Yash

If by some freak accident I was taken back to the beginning of the academic year and came across myself at the time when I was considering starting up The Work Shop, having reflected on my experiences so far, I would have this to say:

Start something, Do it today!

Guinness ads proclaim that “good things come to those who wait” and they have it all wrong. “Things may come to those who wait…but only the things left by those who hustle.” (A. Lincoln) Procrastination is “suicide on an instalment plan.” Don’t live the rest of your life dying!

Knowing when you are procrastinating is easy. If there is no positive intent in putting something off that is procrastination. You will always know without exception. Identify the mechanics of your avoidance triggers and deal with them. This is an interesting blog by Dr bill Kanus that identifies the underlying causes of procrastination and sets out effective strategies for dealing with it.

We have benefited from starting this venture in ways we could not have imagined at the start. The Greenbus campaign, our involvement at ECO-Build 2011 and DOK#1 to name a few. I found Richard Branson’s approach quite refreshing. He is known to his colleagues as DR YES for his tendency to respond positively to new ideas.

The best approach is “Fail early fail often” as the IDEO man Bill Moggridge says and how true that is.

Wakey wakey

Day dream in your own time and don’t let it get in the way of seeing what’s in front of you. It will go hard but it will save you a lot of heart-ache at the end. Dreams and goals are not the same. One is rooted in fantasy where as the other is rooted in reality. Dreams can be useful when you are looking for motivation but nothing can be done to realise them until they have been transformed into goals that is the route to achieving them has been mapped out. A great way of keeping on track is to use the Gantt chart. I did a stint as and intern in project management support in a construction company and using these charts is the norm there but recently  this is something that I am coming across more and more amongst designers. The options vary from the low-tech free MS-Excel solutions to the high-tech and expensive professional packages like primavera (Which I wouldn’t recommend but for complex construction projects).

Curb your enthusiasm

Be prepared to understand if others aren’t as enthusiastic about your ideas as you are. When negotiating remember that those sat at the other end of the table might not share your aspirations. They are looking out for their own interests. If you are caught out by their lack of enthusiasm you might inadvertently put yourself in the position of giving too much away to try to bring them onboard. That is partly why our negotiations with KF nearly collapsed. Put that energy to use elsewhere and find another way.

Have an exit strategy

Another reason why we ended up doing more that we had hoped to bring Kingston First round was the fact that we committed ourselves mentally to the site and could not figure out another way of achieving the same goals.  People can smell your desperation and will just hold back while you promise them the world to persuade them to give you what you want. Corrine suggested 3space (www.3space.org) to us when I first mentioned that we were having difficulties with owners of our intended site. 3space who offer “meanwhile use ” short term tenancy agreements on empty commercial properties would have been a great avenue to go down in hind-sight but we had already put the blinkers firmly on were well and truly fixated on the target building. As a result we got bogged down in lengthy negotiations in which we ended up committing to more than we could comfortably deliver and prevented from putting in the strong foundations on our supply side on which we would come to rely on when we would eventually launch. At the end part of the reason we managed to get what we wanted was by threatening to walk away and that is a useful card to have. Of course we were bluffing and it would have been much easier on our mental health to genuinely possess the option to do so and go with an alternative solution.

There is always another way

Although we managed to make our lives difficult by the way in which we engaged Kingston first in our negotiations we managed to find a compromise at the end which involved doing the kind of work that we had not set out to do. Having said that we came out of it having made a profit before we had even started trading as The Work Shop.  Perseverance does pay off, eventually.

Document everything

We were badly hurt by the fact that we didn’t properly document our negotiations with Kingston first. Taking minutes makes it easier to hold people to what they say. Without documentation you are at the mercy of their whims. If you work hard to gain an advantage don’t let it slip away. Besides negotiations it is often very useful to be able to retrace your actions to better judge what to do next. You will be surprised how much information will be lost if you rely on your memory alone and you will never know when you be asked to report on your progress.

Mind the gap

We have become aware that there always exists an enormous gap between the projections whether in terms of time or funds needed to start a business. Although we have been down this road before our first foray was very much a low intensity affair which was something myself and Alex did in our spare time and with no particularly challenging deadlines or targets. With The Work Shop we set ourselves ambitious targets for opening the shop and were confronted by the fact that the rest of the world doesn’t care about our deadlines. Contingency planning is key.

