We believe great management is built on a few key capabilities: giving great, inspirational feedback; active improvement of colleagues’ skills over time; and constructing project rhythms that extract outsize value from each member on a team. It’s not about efficiency or Gantt charts, it’s about helping the people around you achieve more when you’re around than when you’re not.
-Clay Parker Jones, in Medium; emphasis mine.
The following Q&A is excerpted from Makeway Magazine's interview with Jake Bronstein, of Flint & Tinder.
Through the journey so far, any particularly memorable stories that have helped you continue?
The first underwear factory featured in our video is particularly near and dear to my heart. It was in the foothills of PA and had been having a hard time for a VERY long time. We got them spun up making underwear (bought them a couple of pieces of equipment, learned to use it together etc) and in doing so kept nearly 100 people employed for 3 months. It wasn’t enough to keep the bank from foreclosing though. It was really hard watching, but it also crystalized the importance of what it is we’re going.
Here, a weird narrative. A "family owned and operated" factory in middle Pennsylvania is down on its luck. They're "ready for something better," so Bronstein - an entrepreneur and showman - makes them the lead role in his (highly successful) Kickstarter campaign. Here's the video:
I take Bronstein at his word that he worked intimately with his factory, and that if he could have had his way they would have remained open. But the portion of his $290K campaign that went to the factory apparently "wasn't enough to keep the bank from foreclosing," and the factory was shuttered.
The Flint & Tinder FAQ page claims that "for every 1,000 pair of underwear we sell per month, at least one sustainable job is added within our supply chain. " But what does "sustainable" mean, and why wasn't F&T able to keep the original factory open? What does a "sustainable" job look like once the bank forecloses?
I like American people as much as the next guy. But I'm highly skeptical of anyone who claims to be entering a business venture in order to lift American manufacturing out of its presumably sorry state. Poorly run operations will be shuttered, no matter where they're located. And procurement teams should choose suppliers based on whether they are able to fill orders.
I own F&T product, and I think it's totally fine. And I like a narrative as much as the next guy. But my experiences visiting factories in China were as compelling - if not more so - as my experiences visiting US facilities. As a consumer, I appreciate $.35 worth of human toil that went into making my cheap nail clippers, no matter where they came from. And as a supply chain specialist, I appreciate the vendor that can deliver what I want, when I want it, at a price that my consumers will pay for. That's all.
UPDATE: I posted this on 2013.11.11. On 2013.11.17, Flint & Tinder sent a sincere reply to me on twitter, saying they were confused by my post. I respect F&T's feelings, and will be writing up a clarification as soon as I'm able.
Adapted from my answer on Quora.
As a hardware product designer myself, I can say that it's really important to be working with someone with whom you have a shared understanding of the product development process.
I've generally been lucky, but from time to time I have worked with clients who simply have a different idea about how hardware should/can/will be developed. While I tend to think that I'm right when it comes to these things, the bottom line is that it doesn't really matter: conflicts of this type are undesirable and difficult to resolve once you've entered into development.
Like with most things, it's up to the client to know what questions need to be asked. If it were me, I'd get smart in as many ways as you can. Start by going to hardware design/development/production meetups. Download a copy of Autodesk Fusion 360 and start modeling your ideas. Learn about as many manufacturing processes as you can, optimally visiting actual shops in person. The more you know, the better.
I would also recommend that you approach a designer with sketches and good specs for what you want to do and how you want it to look. In other words: if you have perspectives on these matters (some people don't, but more often they just don't communicate them effectively), you want to be clear on both design intent and aesthetics.
Something to keep in mind here: The more you bring to the table, the more clarity in your relationship with the rest of the development team, AND the less time & money you spend.
I would also, for what it's worth, take Tom Wolfe's "Man From Mars" stance, described here.
Gaa xkcd so good.
Just a pretty diagram, showing some ideas for a marine monitoring system I was thinking about a few months ago.
I like it when technical drawings include depictions of something physical, too. Whatever about anti-skeuomorphism, right?
Short update on my Dummy Headset project!
First, I took v1 (the non-lightened version) and installed it on a frame I lad lying around. In order to do so, I had to tap threads into the holes that were SLA printed right into the parts, which I did by hand. Shapeways and the other 3D printing houses just won't do secondary operations (this is dumb and will in time change), but it only took a few minutes to do. For mockup purposes I used some cup point set screws that I had in my shop (the final version will have soft tipped set screws). The end result was pretty slick - my frameset now has the fork semi-permanently attached, and the whole thing is totally secure.
