Salty Dog Chips. I love how the dog looks like it’s doing something naughty. I think that resonates with the furtive naughtiness of eating crisps.

Nudie’s whole direction is so cute, spirited and cheerful.

It kinda looks like the brand is “I WANT” but Commissary Kitchen is responsible for this one. Why make the consumer turn it over when you can talk to them on the front? Use of “I” engages the consumer’s higher level wants.

Great form factor and stylish packaging. It wouldn’t really matter if the tea was shit, which given the flavour of Darjeeling Cherry, it probably is.

Can’t immediately think of a more bullseye execution than this. Brilliant.

Great sense of locality and craftsmanship but executed in a modern way, rather than Ye Olde or Down Country design. Actually the cheese is only slightly above average and tastes relatively mass-produced, so they are investing a bit in dis-satisfaction here, but in terms of getting into my trolley, it’s full of win.

On Nicholson St in Carlton.
I love the heritage of some of these signs. They have an earnest artlessness that imparts a real sense of place and time. Artlessness isn’t something that goes much with marketing, where the awareness and associations tend to be managed to the nth degree. Even seeming artlessness is often highly staged, such as RACV’s Jason call centre ads or iinet’s BOB. I reckon there’s a case for preserving as much true, authentic artlessness as you can find in a heritage brand. Where people have become wary of agency schmick and having their psychology over-understood, artlessness is a refreshing reminder of a different meaning for consumer orientation.

I went to their website. It is a true study in absolute shitness. You can do better than this with a five-year old chimpanzee and Microsoft Word. I don’t know how they managed to block out half their heading but they have. Of course, it’s perfect branding for them – it says cheap, it says Asian (this is a definite positive) it says cheap and cheap some more. I don’t know why anyone would go into computer hardware, it’s such a race to the bottom – margins are wafer thin and the stock’s superseded almost as soon as you’ve bought it. Great for the consumer though…

What I’m trying to work out is, did these guys:
a) slap up the shittiest website they possibly could because this is genuinely the extent of their style
b) maintain a shitty-looking website because at some point they realised that having a shitty website was the perfect way of saying “we are Asian and we are cheeeeaap”
c) pay some branding consultants a quarter of a million bucks to do market research and then engineer them the shittiest looking website since the early 1990s.

I’m guessing it might have started out as a) but progressed to b) or c) because these guys are obviously not amateurs – ten years in the game, 17 stores (they even give you how many square metres the store is – so useful) and big expansion plans too.

In any case, I love their branding and they’re totally getting my patronage!

–UPDATE–
I have just discovered that MSY’s website and PDFs are so unreadable as to have spawned their own fanpage, which takes MSY’s data and puts it into a more legible, aesthetically pleasing format… hilarious… check out MSY but Readable

Hermessence, the sales assistant was quick to point out, is only available through Hermes shops, unlike the other Hermes fragrance lines, which are also available elsewhere (presumably department stores, specialty retailers, online etc.). It’s also charged at a considerable premium to other Hermes fragrances – in the order of 50% – 100% more.

The strategy is redolent of Armani’s Prive fragrance strategy almost to the point of flattery. And you can understand why these premium brands might want to have their cake (mass-market dissemination) and eat it too (have a fragrance “brand” that speaks more directly to their couture clients).

But I wonder if the internal logic of these ventures matters, because it is not much good. To me, there’s a disconnect between the “official” story and the product itself.

You see, it seems to me that any luxury house would be disincentivised from putting its best juice recipes into something very niche, with a small number of doors and a prohibitive price point. There would always be way more money in the mass road, justifying development time and an investment in quality. If you have a fantastic, winner perfume, you’d want it in as many doors as you could without sacrificing your image, at a price point that spoke to middle income earners. Not tucked away in the back of your company stores that hardly anyone visits.

The endpoint to this logic is, of course, that the “exclusive” perfume is almost certainly an inferior item. Anything that was really really good would be saved fro the masses, leaving your second-bests for the exclusive line. Certainly, Hermessence seems that way to me. The fragrances in themselves are well crafted (Jean Claude Ellena is a wonderful nose) but they just aren’t at the level of sophistication of, say, Terre D’Hermes or Un Jardin Sur Le Nil. What you can say is that they are distinctive and intriguing – they just don’t have rock star quality.

The consumer’s logic tells them that it’s more expensive and more exclusive – perhaps that is enough to justify the price point and the venture. And the distinctiveness may be enough to make them noteworthy, so that buyers can project their good taste to others. But I, for one, smell a little bit too much opportunism and inconsistency. If part of the story I am supposed to tell myself is that these fragrances are “better” than the other Hermes fragrances that are significantly cheaper, I don’t buy it.

Hard to pin down – a bit low on polish & surprise? No interior designer finesse? A bit too pubby? S thinks it’s the lighting and the music is wrong. Music should perhaps be jazz – 1806 prides itself on its historical cocktails so why not some historical hooch music. I think maybe more clutter, some veils and partitions, more couches, and less signage outside. It’s already on a main road. There’s other possibilities too – maybe we aren’t the chosen demographic, or maybe this isn’t a “pretentious city nook-bar” bar. Maybe it’s like the plain-looking girl who’s content to sit it out and wait for the boy who’ll like her for who she is and what she does, rather than her looks.

s.komatsu bills itself as gluten-free, lactose-free dining, and has a big evangelistic sign about this out the front, which probably turns off some. And then has a really poorly-set-out menu-concept: too many pages and options and the prices are tucked right at the back and you have to choose between two dining concepts, the dining room up the top and the bistro down below. All this is abetted by bumbling explanation by the hosts.

We elected for the full dining whammy upstairs. It is a very nice, modern space they’ve inherited, I think, from a previous tenant. The music is truly terrible – some “restaurant background music” CD compilation with orchestral versions of pretty much every tacky song ever written: a bit of Elton, Barbara, Bette, Michael, I think even some Mariah. Oh and Richard Clayderman-esque versions of Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto (oh all right, only the theme bit from the third movement) and the Pathetique Sonata (the middle movement). The music was almost so bad it was good. Poor S, just having bundled off night shift the night before, wasn’t so sure. Mental note to self: after night shifts, keep the meals short and locations unchallenging.

So with all of that the food was mostly nice – good sashimi and tempura, and I had shabu-shabu which I hadn’t had before. Well-meaning service, OK wine, good wineglasses, weird dessert. But only two covers for a whole floor on a Friday night? I hope for their sake they do better when the footy’s on…

Muji was born… to create products designed not to make the shopper feel “I’ve got to have this,” but to inspire the feeling of “this is good enough for me,” because people don’t live only by their desires. The capacity to choose and judge what is “good enough for me”, without shopping for status, is something to be proud of. (Monocle 11)