Supply chain is king

Whatever else is involved in a retail business is meaningless if you have nothing to sell. We should have scaled back our expectations from the students simply because by their nature they are unreliable. This is something we should have spotted sooner having been students ourselves and having spent most of our adult life in the company of students. It has been hard work and to be truthful a little off putting which is why we are putting customer care especially as far as the retailers are concerned at the centre of our other business NUU. To remedy this problem we have placed greater significance on sourcing work from graduates who are on the whole more experienced and more professional.

Want something done? Don’t do it yourself!

Delegate as much of the work to others as is possible. You would not believe what people are willing to do for free to be involved with a positive project.

If you try to do everything you’ll end up burning out and not getting everything done. Besides when you become too involved in the project (to the point of spending every waking hour working on something or other) you will not be able to stand back and make objective decisions. We were hurt badly as a result of this. 60 hour weeks aren’t good for anybody. To my shame I had read jeff howe’s  book on crowdsourcing but failed to put it into practice. This was a mistake for sure.

Mayday Mayday Mayday!

Don’t be an idiot, ask for help! Ask for help all the time and from everyone. People aren’t going to think any less of you for that and the worse that can happen is that they would say no. Concentrated especially on identifying who else benefits from your desired outcome and make them contribute towards the achievements of your common goals.

This is something we identified early on when we produced the start-up canvas[Business model generation]. We had identified FADA as a beneficiary of the project but we failed to squeeze out as much assistance as we should have from them.

We went running for help to Kingston University when we recognised that our negotiations with KF had stalled and got what we wanted. The university threw their weight around and their involvement dramatically changed the dynamic of the negotiations. Being a BID partner (essentially a contributor to Kingston first’s funding) provided much needed leverage in the negotiations. Especially since they were able to put pressure on people higher up in the food chain within the KF hierarchy, people we would not have necessarily had access to.

Netwrok, network, network

We made the mistake of not starting early enough with building our network of creatives that was what we should have done right from the beginning. Had we built a network first we could have an asset in the bag right from the beginning. This is especially true with the students. The student’s capacity for carrying out extra curricular work is limited and seasonal due to their academic commitments. Had we started earlier we could have had them working in the background while we were busy putting everything else in place. We missed our window.

Aside from that oversight we have met a great deal of people who were ready to help and/or offer advice through this experience. The advice is have a pitch ready and talk about your project with as many people as you can.

Beside the obvious advantages of having a wide network you also have the added benefits that are peripheral to the core business we would never have been offered to represent Kingston in the Green Bus campaign [see earlier post] and we would not have access to the creative talent we plan to represent at DOK#1 [see earlier post]

Get out more

Do what is necessary to enable yourself to spend some time looking from the outside in. When you do look from the outside in the clear light of day will reveal shortcomings and opportunities that you would not have necessarily spotted .

Chasing the grade, Chasing the dream

The perennial student dilemma is always whether to go for delivering an assignment to please their academics or whether to realise its full potential in terms of creating value. Or so we thought. The fact is that the thought of commercialising their work hasn’t even crossed the minds of most students. Here lies the problem. As far as the students are concerned we have found that the difficulties we have faced in sourcing market ready merchandise is a symptom of an underplaying problem. That is the students find it difficult to see the usefulness of their work beyond meeting their academic obligations and the prevailing culture of working to deadlines rather than working towards a finished article. We are increasingly finding ourselves in a situation whereby we have to coach students on how to prepare their products for a retail environment. This is especially true with product design students which is odd since the discipline is primarily concerned with the production of good for sale. Thus the scope of the project has been dramatically extended to include advising the participants particularly the undergraduates on preparing their ideas for market including packaging, ease of assembly etc. but aside from the load it places on us in terms of time spent coaching the students it is something we are very proud of. We can already see the positive impact it is beginning to have on even on those at the early stages of their undergraduate degrees. We can see that this ability to be selfsufficient will be increasingly more important as the number of design graduates continues to increase at an astronomical rate and the size of design practices become ever smaller. (Design council report)

That internet thing

The importance of using the internet as a tool to for raising the profile of the business and attracting business opportunities is something that has become clear to me through this experience. Having said that it is sometimes difficult to find the time to be active online while running four projects and working six and half days a week to survive. Perhaps it comes down to integrating this activity in your daily routine much like answering emails or the actual design, development and production of merchandise rather than an afterthought. Admittedly, this is not something that I have got to grips with yet. Perhaps this is a time management issue. Whatever the problem is it needs to be sorted out soon.