Of note: Here's a photo of the original dummy headset that I turned on my late circa 2010. I used little thumb screws on it, which were kind of convenient, but the overall look is too blocky for my eyes.
After mocking the whole thing up and seeing that it functioned as intended, I went ahead and ordered v2 of the parts, which are internally relieved to reduce build mass. They came a week or two ago, and I'm happy to say that I think they'll work just fine. The internal ribs probably aren't totally necessary, but they're kind of a cool feature and would be *impossible* to be made via conventional methods. I may end up removing most of them, but for this version I'm happy to have included them.
I also grabbed a few soft tipped set screws from McMaster, and am looking forward to seeing how they work. The nylon tipped one would be for carbon fiber steerers, which are pretty delicate and don't want a metal screw digging into them. The brass tipped screws would be for steel and aluminum steerers, which are much more durable.
I haven't had time to tap the holes in this version or install them on a frameset yet, but I have no reason to think they'll work anything other than perfectly. At that point I need to determine whether it's worth trying to get them injection molded or CNC machined in bulk. These SLA versions cost me about $20 for the set. If I had to guess, I'd say that they'd run $5-10/set for CNC machined and $2-3/set injection molded (in quantities of 100s, plus $2-3K in tooling and setup).
Fixture building comprises a lot of a manufacturer's time, regardless of the scale of the operation. For small shops, designing fixtures that can be used repeatedly for different customers is extremely useful. I faced this challenge a number of times when I was working on bikes, and spent a lot of time setting up fixtures that helped my productivity a lot.
In 2010, I built the brake boss mitering jig below. It mounts to a tiny little rotary table that I bought for my Benchmaster, itself the tiniest horizontal mill that I owned and still one of my favorite tools.
It seems quaint, but little productivity tools like this are how shit gets done in even big production style factories around the world. I kid you not - little manual mills, drill presses and lathes are in operation as I write this, performing some little repeatable operation on high precision parts for demanding customers.
Eventually a lot of these things are likely to be sold for scrap and passed down the line to developing economies. I've been to a few tooling auctions, and have seen 75 year old punch and foot presses that weigh (literally) a ton being sold for under $100. I understood that they would be loaded into a container and shipped to Asia, and it's likely that they got a new life there making good parts for another decade or so at least.
I generally think that that lifecycle is a healthy one, though it does have the strange effect that nowadays, even the most industrious kids are likely to end up knowing additive manufacturing in lieu of conventional (mostly subtractive) methods. Schools around the country are buying up MakerBots by the truckloads, and with good cause - to fail to do so would be an offense on par with teaching me cursive in 1992, when what I should have been learning was C or HTML. But all those 3D printers have got to go somewhere, and I suspect [citation needed] that they're supplanting Heavy Tens and J-Heads, which anyway don't get too much use as it is.
While I'm reasonably unromantic about that transition, it does strike me that subtractive methods are likely to remain, for the long time, significantly more efficient and effective for making certain types of products. Just as CNC machining hasn't replaced casting, forging, and sheet fabrication, additive manufacturing won't totally replace those methods either. All of these tools will, instead, complement each other - and the institutional knowledge pertaining to traditional manufacturing will, I hope, be not supplanted but enriched by newer paradigms of manufacturing philosophy.
So, 3dfile.io supports Autodesk Inventor *and* Solidworks files right out of the box. Sketchfab, on the other hand, only does these dumb tessellated formats that all the 3D printing people use.
Note that the body appearances in this viewer actually aren't what I have them as in Inventor; apparently 3dfile.io is applying some sort of changes to the file when I upload it. Regardless, not having to export as a different file format is great. I don't see how I'll be using Sketchfab at all anymore.
Oh. Also, I modeled a can. Pretty neat, huh?
Note: I wrote this post in response to Eric Paley's "Startups Shouldn't Write Prose" post. While I disagree with the premises of his argument, I do concur with a number of his conclusions (e.g. that formal business plans have limited utility). Regardless, I have respect for his thoughts on the subject, and appreciate the ideas he puts forward in the original post.
