By Posted on Posted in Entrepreneurship, Family, Inspiration 1 Comment

lemonade stand Yesterday evening I arrived home and my daughter, who is 9, looked quite busy then suddenly approached me saying: I have decided what I will do when I grow up, I want to open a perfume store with my 2 best friends, I will ask them to check if they accept being in this with me but I only have one condition, I want to be the manager and run the business, they will be helping me.

I was quite astonished hearing this, me, who spent and is still spending a large amount of time chasing VCs and investors to launch my own retail startup.

I looked inside her innocent eyes which had no clue about the complex process of funding and launching a new business but at the same time saw the sparkle and enthusiasm.

And what is your plan for this business, how are you going to start? I ask.

First I am going to name the store/business, what names do you propose something nice and short like Zara, Mango or similar to these brands?

And why don’t you try naming it yourself, this is your business, you should come up with name? And let us say we manage finding a name for your business, what is next?

Next, I will start writing down the name of the perfumes brands that I will sell in the store, Lancome, Lacoste, Mont Blanc, Estee Lauder, Burberry, … please help with more names daddy!

And I propose: what about in between naming the store and the list of products, we include the design on the store and maybe later after naming it, I help you creating a logo for it and draw some design with some colors, so you can have an idea how it is gonna look like?

And she agrees.

So now we are in the process of brainstorming for a business name and in the meantime she will ask her 2 best friends if they want to be her business partners.

To be continued … in case the project is not dropped.

By Posted on Posted in CrowdFunding No Comments

Dear visitors, I am crowdfunding for my retail startup on indiegogo, feel free to visit my project page here, your contribution can make a difference in launching my venture.

No matter you are located geographically, all you need is a credit card, Visa, Mastercard and American Express (sorry no prepaid cards are accepted).

My campaign is in USD, in case it is a currency other than your own, be aware that you will be charged the equivalent in your own currency. Contributions will need to be rounded to the nearest whole unit of currency.

To contribute to a campaign, look for the big “Contribute Now” button on the right hand side of any active campaign page. Clicking on this button will bring you to the Contribution Check Out page. Please note that your credit card account will be charged immediately, as soon as you complete your contribution check out process, not at the end of the campaign.

By Posted on Posted in CEO, Entrepreneurship, France No Comments

Nicolas Riché is the CEO of Columbus Café, a French chain of coffee shops, who went on Patron Ingocnito (Undercover Boss) on the French TV channel M6 as an undercover employee in his own stores to check how employees react, their needs, the stores problems and at the end, he revealed his real identity to the 4 employees with whom he spent 1 full day separately, training and going thru their daily tasks, after asking them to come to the main office in Paris and offered them many different ways to improve themselves and the store services to serve the brand differently and more positively.

You can watch the full video at this link (in French).

By Posted on Posted in Books, Brands, Marketing No Comments

I just finished reading Brandwashed, an amazing book by Martin Lindstrom, a worldwide renowned marketeer.

Martin takes you in very deep places on how brands we use are brainwashing us, the consumers, everyday.

On a personal experience, Martin tried hard to get away from his brands, the brands he is using everyday, but could not resist and came back using them. He is also showing how consumers get attached to brands because of fond memories and nostalgia, how brands are creating everyday different techniques to make us want them, to inspire us going into stores and getting them from shelves even sometimes without thinking.

Book foreword by Morgan Spurlock

From the bestselling author of Buyology comes a shocking insider’s look at how today’s global giants conspire to obscure the truth and manipulate our minds, all in service of persuading us to buy.

Marketing visionary Martin Lindstrom has been on the front lines of the branding wars for over twenty years. Here, he turns the spotlight on his own industry, drawing on all he has witnessed behind closed doors, exposing for the first time the full extent of the psychological tricks and traps that companies devise to win our hard-earned dollars.