Fix the tribe

Think of something that you would like to change and do it. Well we are trying but we are receiving resistance from the one place we thought we could expect support. What I mean by resistance isn’t wilfully hindering us indeed the students are vocal in their support of what we are doing and there may well be intent but we have found that so far this has not translated into action. Seth godin states that “essentially what we all do now is assembling tribes that spread that idea until it becomes a movement”. Well there is something wrong with this tribe. The idea seems like a good one and we seem to have identified a “group that is disconnected and has a yearning””but something isn’t right and I can’t put my finger on it. I thought that what we were doing came from my empathy for those who are struggling with the same issues I dealt with when I was a student and recent graduate. Maybe what we need is place to assemble a place outside of the current system. Soon we will have that and it will remain to be seen whether that has a positive impact on things.

Future goal

The goal moving forward from here is to firstly ensure that The Work Shop is a success. This is the primary target that needs to be achieved. But beyond this We have found that while we enjoy designing and producing our own line of products. The level of competition on the market means that the smart money is on businesses that help creative people reach the market. It is for this reason that we are branching out into organising collective exhibitions for small design outfits in return for a percentage of their earnings from any resultant sales. It is a new revenue stream that was born out of our experiences in this module. See earlier post on DOK#1. Essentially this is taking the work Shop to the next level. We have already set our eyes on a bigger target and we now see The Work Shop as a test bed for this new venture.

NUU and The Work Shop collect “Most Entrepreneurial Student” award at Kingston enterprise event.

I just wanted to thank those people that I didn’t get a chance to thank at the event

At MACE Catherin and Corrine

At FADA: Peter Christian, Peter Ford, Colin Holden

FADA Technical staff there are too many of them but they know who they are

At Enterprise: Martha Mador, Simon Hulme , David Stokes, Dwain Reid

Thank you all for being so generous with your time. see you on the 13th of June.

This isn’t strictly about MACE but it does highlight the fact that the emphasis on networking in the course is justified.

In September 2010 Myself and Alex took part in the Tent exhibition at the Truman brewery in Brick lane. Partly because we wanted to reduce costs we took one of our friends (Pedro Mealha) along with us and basically split the stand three ways, two for us and one for Pedro. We split the hire costs down in the same way. During the exhibition and since then we have done our utmost to connect with as many people as possible. And we have been rewarded with sales and opportunities to collaborate and to pass on jobs to one another.

We were contacted by DOK#1 who had seen our work at Tent and offered a stand in the exhibition. We made a counter offer. That if we were able to bring in enough designers along with us that they would give us a much bigger space. Thanks to our networking we are now able to take a much bigger contingent to Denmark to exhibit at the DOK#1 2011 in September. As a result we have now been offered our own room over 7 times larger than the space we had (paid for) in Tent. And for free! There are a mixture of up and coming designers as well as well established names coming with us to Denmark.

So all this collecting of business cards make sense now. All of this would have not been possible if we had not put ourselves out there. So get your people to talk to my people!

We have now completed our work for Kingston first and all improvements have been delivered barring some display hanging clips that have been rejected and would have to be redesigned.