I am a big fan of accepting and accounting for uncertainty. Uncertainty has been a big part of my life, and I suspect that its role in the lives of those around me will only increase over time. In general, I think that's okay. Partly because I think it's fun to embrace uncertainty, but mostly out of my feeling that, as Chuck Klosterman wrote, "the future makes the rules, so there's no point in being mad when the future wins." My best play is to construct general theories about what the world will look like in the future, and then try to position myself in such a way that the work I'm doing will be rewarded and the things I care about will be allowed to grow.
It's a tough thing to do. Humans are mediocre predictors, and they're terrible at understanding and evaluating predictions (see Subjective Validation, the Forer Effect, and whatever your friends think about their horoscopes). In philosophy and math, formal argumentation takes a large role here; it can be very helpful in evaluating the methods of reasoning used by predictions in general.
While I was a passable student of higher order logic in college, formal argumentation has played a large role in how I understand the world. But I accept that my experience is not universal, and I care more about getting my point across than I do about the medium. And the fact of the matter is that prose remains my best tool for communicating complex ideas - and I suspect that the same is the case for most individuals and brands.
Startups, like the rest of us, deal in uncertainty. A startup is, in Steve Blank's definition, "an organization formed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model." That is, startups are inherently uncertain what business they're in, or what business model they will organize themselves by. The primary obstacle in any startup's path is figuring out what they can make that people will want.
In the early stages of a startup's life, investors constitute something of a separate class of customer; as funding options broaden (see crowdfunding; the SEC's recent actions), this line will blur even more. Regardless, all of a project's stakeholders will require some form of communication, and in the case of investors, a startup's goal is to show how and why its business will be successful. There are many aspects to that equation, of course. But they generally include at least an implicit argument, which is communicated in a variety of ways. Startups need to communicate that there is (or will be) demand for what they're working on, and they need to show that they are uniquely positioned to meet that demand. These are complex ideas, and not to be taken lightly. Moreover, investors won't want to feel like they're being argued into something, so startups would be wise to let the logic of their product, and the makeup of the team behind it, speak for itself.
Slide decks do not generally convey argumentative structure well. Arguments are not constructed hierarchically, but slide decks present information in a top-down, slide-by-slide manner. They also measure information in discrete parts - the slide being the smallest unit of measurement. But arguments don't conveniently break up well into slide-sized pieces, and the result is that key points are often truncated in order to adhere to a slide's predetermined size.
What slides are good at is creating a rhythm during a presentation. For many presenters, this is highly useful - but to my mind, the content of the argument should not be sacrificed for the sake of presentation, and any presentation method that requires arguments to be abbreviated should be avoided. Startups should avoid hubris at all costs - and the presentation of an abbreviated argument in order to make a stakeholder easier to convince is not a step on that right path. As Edward Tufte wrote:
The pushy PowerPoint style imposes itself on the audience and, at times, seeks to set up a dominance relationship between speaker and audience...A better metaphor for presentations is good teaching. Teachers seek to explain something with credibility, which is what many presentations are trying to do. The core ideas of teaching - explanation, reasoning, finding things out, questioning, content, evidence, credible authority not patronizing authoritarianism - are contrary to the hierarchical market-pitch approach.
Slide pitches encourage a presenter to elide the deductive reasoning of his company's work, and let the post hoc ergo propter hoc nature of the presentation seduce his audience. As Tufte says, "PowerPoint actively facilitates the making of lightweight presentations," and I would argue that startups should avoid lightweight presentations - especially when dealing with early stage investors.
Prose, on the other hand, is accessible, thorough and can be highly evocative. It's also platform independent, and doesn't require the author to be present to provide context to slides which have been abbreviated in order to achieve a consistent tempo. Prose can be used to convey complex, nuanced arguments, and it does so in such a way as to communicate argumentative style and personal character.
Prose also has the benefit of requiring verbatim proofreading, forcing its author to literally read back an argument to himself. This process can be extremely helpful to a project in which all of the details haven't been ironed out, as weak points are often glaringly obvious when they're verbalized explicitly. Slide decks, on the other hand, allow authors to gloss over difficult points in the text, with the intent that they will be filled in verbally during the pitch. Careful audiences will pick up on these argumentative gaps, especially when reviewing notes after the presentation, and the result doesn't reflect well on the author's formidability or command of the subject matter.
