The Staufenberger Repository

Amsterdam highlights

It wasn't all work, work, work in Amsterdam. We did a bit of cruising round on the Sparta, pretending to be locals. Here are three retail establishments that we visited along the way.

1. Nijhof and Lee is a lovely bookshop that specialises in design, typography, architecture, advertising, new media, that sort of thing. They stock out of print titles as well as new.

And, for fans of graphic design from the Netherlands, they have a well stocked line of posters by dutch masters such as Wim Crouwel. Here's one of his earliest efforts for the Stedelijk Museum from 1964.

If you fancy getting your hands on one of these posters, it's well worth making a detour to their shop next time you're in Amsterdam as only a fraction of their stock is online.

2. Suit Supply have just opened in London, but we thought we'd take the opportunity to see the dutch chain in its native habitat.

It's an interesting and energetic brand: you can get an off the peg suit for £200-£250 and made to measure for a bit more, depending on fabric.

And to underline their tailoring credentials, each shop has a chap doing alterations on the spot.

If your alteration isn't completed within 30 minutes, it's free. Not bad.

3. Star Bikes is where we hired our bikes. It's where our visit began and ended. Except for the train trip to and from the airport, but that doesn't really count. It doesn't look like they sell bikes, it's just rental all the way.

They'll also do you a picnic to pack on your bike if you want to make an excursion somewhere. The staff are super nice and super chilled. Very Amsterdam.

Wacky update

Yes, it really is their name. It's The Wacky Barber.

But, questionable though it is, the name isn't everything. There are plenty of other things that have a greater bearing on your success.

And the Wacky crew have a few things going for them. They're clearly perky and energetic. They opened with two weeks of free haircuts. They give a free beer or coffee while you wait (not unusual in swankier "salons" but a nice bonus in a barber). And they do their own outdoor advertising (flyers bluetacked around Smithfield).

And this isn't their first branch so they must be doing something right.

Here's to breaking rules.

You don't have to be mad to work here...

Some premises round the corner from Studio Staufenberger are being refurbished for a new venture. This poster is stuck in the window:

Now, we're not usually ones to criticise. But sometimes even we struggle to accentuate the positive. Perhaps we're missing something but...Wacky?

Not that there's nothing wrong with using a descriptive approach to naming a brand. It tends to work best at the budget end of things: Kwiksave, Easyjet, Prontaprint and so on. But this falls foul of the stimulus/response  aspect of successful communication that Steven King and others set out long ago. If you want people to think you're krrrrrrrazy, telling them that you are is probably not the best way of prompting that response.

Let's hope this isn't really the name of their shop/service/brand and just a bit of bad communication prior to launch.

We'll keep you posted.

Judge a man by his sneakers

We love sneakers here at Staufenberger, they also say a lot about a man. In fact I only got a job in advertising because I thought I could wear them everyday for work. Then the shock of my first client meeting when I was instructed to go 'suited and booted'. That was years ago, since then everyone seems to have come round to my way of thinking, even the finance guy seems to wear jeans and sneakers to work (well on Friday's anyway).

So now they're work wear we need to keep them clean and for that we have Jason Markk's Premium Sneaker Solution. Beautifully packaged

and safe to use on practically every material.

There's also a helpful 'how to' video.

Now there's no excuse for not having box-fresh sneakers for that all important pitch or meeting with your accountant.

via Hype Beast

Nike Bike

We've posted about fixed wheel bikes and their 'hip' status before. Well now the Wilson Brothers have designed one for Nike to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Air Force 1. We have no idea what bikes have to do with Air Force 1s but hey, it's a nice looking bike and we do like the saddle.

Obviously, the debate is already raging as to whether Nike is trying to crash a scene it has no right to be in. Interestingly, it's a debate that has already been had a few years earlier when Puma released Fixed Gear 101 (a heavily downloaded intro to the world of fixed gear riding) and created a track team, Team Puma, comprised wholly of New York couriers. It would be interesting to find out how many of those who reject Nike coming into their scene were the very same people who were introduced to the scene by Puma.

Nike Bike 2 - context

And now for some San Francisco hipsters on fixed wheel bikes. We couldn't spot any Air Force 1s.

Goodbye Beat Street

For a hip hop fan no trip to New York was complete without visiting Beat Street. You could easily spend an entire afternoon in that Brooklyn record store cultivating thumb blisters as you flicked through what felt like mile upon mile of vinyl in the basement. Beat Street's basement actually stretched for an entire block.

Some have greeted the closure of the store as one step closer to the death of vinyl. A fatal blow delivered by the rise of the likes of Serato. In the case of music formats this is another instance where I think endism doesn't strictly apply (see The Future of Magazines). Many other things may have contributed to the downfall of Beat Street, from the gentrification of Brooklyn, the building of the Brooklyn Nets stadium in the area or perhaps just plain old bad business.

Anyway this is great little film about the passing of Beat Street with some footage of Serato in action.

Small things

Like a few others, we've been bleating on about the importance of the small stuff as well as the big things.

A while back I mentioned Topshop shoeboxes. Here they are:

Now, having worked for a large clothing retailer in the past, I know that even these seemingly small things can take on alpine proportions when it comes to making them happen. The point is that in the grand scheme of things these are little, relatively unimportant, details.

But aren't they great? You get a handy little handle, a slidey little compartment and - for those who like that sort of thing - an illustration by Daisy de Villeneuve.

As the kids might say, sweet.

The Fixie Biz

No doubt prompted by coverage here at The Repository, none other than The Wall Street Journal recently ran its own story on the fixed-gear bike phenomenon.

In addition to the usual blather, it includes an interesting aside about the profit margins for fixies. Apparently, the fixed models that the major manufacturers are beginning to produce are roughly 5% more profitable than your regular road/mountain going bike. And the margins on these are already pretty healthy at around 25% to 30%.

Which just goes to show how important this new fashion dimension is to any market, bike or otherwise. The fashion dimension makes the market less price sensitive.

(Original WSJ article is behind its paywall, but can be found pastebombed on the Cycling Plus forum here.)

Krass Optik: Vogelgrippe im München Schrecken

Team Staufenberger have been on assignment in Munich where we came across this crayzee window display at Krass Optik.

What bird flu has to do with glasses is lost on us but then our grasp of German isn't that tight. And despite being in somewhat questionable taste, it certainly made us stop and have a look at their specs, which were really rather nice.

What's interesting about the brand, though, is that it avoids all the usual lifestyle cliches that most optical brands, like this and this lot, fall into. You can't see it very well on the website but their comms material features faces made of fetching spectacles placed on objects like a fire extinguisher, a pear and a teacup.

Sehr cool.

(Headline translation courtesy of Google Language Tools.)