This concludes a rather painful chapter (OK, maybe I’m laying it on a bit too thick, but it was frustrating, that’s for sure!) in my life which I have discussed in my previous post about deliberate ambiguity. The improvements to the ground floor building were done as a compromise deal to allow The Work Shop to set up in the space and keep Kingston First happy. Fortunately for us we have made a small profit from this part of the project but if I had to do this again I would probably steer clear of anything like this. The improvements included

• New display system for exhibitions using 196 Clemclamp fasteners with 43 double sided panels with adjustable leveling feet(18 of 8’x4’ and 25 of 8’x2’) finished in flame retardant emulsion  delivered
• new display system for the aforementioned board
• revamping of the tourist information desk including integrated flyer pockets and inlayed polycarbonate information logo graphics
• manufacturing of light-box feature display signage with Kingston First graphics
• information sign signage for coloumn
• supplying, CNC cutting and installation of 120 frosting elements for ground floor windows
• free standing literature board with 20 custom built acrylic flyer pockets with machined stainless steel stand-offs
• 14 individually silk screen printed blinds with information sign graphics
• Honestly, the list goes on

You would not believe how much of a pain this whole saga was while all the time we just wanted to get on with our own work on the shop. Here are some images for your viewing pleasure:

I haven’t got the pictures to prove this and you would just have to take my word for it but most of our display units for the shop have also been completed and delivered to the site. Although they would need some minor alterations before we are ready to start trading.

To promote The Work Shop at knights park campus we undertook a teaser campaign the campaign would have three stages with the latter two stages gradually revealing the message. That is we were looking for contributors to sell the work in the work shop. There were five distinct series each with their own intended recipient. But the identity was very much consistent across the campaign. Below are the three stages moving from left to right each column represents a week between the next reveal stage.

The competition for advertising real estate in the campus is fierce with anything from cameras for sale and random events taking up pretty much every inch of available wall space. Because of this we concentrated on the one place that to that point (It’s now become a new trend) had been left untouched. The toilets. The idea was that there aren’t a lot of distractions in that space and so we would have our audiences undivided attention.

The campaign was a success in that the program is now well known across the campus what we didn’t anticipate was that this would not automatically result in entries flooding in. Which is what happened. We had a handful of leads. So having put up some 300 posters we then had to go looking for work to put in the shop. I’m still confused about the whole affair

We were approached by Julian Whiting from PC-Powerdown (pcpowerdown.com) to act as the furniture sponsors of the event in return for gaining exposure.

We became involved with the setting up of Kingston’s stand at the Eco-build 2011 partly through the publicity created by The Work Shop project. It was through this event that we came to the attention of Julian Whiting’s Green bus team.

The furniture was loaned to the Green bus team for the duration of the event and was returned undamaged. We also supplied the team with a guest book in the form of a table which was signed by various MPs, Mayor of Richmond and the general public. This has been a great experience and actually has not cost us a penny. Furthermore we have been approached by a number of businesses who saw our work on the bus to supply them with furniture (Negotiations are on-going.)

Our involvement with the project also came to the attention of the faculty press office. You can see the news bulletin here.

For me this highlights the importance of networking and generally getting your name out there. If you know enough people good things just fall in your lap.

I had been meaning to write about this for some time but something always came up.  So here we go. Just a little piece about a mistake we made during the project that ended up costing us a great deal of time and effort to put right.

In our negotiations with Kingston first the operators of (the site we are going to occupy) we adopted a policy of deliberate ambiguity. The ambiguity surrounded what we were going to offer in return for them allowing us to use the site to set up The Work Shop.

What we failed to notice was you cannot benefit from muddying the water if you are the fish. Unbeknown to us that was exactly what we were, the fish. In other words this policy only works if you are negotiating from a position of power or at the very least you are on equal terms with respect to what you are able to bring to the negotiating table. In this case we were negotiating with an organisation that would have gone on doing what they were doing with or without us. They really weren’t that bothered if we succeeded or not but we were desperate and it showed.

So when we thought we were engaging in a bit of clever bargaining we were in fact making a rod for our own back.

We were warned about this by people advising us in FADA and we ignored this advice at our peril. What ensued as a result was what the military types would call “mission creep”. This is when an operation with a limited scope designed to accomplish a given goal through a number of pre-planned engagements spiral out of control and become a protracted and costly affair. Often, this occurs as a result of a misplaced perceived sense of superiority.

That is exactly what we did. We went on to say things like “well, perhaps we could do this or that but we’re not sure let’s see “thinking we could always just say no later. What actually happened was that having sensed or desperation Kingston First was taking notes on all of the things we were offering and then turned around and demanded that we do all of those things or else there would be no deal. We were stuck! We had no leverage to bargain with them. It was stupid really. Don’t do it!