Of course, all authors need to find their own paths towards personal argumentative style and brand image. But the benefit of complete sentences, whether in the form of blog posts, executive summaries, or soliloquies, should not be undervalued. Prose is a powerful tool, and there is a wealth of historical examples of well composed prose arguments which - long after their authors are gone - remain convincing and powerful (see Chomsky's early syntax work, Boolos on incompleteness, Plato (take your pick), or any nearby piece of scientific literature). It's possible that the same will someday be the case with the slide deck. But I suspect instead that it's a transitional technology, and that presentations relying on PowerPoint-like technologies will be largely forgotten. Written prose, on the other hand, will be with us in some form or another for a long time, and I'm not in a position to argue with the future on that point. I encourage young teams - and anyone wanting to convey their ideas to others - to do the same.
For anyone looking for a particularly acute parody of a slide deck, see Peter Norvig's Gettysburg Address. Note, though, that any medium has examples of poor execution - and please send along examples of especially good slide decks, if you've got them :)
Special thanks to Hope Reese and Nick Fletcher Park for editing.
From the Wikipedia page on Taguchi Methods. Genichi Taguchi was an engineer whose research focused largely on manufacturing tolerance design.
He therefore argued that quality engineering should start with an understanding of quality costs in various situations. In much conventional industrial engineering, the quality costs are simply represented by the number of items outside specification multiplied by the cost of rework or scrap. However, Taguchi insisted that manufacturers broaden their horizons to consider cost to society. Though the short-term costs may simply be those of non-conformance, any item manufactured away from nominal would result in some loss to the customer or the wider community through early wear-out; difficulties in interfacing with other parts, themselves probably wide of nominal; or the need to build in safety margins. These losses are externalities and are usually ignored by manufacturers, which are more interested in their private costs than social costs. Such externalities prevent markets from operating efficiently, according to analyses of public economics. Taguchi argued that such losses would inevitably find their way back to the originating corporation (in an effect similar to the tragedy of the commons), and that by working to minimise them, manufacturers would enhance brand reputation, win markets and generate profits.
Or, I mean, whatever. I *guess* they can keep trying to get ~$400 from me to see the spec for representing geometric data (ISO 10303-42) in STEP files... but I'm not sure that's sustainable long term. Right?
Seriously, though: What am I missing here? Why are standards bodies organized in ways that seem to specifically prevent small (but potentially motivated) teams from participating? Are the projects they're working on too complex? In light of counterexamples ranging from the Linux kernel to GCC to the Apache web server and Android, I can't see how this is the case. Is it just a matter of entrenched interests refusing to relinquish control of a powerful governing body? Are there examples of similar open-standards projects that I'm not aware of?
Regardless, I wonder what the long term prognosis for standards regulation of this type is. I would *hope* that in ten, fifteen years max I'm seeing these standards in a web browser for free. Am I crazy?
If I am, I hope somebody speaks up :)
I posted a related question on Quora. Answer it!
N.B. It strikes me that my nomenclature might be a little off, and that perhaps there are good examples of open-standards projects in the web world (e.g. W3C). Forgive my ignorance.
This great snippet from FastCo's piece on GitHub's management structure hit me hard, especially as I've been thinking about the power of prose. See also: Ryan Tomayko on GitHub's open-source structure.
Communication isn’t just key to self-organization--it also solves or simplifies a bunch of other hurdles that growing companies face...
Marketing collateral is a natural by-product. When your company communicates internally with polished, clear, and well-produced content, it is easy to and repurpose that material for external communications. The kind of communication that is required for self-organization will end up producing all the events, schwag, and content you need to build and publicize an authentic brand.
I think that the power of this shouldn't be understated. Having a clear idea of the business you're in and how you communicate about it - which, as I've argued, can be done well through writing prose - can produce ripple effects throughout other facets of your company.
It also strikes me, reading the above quote, that slide decks are almost never presented to potential customers. If there are counterexamples to this, I'd love to see them. If not, I wonder if marketing departments are identifying weaknesses in the medium that upper level management is blind to.
If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.
LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman. I googled around for a quote with context, but didn't immediately find one. Oh well.
From Wikipedia, emphasis mine:
A faceted classification system allows the assignment of an object to multiple characteristics (attributes), enabling the classification to be ordered in multiple ways, rather than in a single, predetermined, taxonomic order. A facet comprises "clearly defined, mutually exclusive, and collectively exhaustive aspects, properties or characteristics of a class or specific subject". For example, a collection of books might be classified using an author facet, a subject facet, a date facet, etc.
