvas, the ReFound artists transform reclaimed pieces into unique, functional artworks.”
Pic: BruceTurner