I’ve stumbled upon a great book by Jeff Howe (I recommend t to everyone who… well, actually I recommend it to everyone). In “Crowd sourcing: How the power of the crowd is driving the future of business ”, Jeff Howe give numerous examples of how crowdsourcing has been employed by businesses to do the jobs traditionally done in house or outsourced to other businesses (there are examples of both successful and unsuccessful attempts along with analysis of their respective strengths and shortcomings).

Kingston Made given it’s limited resources is heavily reliant on the power of the crowd to source it’s stock, organize marketing campaigns and run the everyday operations of the business. While our crowd is limited to Kingston students and graduates the potential capabilities of this not too small specialized crowd shouldn’t be underestimated. In fact Howe asserts that the optimum size for a crowd is around 5,000 (unfortunately this means we will have to recruit pretty much everyone at Kingston and their dog).

As discussed in previous posts, by far the most challenging aspect of running this business is the proper organization and management of the capabilities of this crowd.

Howe argues that the diversity of people’s “hobbies” and how seriously they take them has a lot to do with their dissatisfaction with their highly specialized professional working conditions.  This is Ironic since it’s the increased professional specialism that is giving rise to diverse amateurism. In our case while we rely on people who are carrying out the work traditionally expected of their area of specialism for sourcing our stock we too we can point to creatives that feel trapped by the rigidity of accepted and often arbitrary boundaries of their chosen specialization. Fine artists that make furniture, product designers that create artwork. Whatever, if it’s good we’ll sell it! Furthermore, we can tap the resources of those students that aren’t necessarily interested in the production of objects for sale but other aspects of running such an enterprise. The difficulty here is how we can incentivize this cooperation beyond offering work experience and occasional prizes.

10 rules of crowd sourcing (according to Howe):

1.       Pick the right model

a.       Crowd wisdom

b.      Crowd creation

c.       Crowd voting

d.      Crowd funding

2.       Pick the right Crowd

3.       Offer the right incentives (understand your crowds motives and reward them)

4.       Keep the pink slip in the drawer (you can’t crowdsource everything you’ll still need a core of professional staff)

5.       Dumbness of crowds or the benevolent dictator principle (crowds need a layer of administrative staff that provide guidance without stifling creativity)

6.       Keep it simple and break it down (you can get more out of your crowd if you break down tasks into bite sized chunks)

7.       Remember the Sturgeon law! (90% or more of the crowds output will fail to reach the standard required)

8.       Remember the 10 Percent, the antidote to Sturgeon law! (Allow the crowd to sift through the work and find the gems)

9.       The community is always right (guide the crowd don’t attempt to make them follow you)

10.   Ask not what the crowd can do for you but what you can do for the crowd. (attend to the needs of the crowd)

I’m going to write about a great TED talk by Seth Godin. In “Sliced bread and other marketing delights” he proposes that “[the] Ideas that spread, win” hardly a revelation but it’s interesting how he dissects this process and explains how it can work.

Although Godin does not reference Rogers by name he draws heavily on his ideas about the diffusion of innovations in fact the graph displayed on 9’:50’’ is identical to the one Rogers developed.

The bell curve of ideas diffusion

Godin proposes that instead of marketing your product/service to the two groups on middle of the curve (i.e. the early/late majority as with what Godin calls the “TV-industrial complex”) you should market your product/service to the innovators and the early adopters.  Rogers put the figure of these two groups at 16% of the population. “sell to people who are listening and maybe they’ll tell their friends”.

If you can create something remarkable (that is “something that is worth making a remark about”) and succeed in selling the idea to the innovators and early adopters then those ideas will surely spread from the innovators to the early adaptors and from there to the rest of the population. Godin points to the Otaku phenomenon in Japan. Otaku is the term used to describe the people with an obsessive interest in a particular group of products or hobbies. Products that have this remarkable quality do well with the Otaku and often spread to the general public. Outside Japan we can point to Apple as the most successful company that uses these tactics.

