Customer Service – Go Doosh!

It’s getting colder now, so the other morning, while waiting at the airport for yet another delayed flight I went online to look for a warm, mid-weight jacket / coat.

About 3 years ago I’d brought a couple of long sleeve Tees from a cool NZ clothing brand called Doosh (Yes I know, their name is a bit suspect, but their clothes are cool), and I remembered that their jackets were pretty good as well. So I checked out their website and saw a jacket I liked the look of, the Arctic Coat (no, this not me modeling it!).

Although Doosh has an e-commerce store, and  I am happy to risk buying tee shirts etc online, I’m not going to buy a coat that way as I want to be able to try it on and check out the quality.

Unfortunately, their site didn’t say which retailers stocked their lines and so I clicked through to  ‘Contact Us’  and at 8.43 am, sent an email to Jacob Dodds (Doosh’s Account Manager), to ask whether was anywhere in Wellington that  I could check out the Arctic Coat.

At 9.08 am, just 25 minutes later, I got a friendly email reply from Dana Foster, their Warehouse Manager, giving me the details of Doosh’s Wellington stockist – Marvel Menswear – excellent! I went round  to Marvel Menswear later that day, tried on the Arctic coat, and brought it on the spot.

It may be a sad reflection of our times, but nowadays an incredibly prompt and friendly reply to a web site inquiry stands out as amazing customer service to me.  Simply by responding to me as they did, I was already predisposed to buying their product, and the only thing that could have ruined it was if there had been a product quality issue (there wasn’t), or poor service in-store (the service in the store was excellent).

Nice one Doosh, and not forgetting Marvel Menswear!

The 1980’s – a lot to answer for?

The 1980’s, a decade of indulgence, bad fashion, big hair, and even bigger shoulder pads.

And it wasn’t just the hair and shoulder pads that were huge. Big egos, big aspirations and a huge hunger for success all combined to make the 80’s the decade of greed. Who can forget the immortal line, “Greed is good”, as used by Gordon Gecko, the stockbroker anti-hero in the movie Wall Street?

In the early 80’s, mobile phones were relatively new, and the size of house bricks. IBM launched the home PC in 1981 and most of us were using MS-DOS until the arrival of Windows in 1985. Mass browsing on the World Wide Web would take another 9 years, when the Mosaic browser was launched.

What’s truly amazing is that many of us remember the  80’s but cannot recall how technology has moved along since then.

So, what has changed in the last 3 decades? Thankfully, the physical dimensions of most things personal – hair, shoulder pads, mobile phones, computers have all reduced dramatically. “Greed is good”, the ethos of the 80’s, isn’t a popular stance in our current times. Conspicuous consumerism is no longer cool and vulgar displays of wealth are tacky. Thrift is the new  black, and although size is everything, now it’s all about down-sizing – cars, homes, jewelery, weddings, mobile devices, laptops and stereo systems are just a few examples. Now, ‘Small is good’, just as long as it performs exceptionally well.

Geek toys were also around in the 80’s – and they have their modern equivalents. Check out this Wired article.

However, before we merely write the 80’s off as the ‘bad taste’ decade, remember that it was also the time of the emergence of consumer based mobile and personal computing technologies,  the predecessors of our i-phones, Blackberries and always-on home media centres.

Amazing, I want one of those!

This has been out for a couple of months now, but it’s just so cool I wanted to put it up on my blog.This is not science fiction, it’s reality and Sixth Sense is one of the projects from MIT Media Lab.

Video of presentation comes courtesy of TED and forms part of their ongoing series of TEDTalks – watch and be amazed, but I don’t think they’re taking orders yet!

Vodpod videos no longer available.

more about “Amazing, I want one of those!“, posted with vodpod

DigiEx has been mobilised and QRed!

Imagine my surprise when checking my blog stats to find that an entity called Kaywa had been to my site, and using ‘Feed2Mobile’, generated a mobile version of it – then just to make the whole experience really tidy, auto-generated a QR code for it so people with QR enabled mobiles can go the mobile version of DigiEx.

I knew nothing about Kaywa until they mobilised me, but thanks anyway guys – plus I love the pixel knitwear scarves you’re doing in association with Lendorff – spacies and QR codes – kind of ‘geekool’.