Faceted classification is used in faceted search systems that enable a user to navigate information along multiple paths corresponding to different orderings of the facets. This contrasts with traditional taxonomies in which the hierarchy of categories is fixed and unchanging.
Back in the Napster days, I spent a not insignificant amount of time renaming song files and placing them in a hierarchical file system. Each track was named in the following format:
"#{artist_name} - #{album_name} - #{track_number} - #{track_name}.mp3"
And my directory structure looked like this:
With individual track files living inside each album directory.
At the time, I was running Linux on my home PC and spent a lot of time navigating file structures in a shell. Having my music organized hierarchically was useful there, and I spent a bit of effort maintaining the system, even going so far as to write a shell script that would automate the creation of file structures for unclassified files.
Today, my habits have held over even while technology has changed. I still think of my media collection in terms of files (so old fashioned, I know) , and I keep iTunes in the "column browser" view. It works, but it's antiquated; were I more modern, I'd stream media exclusively and would search a cloud library for tags (created through folksonomy), not browse by static, predetermined layers of organization. When I was running Linux that wasn't an option, and my hierarchical organization was my easiest and most effective way of sorting songs. Now, that advantage is slipping away in the music industry, as social and cloud-based streaming services become more and more intelligent about how they thing about the qualities of a song or artist.
In other facets of my life, hierarchical organization gets closer and closer to obsolescence. When managing 3D assembly models, I find it tricky to establish naming sequences that will make sense across projects and phases of development. I tend towards part names that begin with two letters and end with four numbers. In a given filename, I follow the part name with a short verbal description. The end result looks like this:
"BK1008 Rack End.ipt"
Here, the file extension is .ipt, which is the Autodesk Inventor extension for part files. This particular part is one I designed for custom bike racks, and the prefix "BK" refers to bikes. The part lives in a directory called "BK Bike Parts", along with a bunch of other - related and unrelated - parts. Parts are categorized in directories according to the purpose they're originally designed for, but they're often repurposed or discarded. Their part numbers are just placeholders, and the descriptive titles I give them are often mostly meaningless. Often times, one designs a part with a particular form in mind and names it accordingly. Over time, that form changes, and in the end the name is nothing but a vestige. It's a kind of a Theseus' Paradox, and one that conventional naming schemes - or mine, anyway - don't account for well.
I'm happy to say that I have no idea what my files naming sequences will look like in five years. Jordan Brandt, Technology Futurist at Autodesk, predicts the death of files in a way that strikes me as totally prescient here. I'm not totally clear on the implications, but he describes a world in which part metadata is stored at attribute tags, much like Facebook photo tagging. Such a system would, I presume, at least initially require the user to set up searchable tags in order to enable reliable part retrieval. Eventually I'd hope that attributes could be generated predictively, much like Facebook scans photos for faces and auto-suggests likely matches for who to tag.
At this point, my file naming conventions would become irrelevant. Brandt puts it very well - I *never* need to look in a particular folder, or for a particular filename, when I want to find a photo on Facebook. It's tagged with all the relevant data, and with adequate search tools it'll never be hard to find. Eventually I expect the same to be the case for the little gadgets I'm designing: their identities becomes more and more tied to their actual attributes, rather than some arbitrary and cumbersome naming sequence.
I built this frame in 2008. It was the first belt drive bike I built, and hence it was an experiment that I financed on my nonexistent R&D budget. I probably spent $2500 on it, plus something like 40 hours of build time. But that paled in comparison to the time I spent *thinking* about it, which was likely in the 80 hour range. I also developed the graphic design myself, teaching myself Illustrator in the process - add another 20-30 hours there.
I like the bike. It was a pain in the ass, a challenge. I tested out a bunch of new things on it - the S&S seatstay coupling, a new waterjet head tube badge, a new (fancy) paint job with painted-on graphics. I think it came out great, though paint isn't exactly notable for its durability, and now the frame - despite being woefully underused - is chipped and scratched in all manner of places.
Regardless, I love it. I don't know what I thought I was doing, but I fucking took this bike on, and I'm proud of myself that the project being a bit over my head - and over my budget - didn't stop me.
