Packing tape art

I've always wanted an art installation at our Zingerman's Mail Order warehouse that reflected our work and materials. This would do nicely. A cocoon landscape of tape, from Paris.

Recent reading, moguls edition

The making of Shinola. A look inside a bit of the sausage making as a new luxury brand comes into existence right under our noses. 

"The biggest business incubator in New York" is a place that sells friend anchovies? The founder of Smorgasburg, the grandaddy of the new modern food hall movement, talks about the economics of running a modern food court.

Chuck Williams, one of the founders of the modern food catalog and how he got started.

Randomness Helps

I never stop being amazed by small, counter-intuitive operations innovations. From a New Yorker article on Yoox, the online fashion site:

When clothes arrive at the warehouse...folded items are placed in black plastic storage bins that look like large milk crates. The crates are packed randomly—pants, shirts, and sweaters are mixed together willy-nilly. When an order comes through...it is placed on a conveyor belt that...delivers it to the correct wrapping station, which are manned by humans. Were items sorted with their like, the humans would have to search all of them to find the one matching the order, but since items are sorted randomly, it's easy to spot the right one. "Chaos is our friend," Guillot said.

I don't know how to use randomness like this at ZMO but maybe there's a way?

Uniqlo: Using Toyota Style Systems to Sell Clothes

 

Uniqlo is a low price rather stylish clothing company that, if you don't know by now, you probably will soon. They've been a certain kind of phenomenon in New York since they landed in Soho a couple years ago. Now they're set for expansion across America. There is an excellent article about them in New York Magazine.

They're from Japan. I don't know if that fact — that they're from the same country as Toyota — has some influence, but they have some key similarities to the car maker. They use operations to drive sales. They have lean style systems to make, buy, stock and sell clothes. They experiment and expect to have lots of failures. They have open book management — every employee can see the sales every day, down to the number of each item sold. They also have a freaky clone army approach, which, when you read about it, may give you the heebie jeebies. 

In the end, the article is mostly fun, especially if you are interested in fashion. But it's got some good ideas to steal for anyone who manages operations, too.

Full disclosure: I am a fan. I'm not going to lie, their stuff is pretty good.

Link to the full article here.