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Birchbox and Quarterly.co
Birchbox, a company that sends out monthly boxes of beauty
and grooming supplies, claims more than 400,000 regular
subscribers just three years after launch. Its European sister
site Glossybox grew to similar popularity in an even shorter
period of time. More recently, Quarterly.co has taken the
subscription concept a step further, delivering products every
three months picked by a range of curators, including style
expert Nina Garcia and Make Magazine founder Mark
Frauenfelder, or brands like quirky L.A.-based Poketo.
TODAY’S
SMARTEST
BRANDS
KNOW HOW TO LEVERAGE BOTH
THE POWER OF ANALOG AND
OUR DESIRE TO CHANNEL OUR
INNER HANDYMAN.
What’s remarkable about these, and dozens of other product
subscription services is that they’ve convinced people to lay
down serious money--sometimes several hundred dollars a
year--for goods that someone else is choosing, which runs
counter to the customer-is-in-control mantra we so often
hear. The thrill of discovery is part of the appeal, but there’s
also the thrill of not having to decide: when you’re bogged
down by decision fatigue, latching onto a person or brand
whose choices you trust can feel like liberation. Even if you
have no use for a box of candy-colored paper straws.
REPAIR AND REPURPOSE ARE THE NEXT KILLER APPS
The recent proliferation of makerspaces, hackathons, and
DIY-oriented events like Maker Faire suggests that repairing
and repurposing are being actively embraced as mainstream
pursuits--not just a way to be frugal, but a form of expression
and creativity. At the same time, we see increasing evidence of
analog technology’s appeal, even when it’s driven by digital
media, as evidenced by the wild popularity of Instagram and
the continued growth of the vinyl record industry. Today’s
smartest brands know how to leverage both the power of
analog and our desire to channel our inner handyman.
The Vamp
The Vamp is a device that resurrects dead speakers, which
isn’t as strange as it sounds. Essentially a small, batterypowered amp with Bluetooth reception, the cube-shaped
Vamp is designed to sit on top of an old speaker and feed the
speaker signals received from your smartphone or laptop.
TECH COMPANIES TRY TO BEST
COMPETITORS WITH THE FASTEST
PROCESSOR OR THE HIGHESTRESOLUTION
DISPLAY.
MOST
CONSUMERS DON’T REALLY CARE.
The device’s Kickstarter video features its designer, Londonbased Paul Cocksedge, professing his love for old, boxy
audio gear, and appealing to the hacker and tinker in us
all, as well as that jolt of eco-satisfaction we all get when
rescuing something from the garbage heap. The campaign
has been an unqualified success, raising three times its initial
funding goal.
TECHNOLOGY MOVES TOO FAST TO CARE ABOUT
It’s all too easy for tech companies to mindlessly chase
superlatives--to try to best competitors with the fastest
processor or the highest-resolution display. The thing is, most
consumers don’t really care. As we wrote earlier this year,
“The Internet runs on an alphabet soup of languages and
protocols, and only a slim population of early adopters count
pixels or processor speeds anymore. The rest of us just want
to know what it’s like to use.”
Moto X
The Motorola/Google partnership that produced the Moto
X smartphone is remarkable for several reasons, including
the phone’s “always on” voice recognition, the unique
Motomaker interface that allows shoppers to customize
it before ordering, and the fact that it’s assembled in the
United States. But one of its most striking features is what it
doesn’t have: an ultra-high-res display.
Just three years earlier, Apple wowed the technology world
by doubling the resolution on the iPhone 4, calling the result
“Retina display.” Digital cameras experienced a similar trend
in the early 2000s, with manufacturers racing to cram in
more and more megapixels, until image sizes became
gargantuan, tech writers started to rebel, and manufacturers
began to rein in their resolutions. Yet when the Moto X was
released last year with a resolution of “only” 1280 x 720
pixels, critics were quick to call it out as a liability when held
up to higher-res competitors like the HTC One or Samsung’s
Galaxy S4.