CRM for Gmail - Rapportive

We're answering a lot of Shoes of Prey customer emails using Google Apps for your domain and Gmail. One of the downsides of using Gmail is that there aren't really any customer relationship management tools integrated into it.

Enter Rapportive. Rapportive is a Firefox and Chrome extension that integrates social and CRM tools right into your browser. Even though it's early days, it's awesome! Take a look at the image below. Mike sent me an email and taking the place of the Gmail ads Rapportive displays:

• a photo of Mike that they've pulled from a social network,
• his job role (though this data is a little old as it's showing his previous role at Google),
• links to his social network pages in case I want to learn more about him, and
  
• a note I've made to myself about Mike.
  

And Rapportive has even pulled a dodgy photo of me that I clearly have somewhere up on the web.

Naturally they're only using data that people have made publicly available, and they're doing an impressive job pulling data from all these different sources. Rapportive only launched very recently and it's still early days so the service doesn't work perfectly. There are also lots of things they could add. A feature I'd love to see is a link to previous email threads I've had with a particular customer. Judging by their suggestions from other users list they'll be adding a lot more features soon. So if you're using Gmail to communicate with customers, I'd recommend trying it out!

Hong Kong and China

Jodie and I just flew into Hong Kong this morning for a 15 day trip, 3 of them in Hong Kong and 12 in Guangzhou. We'll be catching up with our suppliers and working with Vanessa from our Guangzhou office while we're over here.

There is lots on the agenda including new shoe styles, new materials including silks for wedding shoes, new shoe boxes and shoe bags and we'll be continuing to improve on our processes like photography and the arrangements we have with our shipping suppliers.

In addition to that there will be some time to catch up with friends in Hong Kong and enjoy the great food in China. We're looking forward to a fun and busy trip!

Photo Credit

The flexible and extended work life of an entrepreneur

One of the things I've loved about working on Shoes of Prey is that I can work from anywhere. Our office, the couch, the bus, China, or where Jodie and I are now - Noosa. We're up in Noosa for a friend's wedding so we came up to Brisbane a week earlier to catch up with friends and family and we were still able to work each day while staying at my mum's place. That wasn't really possible in my previous jobs.

The flip side of this is that it's hard and sometimes impossible to switch off. It's Saturday morning, we're in Noosa and Jodie and I are both sitting on our bed with our laptops, working.

TEDx Sydney - 22 May

On Saturday Jodie and I went along to TEDx Brisbane and wow, it was an amazing event! TED stands for 'Technology, Entertainment and Design' and the idea of TED is for a bunch of really interesting people to share what their working on in short lectures. I've always enjoyed watching the videos of these lectures from the TED website.

TEDx is an independently organised TED event, and Brisbane TEDx was organised by Carl Lindgren and Paul Fairweather who did an amazing job. All the presentations were inspiring and some particularly so. The full line up of speakers from the day is listed on the TEDx Brisbane website here. My favourite presentation for the day was the photojournalist Nigel Brennan who spoke about being held hostage in Somalia for 15 months. I also enjoyed Dr. Joel Gilmore's presentation on the pros and cons of nuclear power, and Deborah Fleming talking about the ABC TV show Australian Story which she started.

In addition to the great speakers there were plenty of breaks and opportunities to meet the other attendees and I got to meet some really interesting people who I plan to stay in touch with. I've been going along to a lot of entrepreneurial type events and those have been great, but the thing I loved about TEDx is that the topics covered are so broad so I was exposed to lots of ideas and people that I might not come across normally.

TEDx Sydney is scheduled for 22 May and I'm very keen to go along to it now too. You need to apply to attend so visit their website to sign up to their newsletter and you'll be notified when applications are open. TEDx Brisbane had over 1000 people apply for what was initially only 260 places. The videos from TEDx Brisbane should be online soon.

Brilliant Use of Twitter - BestBuy Twelpforce

My marketing friend Matt Newell was telling me about BestBuy and their 'Twelpforce' and it's a brilliant use of Twitter!

BestBuy employees will answer any tech related questions sent to the @twelpforce Twitter account. And even better for BestBuy, their employees are happy to answer these questions in their own time! I guess this taps into the human desire to be seen as knowledgeable and an expert, because BestBuy employees are going home, logging into Twitter and answering customer questions.

BestBuy have made some pretty good ads promoting the service too:

Shoes of Prey - Wholesale

Our custom shoe business is growing nicely so we thought we'd try out hand at offering a wholesale service to fashion retailers.

Retailers can design shoes for their stores using our online shoe designer, then if they order a quantity of each style and colour, and are happy to wait 2-3 months for delivery we can offer them a wholesale price which we believe is competitive with what similar shoe brands in the market are offering. The retailer gets the added benefit of being able to design shoes that complement the other products they stock in their store.

Our cost to manufacture multiple pairs of an identical shoe is less than the cost to make one pair of custom shoes. And ocean freight costs for a large quantity of shoes are less than 1/10th what we pay to post a single pairs of shoes directly to customers, hence being able to offer a good wholesale price.

We're not sure how this business will compare with our custom shoe business, but our theory is that our custom shoe offering is helping us build a good brand, which we can leverage to offer wholesale, ready made shoes. And while we make much less selling a wholesale shoe, in theory the volumes should be much higher.

We'd love to hear your thoughts, and if you know any retailers who might be interested please let us know as we'll be spending the next month or two speaking to as many retailers as we can.

Distribution partnerships - The Swissôtel, Sydney

We've been working with the Swissôtel in Sydney for the last month and together we've put a package together that includes 2 Shoes of Prey gift certificates, a hotel room and high tea for two.

It's very exciting to be working with a brand like the Swissôtel as they're a great fit with our brand. And we're hoping women love the concept of a beautiful hotel, high tea and custom shoes. There should be some great PR and sales opportunities for both of us that come out of the partnership, and we're hoping to work the hotel to run some events in the future so we'll be working on these opportunities more over the coming months.

We're starting to put our minds towards partnerships that help us build awareness of our brand, and enable us to distribute our shoes. Lots of great businesses have used distribution partnerships to get themselves started. Eg. PayPal with eBay and Google powering Yahoo's search engine in their early years.

If you're running a business are you looking at distribution partnerships? Any more famous examples you know of where businesses leveraged distribution partnerships successfully to get themselves started?