ive always said that the best and the worst thing about new zealand is its distance from the rest of the world, and i still think that is as true as ever
when we lived in london i bought a lot of stuff on the web, ever since 2000 when ISDN gave you a bonded 64K pair of copper wires to give 128K for which you were charged two voice calls for every second you were on the internet! it resulted in some catastrophic phone bills, but in the pre-ADSL days this was cutting edge, at least in london!
it was a pain to drive to shops and see things in person and as we have seen since then, all the places selling the unique, high quality, interesting stuff that is worth owning cant afford inner city rent because they put the money into the product and dont have much left for rent, and fifteen years on we can see how that shift has become a mega trend, and in my view it has decades to run and develop, and i see that as a really positive thing if you have, or aspire to have, any kind of craft/low volume business, and if you aspire to be able to own low volume, unique goods
now we live at the bottom of the globe the reasons for us buying off the internet are slightly different
new zealand retailers try hard to bring a taste of european sophistication down to these latitudes, but the reality is with a small population base there are many items i like that would sell in their ones and twos each year, so it is simply unrealistic to expect to find these items in the shops
so anyway, last night i was hunting around on the net for a unique corkscrew, likely the conventional kind and intensely dislikely the extendable ‘fish’ kind and the lever kind to – something the size of a car jack seems a bit out of proportion to open a bottle of wine in my view
indeed i found this, and not only was i taken with its simplicity, but i probably would not have purchased it if the accompanying video on how to use it was not available on the page – i thought that was really intelligent and would like to do something similar on my site here
it wasnt until i had processed my order that i spent some time digging around the site and just really liked the ‘touch and feel’ of the site. it is so obviously a french website, it could never be english or american or german or new zealand – i couldnt even really tell you why, but it has this unique style that tells you instantly that you have been brought to a quintesentially french website
and i think that is really cool and shows off what is best about this internet age that we are living in, and for that reason i thought i would put a blog post up here about them as i really like what they do and i hope some of you see something that is of interest to you too
the internet is wonderful if craft businesses are to survive and thrive, as their products are so niche they need to be able to reach a much wider geographic area in order to generate sufficient sales volumes, than what they could ever hope to generate from a singel store, even if it was located in a big city – the rent/sales volume equation would wipe them out unless they struck upon ‘Apple-like’ success, which is a very ow probability event
best
reiss