Now, How does this apply to our venture (Kingston made)? Well, lets see, who is our market? 1. (Initially) The people of Kingston whom we hope will purchase our products. 2. Lets not forget that the creatives who place their work in our retail unit are consumers too. They are giving away their time and a portion of the price of their items to us in return for the service we can provide (highstreet exposure, community). So, if our market is initially the people of Kingston, our marketing team is a huge mass of Kinston students (read residents) who happen to be innovators and who have a big vested interest in the success of the project. “Spreading the word” is a commercial imperative for these innovators. Any marketing they do for the store can potentially establish a positive feedback cycle of publicity up the curve. For a great example of how this works look at www.threadless.com

How do we aid this community of innovators in helping us help them? Well, we intend to ask them just that. Watch out for our marketing campaign around mid Jan.

I’m planning to do a post on Seth Godin and “the Tribes we lead” sometime soon. Do come back for that.

We hope that Kingston Made will provide for ample opportunities for students to hone their skills in creating products that will do well in the market. In fact we are hoping that the idea of the retail lab will provide an added incentive for students to participate.  I have been trying to draw a comparison between this sort of live market research and the theory of Darwinism and by extension memetics . The emphasis will be on the importance of using simple low cost products (This supports CB’s insistence on early/simple prototyping). I think this text still needs some work. Certainly it doesn’t tie in directly with memetics (for the time being at least there are a lot of loose ends). There are interchangeable veiled references to memes and temes. I’m new to the idea of memetics. It’s perfectly possible that this analogy or in fact this whole reductionist approach is not well suited to this system, so I’m (as always) open to comments/criticism. (I normally wouldn’t do this but I was inspired by Charles leadbeater and his collaborative method for writing the book We-Think. I’ll write about him too later) I’m reading up on the topic and refining the model so if you’re interested watch this space.

I hope you all have an elementary knowledge of biology, genetics and memetics as this will help in understanding the model.

Try to imagine the product as the model biological organism (model organism are organism that are often used for testing in biology and especially genetics). But keep in mind that there is a distinction here between concepts and the vessels. The vessel (model organism, or in other words the objects we stock)can be seen as the test subject (ephemeral and short lived, these are the building blocks of our stock)but the concept can be seen as the genetic code (potentially eternal) that contains a new characteristic exhibited by the vessel that is passed on to future generations (eg. QWERTY keyboard ref: Master thesis by Aysun Aytac 2005) until it is gradually phased out when it no longer provides a genuine competitive advantage (though not always, look at the appendix in humans not only it’s not useful it’s potentially lethal). Fruit flies are a popular model organism because they are inexpensive to breed which means numerous opportunities for observation and testing in relation to the cost of cultivating the culture (Our stock).

Mating or cross breeding (collaboration) of test subjects(and by extension the concepts) can be looked at as bringing together creative individuals and provide opportunities for co-creation. We can possibly facilitate this using the store as our base (again, notice there is a distinction between facilitation and control). Generally the main obstacle is the sharing of intellectual property. But here complex organisms which require large resource expenditure to conceive are highly selective in breeding (the colony grows slowly in relation to resource expenditure and is prone to extinction due to lack of adaptability in the face of changing environment),  but less complex and therefore less resource intensive organisms are far less selective and normally have a large pool of mates to pick from (and so they thrive and adapt by producing hybrid offspring). This phenomena can translate to the apparent reluctance of larger organization to share ideas and participate in co-creation as opposed to the casual intermingling of ideas amongst students.

To what end?

In biology once a useful/desirable gene (concept) such as the active gene for bioluminescence has been identified it can be harvested and implanted into other more complex organisms so that they too would exhibit the same traits. This is not future science by the way (in the field of genetics), many recent advances in crop disease resistance are a direct result of the application of these techniques in crop immunology.

In our model if ideas are successful they can (although this is not necessarily a requirement) be implanted into more sophisticated vessels which would have a greater chance of survival in the market (and potentially a higher profit margin!).

(for further reading on this subject refer to Richard Dawkin’s the selfish gene and susan Blackmore also look at memetics on Wikipedia for a large list of sources. I haven’t read most of them so please feel free to send me any ideas)