The european blogosphere (Loic Le Meur)
The french blogger foreigners love. His presentation was made from a wiki page and was mostly about the state of the european blogosphere (=figures galore) so check the page there is not much to add. Two things thou:
The concept is the following: LaFraise will handle the physical part of T-shirts creation. They (actually the guy runs his business alone) will take a photoshop, prepare it for printing on textile, order the tees from some cheap chinese shop and then send them to the appropriate customers. Nothing really fancy until… until this: T-shirts are actually designed by anybody that wants to. All entries are put into a voting page, and visitors rate the designs they like. So product creation and product cool-hunting (thx ben for the expression, he used it when talking about Régine whose presentation I could unfortunately not attend), the most critical part of the business, these are handled by people that are the customers.
Isn’t it more likely that you’ll buy a tee if you’ve actually created it or voted for it as really groovy? Me thinks so. The guy has the best business model of the century: – anonymous people create his products – anonymous people decide what products are going to see daylight – he “builds” tha shite, taking care of the part nobody can handle as an individual – anonymous people then turn into proud customers.
Did you hear me talk at some point about “marketing costs” or “R&D”? No no no not here monsieur not here. That happens, just outside the company and for free.
Social T-shirting, nice, really nice, and happening in France right now!
So that said it was really impressive for me to see how Loic portrays France. Here is basically a charming (the guy’s always smiling), dynamic and young guy, making things happen, and giving a very positive image of France. He talks about all these amazing initiative that reflect democracy, openness and innovation. Seriously, when was the last any of you associated France with “innovation” and “openness”? Seriously.
June 14th, 2005 at 3:14 pm
Re: Loic as image of ‘new France’: Hah! Yes, a good ambassador – I wish I knew more french bloggers who wrote in English (pardon, no francois for moi) – and Loic is in fact belonging to many of the global so-called A-lists.
I would like to see more of France anno 2005 – and I think LaFraise (thanks for blogging that) is a good example of innovative french guys doing things their own way. Actually, there is a guy in Sweden doing similar things with a blog – I will blog it on my own dltq.org/blog . Was great meeting you in Copenhagen; take care!
June 14th, 2005 at 3:14 pm
Re: Loic as image of ‘new France’: Hah! Yes, a good ambassador – I wish I knew more french bloggers who wrote in English (pardon, no francois for moi) – and Loic is in fact belonging to many of the global so-called A-lists.
I would like to see more of France anno 2005 – and I think LaFraise (thanks for blogging that) is a good example of innovative french guys doing things their own way. Actually, there is a guy in Sweden doing similar things with a blog – I will blog it on my own dltq.org/blog . Was great meeting you in Copenhagen; take care!