From Twitter's Blog (emphasis mine):
The IPA is a new way to do patent assignment that keeps control in the hands of engineers and designers. It is a commitment from Twitter to our employees that patents can only be used for defensive purposes. We will not use the patents from employees’ inventions in offensive litigation without their permission. What’s more, this control flows with the patents, so if we sold them to others, they could only use them as the inventor intended.
This is a significant departure from the current state of affairs in the industry. Typically, engineers and designers sign an agreement with their company that irrevocably gives that company any patents filed related to the employee’s work. The company then has control over the patents and can use them however they want, which may include selling them to others who can also use them however they want. With the IPA, employees can be assured that their patents will be used only as a shield rather than as a weapon.
From the Amazon Shareholder Letter, 1998:
During our hiring meetings, we ask people to consider three questions before making a decision:
Will you admire this person?
If you think about the people you’ve admired in your life, they are probably people you’ve been able to learn from or take an example from. For myself, I’ve always tried hard to work only with people I admire, and I encourage folks here to be just as demanding. Life is definitely too short to do otherwise.
Will this person raise the average level of effectiveness of the group they’re entering?
We want to fight entropy. The bar has to continuously go up. I ask people to visualize the company 5 years from now. At that point, each of us should look around and say, “The standards are so high now -- boy, I’m glad I got in when I did!”
Along what dimension might this person be a superstar?
Many people have unique skills, interests, and perspectives that enrich the work environment for all of us. It’s often something that’s not even related to their jobs. One person here is a National Spelling Bee champion (1978, I believe). I suspect it doesn’t help her in her everyday work, but it does make working here more fun if you can occasionally snag her in the hall with a quick challenge: “onomatopoeia!”
Skylar Tibbits is awesome.
From the video notes:
This project investigates chiral self-assembly with many parts in order to explore the aggregate behavior of simultaneous assembly and self-selection. 240 pieces are agitated to self-assemble closed molecular structures. The continual process shows the various stages of assembly from independent parts to fully assembled structures.
This work points towards a future of both tangible educational tools for scientific phenomena as well as new possibilities for industrial-scale assembly.
Skylar Tibbits has some pretty awesome stuff on Vimeo. This one is beautiful:
Here he explains his work at the MIT Self Assembly lab, and shows a few other cool projects:
These things self-assemble into different shapes. Pretty awesome.
From Fast Company's recap of their pre-Apple interviews with Apple's new consumer experience chief. Emphasis is mine.
On brand culture:
Everything we’ve done is counterintuitive to traditional selling organizations, with their traditional training. My dad used to always say that he could teach anything but he couldn’t teach how to feel. That’s the hardest part when you have 11,000 people: How do you teach them to feel how we feel? When I first started, we had no training programs--none of that. We had to put in world-class sales and service training programs. The thing is, I don’t want to be sold to when I walk into a store. I want to be welcomed. The job is to be a brilliant brand ambassador. Everybody is welcome. Don’t be judgmental whatsoever. Look them in the eyes. Welcome them. ‘How are you?’ Don’t sell! NO! Because that is a turnoff. So how do you hire all these amazing people and put them in a world-class retail setting and then say, ‘But you’re not allowed to sell’?! How do you put this whole digital team together and say, ‘But we are not doing any direct marketing to sell to you!’? The digital guys look at you like you’re nuts. But no, no, no, no, no. What we have wanted to do is build an amazing brand experience and an amazing way that people can engage with the brand. Then it will naturally happen. And then I don’t care where they buy. I only care that they buy the brand.
On desegregating digital from brick-and-mortar:
Traditionally, wholesale is wholesale. Digital people are incentivized to drive digital. And store managers are interested in the store. We blew that all up. I said, No, no, no, store manager in Detroit: You’re responsible for digital too. You’re telling me nobody in Detroit is shopping online? Wrong! Now London, for instance, every week has to report their online traffic and their offline traffic and what was their crossover. I hired a chief customer officer who came from Lloyds who built us a huge insights and analytics department. We put in traffic counters in all the stores, because I could get traffic online but I couldn’t get traffic offline and so I couldn’t get any crossover behaviors. We’ve got ten thousand iPads out there in the stores. And we’ve built this clienteling app. So if you buy in Hong Kong or if you went and bought online or even if you are just window-shopping and have stuff in your basket--we’ll know. Offline stores will be able to see all your behavior online. We are blurring the physical and digital, and it’s not just the retail experience. It is the service.