Picking up from where Vance Packard’s bestselling classic, The Hidden Persuaders, left off more than half-a-century ago, Lindstrom reveals:

  • New findings that reveal how advertisers and marketers intentionally target children at an alarmingly young age – starting when they are still in the womb!
  • Shocking results of an fMRI study which uncovered what heterosexual men really think about when they see sexually provocative advertising (hint: it isn’t their girlfriends).
  • How marketers and retailers stoke the flames of public panic and capitalize on paranoia over global contagions, extreme weather events, and food contamination scares.
  • The first ever neuroscientific evidence proving how addicted we all are to our iPhones and our Blackberry’s (and the shocking reality of cell phone addiction – it can be harder to shake than addictions to drugs and alcohol).
  • How companies of all stripes are secretly mining our digital footprints to uncover some of the most intimate details of our private lives, then using that information to target us with ads and offers ‘perfectly tailored’ to our psychological profiles.
  • How certain companies, like the maker of one popular lip balm, purposely adjust their formulas in order to make their products chemically addictive.
  • What a 3-month long guerilla marketing experiment, conducted specifically for this book, tells us about the most powerful hidden persuader of them all.
  • And much, much more.

    • This searing expose introduces a new class of tricks, techniques, and seductions – the Hidden Persuaders of the 21st century- and shows why they are more insidious and pervasive than ever.

    About Martin

    True story. When he was a kid growing up in Denmark, young Martin had but one thought in his life: Lego. He hand-built and slept on a Lego bed. The family garden became his very own Legoland creation, attracting visitors from near and afar (including the lawyers from Lego).

    Then, still a child, Lego installed Lindstrom onto their advisory board. And then, of all the children in the world – they gave him the very first green brick in the collection.

    You’re guessing this is what got Martin started in the crazy world of branding, marketing and all things advertising. And you’d be right.

    Blame it all on Lego.

    Fast forward some three decades later…

    Consumer Advocate Lindstrom emerges from marketing and branding jungle; he has a fresh perspective. Times have changed and a new, more enlightened, more respectful way of marketing to consumers needs to be addressed. The challenge is clear. Consumers now dictate to brands how they want to be spoken to. The king is dead. Long live the king.

    In particular is the thorny issue of consumer manipulation. Most know it’s going on, this is nothing new. What is new, though, is the voice that is prepared to speak out and challenge this marketing status quo. Brandwashed, his latest bestseller, is a full-frontal exposé of the wanton trickery employed by many conglomerates, iconic brands included, to squeeze dollars out of their loyal customers. Lindstrom, using , t’s not as easy as he thinks. (When is it not.)

    By Posted on Posted in Brands, Celebrities No Comments

    Sugarpova is a premium candy line that reflects the fun, fashionable, sweet side of international tennis sensation Maria Sharapova. Maria has created her own candy business to offer an accessible bit of luxury, interpreting classic candies in her own signature style. A long time candy lover with a surprising sweet tooth, Maria is bringing a new level of quality to the candy category through fun, unexpected types and shapes – with playful names to match. Wrapped up in a beautiful package, it’s both style and substance, just like founder Maria Sharapova.

    By Posted on Posted in E-commerce, E-tailing, France, Jordan, Startups, Supermarkets No Comments

    Yesterday in a news from AMEinfo, a Jordan based company called MENA Apps launched its online supermarket Sallaty.jo for the Jordanian market.

    Online supermarkets in the Middle East or Gulf are not a viable business and most of whom tried to launch this concept ended up shutting down.

    Many years back during the dotcom boom in the early 2000, Webvan was “the” online grocery who wanted to take the retail grocery business to the next level and they ended up burning $830 millions and firing 2,000 employees.

    And while real brick-and-mortar stores are looking for ways to shrink their operational cost and surfaces, some think that the online option is the solution. Big international retailers have all the needed platforms and money to do it and are barely succeeding in it (compare online grocery sites in France), so the main direction in a very advanced retail market crowded with endless big names and store formats like France are moving towards Drive formats (in French), you buy online and come pick up your stuff yourself from a store near you (compare Drives in France).

    If you are not a supermarket yourself, it will be quite hard to offer the needed assortment to your clients, as a supermarket have on average 45,000 items on its shelves so it is quite impossible for any start-ups to stock all these items and variations in its back store, especially with all the fresh and frozen food. And if you have a kind a joint venture with a supermarket, you will end up with very tiny margins on your orders, especially that no supermarket will sacrifice a big chunk of his margin that he is fighting day and night to get from his suppliers.

    Good luck for Sallaty.jo.