Last week Kevin, Bob, and I were lucky enough to visit Zappos, a US company who sell a huge amount of shoes online, and spent half a day touring their facilities and spending time with a couple guys who work there.
Here is what I think are the most remarkable things about Zappos, which provide inspiration to us and are relevant to any consumer company:
1. The powerful and truthful brand that the whole company upholds. Their brand is founded on Core Values – we call them principles at GD- and are religiously subscribed too. They do not claim to do too much, but what they say they do, they do 110%. External brand agencies have not been let anywhere near it. Their brand has been allowed to evolve over 10 years and pervades company culture to an extent I have never witnessed. The best effect of this in my opinion is that commercial decisions become no-brainers with the backdrop of such a prevalent sense of reason d’etre.
2. All areas of the business are focused on Wow’ing their customers – striving to create a ‘personal emotional connection’. Their ‘Wows’ please customers, and the obvious offshoot of this is that they drive talkability, repeat purchase (and therefore lower costs of acquiring customers) – because everyone is focused on creating new wow’s, the whole company orientates their thinking (and, their spending) naturally towards the customer. At GD, our customer is our boss- and it is great to see a company that truly believes that their customer is more important than their management, shareholders, board and themselves, as well. And they go about every day and decision proving that. Zappos spends approximately just 2% of it’s annual revenues ($18m last year) on marketing. Wows are the reason why.
3. In terms of literal customer service, they’ve renamed it ‘Customer Loyalty’. Customer Loyalty is not a call center, but an extension for them of brand marketing. CL agents are brand marketers driving loyalty – and they really do; 75% of sales revenues come from existing customers, which is a figure that we aim to one day achieve. Rather then spend their bucks on re-acquiring customers, they make absolutely customers have such a good experience that they come back.
The data speaks for itself in terms of results. In all 3 of the points above Zappos, ‘a service company that happens to sell shoes’, is stronger in my opinion than the ecommerce ‘gold standard’ Amazon which even if it is predominently in other verticals, already looks dangerously like the vulnerable incumbant. Companies like ours should study Zappos now to understand the future of ecommerce.
Posted on: February 17th, 2009 by Jamie
We send out a free microfibre cleaning cloth with every pair of glasses we sell. This year we will be redesigning it, and I thought that it would be best if the challenge of designing it was opened up to you, as well as us
My own entry will be based on inspiration from Damien Hirst’s dots – I think the picture’s called Opium…
If you’re up for this then you’ll need to email me your entry. This can be either a fully fledged photoshop file, a link to something that provides inspiration, a scan of a doodle on the back of an envelope, or anything really that conveys the idea for the design. We can do the final artwork. Make sure that you send it to Cloth Design Competition by Friday 27th February at 6pm. We’ll then set about the task of picking the winner.
In return, well, all we can offer you is the immense sense of satisfaction from seeing your design/doodle/creation end up on our cleaning cloths for at least a year, with a namecheck at the bottom ‘Cloth design by [your name]‘, a blog post putting you and your design on a podium, and a lifetime’s supply of cleaning cloths! We’ll also throw in a pair of glasses of your choosing from the website to the lucky winner.
Good luck!
Posted on: January 27th, 2009 by Jamie
Click on the image to enlarge.
Posted on: January 20th, 2009 by Jamie
All companies make mistakes in their advertising from time to time (I recall roping in Nancy Sorrell in 2005 as a one-time model which generated very little awareness for us and cost a fortune) but most companies learn from their mistakes and react quickly to them.
2009 has brought with it a wave of repeat broadcasts of the Specsavers TV ad featuring Edith Piaf. I dont listen to her music, but like many people (especially since the recent film about her life La Vie en Rose) I am aware of her talent as arguablly France’s greatest popular music singer ever, and her tragic and premature death.
Edith Piaf would be turning in her grave if she could see this advert. This is a song that the French regard as something of a national anthem, about someone who was a chronic alcoholic and drug user looking back on her life, and saying that she regrets nothing; that all the pain was worth it for her to become the person she now is. It is poignant and heartfelt. (reference)
Whoever sold her out to Specsavers must regret doing so – I’m just suprised Specsavers hasnt stopped broadcasting this once it became clear how misguided it was. The Guardian called it ‘sacrilege, vandalism, and just plain wrong‘. I just did a google search, and it looks like it’s been shorlisted by someone as one of ‘TV’s worst adverts’ and someone else on page 1 of the listings calls it ‘evil’ . As I speak, the latest comment on youtube reads ‘I’m sure I’ve seen a worse ad than this. But I can’t think what it is. ‘.
Specsavers’ advertising can be impressive, like the viral Barclaycard style ad, but surely it’s time for these particular broadcasts to stop?
Posted on: January 8th, 2009 by Jamie
Thought I’d just publish this little list of songs I found which are related to glasses and/or eyes. You will find a selection of them on our ‘on-hold’ music
Let me know if you can think of any others you can think of and I’ll try and include them on Radio GD too. For the record, I’m a Jimmy Cliff fan (go see the Harder They Come if you havent already. Think it’s on at the Barbican although i saw it at the Playhouse) so I can See Clearly Now is my favorite and has actually featured on our on-hold music since 2005!
Posted on: October 21st, 2008 by Jamie
Picture by tahir
A massive milestone in our company’s development happened today
Hats off to the IT guys who made it happen, who are now bleary eyed and clutching Eat Breakfast rolls.
If you visited the website from 11pm-12pm you will have noticed an ‘out to lunch message’ instead of the homepage. In fact, the lights were on in our offices above Baker Street until 4am as the ‘classic’ website which has served us since 2004 was relegated and the website we referred to as ‘Beta’ became the new Glasses Direct.
What you see now as our website represents a significant step forward in customer experience . Here are my top 5 new features:
1. Our Virtual Mirror software. Developed in France by our brilliant facial recognition experts – what you see online now represents the pinnacle of innovation in try-on technology. The most exciting bit is that what’s live now is actually just the first iteration and there is much, much more to come. 3D try-on and exact measurement scaling is only a breath away, so watch this space.
2. More categories – you can now shop for glasses in many different ways. On the high street you look at shelves marked ‘semi-rimless, rimless, designer etc’ but not everyone wants to shop for glasses using those categories. Now we let you shop by gender, price, material, lens type, whether they are rock ‘n roll glasses, designer brand – and many more which we are still working on such as face shape.
3. Reviews, videos, measurements, data – we give you much more information than you will ever find on the high street about our products. No sales rep in Specsavers can furnish you with the amount of data the web can…. And we’re building up a library of it. You will soon find celebrities who wear similar pairs of glasses to the one you’re looking at, staff reviews from GD, and also we are going to let you know in more detail what other customers are buying. I particularly like the bendable video David did to illustrate the indestructibility of those frames. More to come
4. Inputting your prescription and choosing lenses. We have undoubtedly the most advanced system to prompt you and help you as you enter your prescription and choose lenses. We’ve been on our backs underneath the car since day one, fiddling with the nuts and bolts, chopping and changing and finding the best way we can help you to checkout. 4 years of experience is rolled into this new order process and we hope that you like it. Because it’s not exactly simple –all this – and our mission is to make it so.
5. This blog! David and Ran are the mainstays of this blog, doing a fine job producing great articles. Keep checking and contributing.
There is so much more that goes behind the website –which tracks your glasses through the laboratory, which gives our customer service teams the information they need when you call, that tells us how many pairs we have left till we run out….. but today represents a big big step forward for the front-end customer experience. Round of applause for the David Carruthers, Head of User Experience and the IT team that made it all happen!
Posted on: September 18th, 2008 by Jamie
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