Peter Fisk

Spanish startup Gik Live! make wine that is naturally neon blue. They extract a pigment from the skin of the red grape (called anthocyanin) which gives the neon blue hue. Some winemakers have called it “blasphemous,” but the founders say the wine is safe to drink.

“This is not something that’s done in a lab at all,” said co-founder Taig Mac Carthy. “This is all pigments, they come from nature, and so do the grapes. The making of this is 100% natural.”It took two years of testing to get the recipe right.

The drink is made using different varieties of red and white grapes from around Spain, including the wine regions of Castilla la Mancha and Rioja. Anthocyanin, a pigment from the red grapes’ skin, and indigotine, which is derived from plants, give the wine its bluish colouring Non-caloric sweeteners are then used to modify the flavour and create a sweet drink with 11.5 per cent alcohol per volume.

The six founders are all in their twenties. They raised Euro 40,000 between them to start their business with help from The University of the Basque Country. The wine has a very sweet taste and it’s similar to white wine. It’s sold in over 25 countries at a shelf price of Euro 15.

The company was challenged legally in Spain about whether it could be called a wine. Some tweaks to the composition eventually allowed it to fit into the category definition, but it is certainly not trying to conform. Early clients are equally split between men and women and aged between 25 and 34 years old, according to Gik’s online data.

Whilst wine tasters have given the wine mixed reviews, its target audience of millennials have been most positive, less due to the flavour and more due to the Instagram-ability of the blue hue.

“I love how magical the blue color will look in my Instagrams, but the taste wasn’t exactly up my alley – it tasted a little more like a cocktail than wine. I probably wouldn’t seek this bottle out, but if it was the only alcohol option at a party, I could certainly get lit on it.” said one.

The producers suggest pairing the wine with sushi, nachos with guacamole or pasta carbonara with music from James Blake or Alt J in the background. Aritz Lopez, co-founder of Gik, said that in Spain new generations are not used to traditional wine, they prefer beers, liquors or cocktails.

Lopez said Gik spent two years working with the University of the Basque Country, which provided them with a laboratory and a team of chemical engineers.

The blue colour has its own meaning and was inspired by the concept of Blue Ocean Strategy.

“The book says there are two kind of oceans: the red ones, full of sharks (competitors) fighting against each other for a few fishes (customers) and turning the ocean red because of the blood. And it talked about creating blue oceans; oceans where, thanks to creativity and innovation, everyone could be free,” Lopez said.

“It sounded like poetry to us, so it could not be any other colour,“ he added.

Haier, now the world’s largest white goods business, recently celebrated 10 years of its rendanheyi (or win-win) business model. CEO Zhang Rhuimin sees the approach as a way to stay small and focused – maintaining the entrepreneurship, intimacy and speed of a start-up – despite now being a $32 billion multinational with 70,000 employees. Haier is actually a family of 200 micro-businesses, each largely autonomous, and 70% of them with revenues exceeding $20 million last year.

The Qingdao-based company has stretched far beyond its refrigerator origins of 1984, now on the cutting edge of robotics and connected home devices. Just this year it launched Coton, a pocked-size washing machine, ready for any emergency. Haier is a shareholder in each of its micro-business, alongside all of its employees, who share in their own profits.

Rhuimin, who has seen Rendanheyi deliver 28% annual growth for the last 10 years, and profits grow by 1200%, is now looking to co-creation as the next phases in his journey, and for Haier to become leading player in the sharing economy.

Yoshiaki Ito, Haier’s CEO and President for Asia, on winning in an era of hyperconnectivity – where consumers are more connected to information and are relying on the Internet for information, not the manufacturers:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOw0F4_9-8g

Zhang Ruimin has led several revolutions at Haier since 1984. Under his leadership, Haier was transformed from a near-bankrupt manufacturer of poor quality refrigerators to the world’s largest white goods manufacturer (with a 10.2% retail market share, by volume). They manage to move before they really need to. They are rarely late in adapting.  They seem to have a masterful sense of timing—selecting the right moment to abolish the old and embrace the new.

Zhang says that ‘successful companies move with the times’. But instead of only talking about it (like so many others) he also walks his talk. Over 30 years he has led Haier through five strategic cycles—with great success.

There are 5 phases in the Haier story:

Stuart Crainer from Thinkers50 reports from the first International Rendanheyi Model Forum in Qingdao, China:

Some thirty years ago I went to interview Peter Drucker in London. At the time, I knew very little of his work.  He was an old man who had written a few important books.  When you are young you tend not to worry about such details.  Suffice to say, I was sketchily prepared to interview the founding father of modern management in any vaguely intelligent way.

During the interview, my eyes were opened. Drucker was a veritable fount of knowledge and stories.  As a child in Vienna he had met Sigmund Freud. He was also an expert on Japanese art.  And he re-read Jane Austen annually to remind himself of what great writing is.

There was much more. Drucker talked for an hour or two. Along the way he commented that the book we all want to write is, ‘How to make a million and still go to heaven’.  I would still like to write this.  I escorted him down the road to a pharmacy — as I remember, he needed something for an old skiing injury.

I left my meeting with Drucker convinced of the timeless nature of management — after all, it took management to tend the Hanging Gardens of Babylon or to build the Great Wall of China.  Drucker taught me that management was also universal and had the power to change the world.

I was not alone.

Also during the 1980s in Qingdao in China, a young man by the name of Zhang Ruimin discovered an old, battered copy of Drucker’s The Effective Executive.  The book opened his eyes.

Fast forward to 2017 and I am sitting in a state of the art conference venue in Qingdao and alongside me is Zhang Ruimin, chairman and CEO of the world’s largest white goods manufacturer, Haier.

Under Zhang’s hugely innovative leadership, Haier has evolved from a basically bankrupt manufacturer of poor quality fridges to one of the most innovative companies in the world in terms of its management.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysPtIplTN5o

Haier’s business philosophy is called ‘Rendanheyi’.  To the outsider it appears hugely complex, a large company basically deconstructed into a freewheeling entrepreneurial spider’s web. Middle managers (some 13,000 of them) were eliminated in one dramatic swoop.  Instead of forming another line in the hierarchy, they now have the opportunity to be CEOs of their own businesses within the company.  This has spawned hundreds of micro-enterprises. Wages are directly linked to the amount of value generated by individuals, all individuals.  The author Danah Zohar describes Haier as a “quantum organization”, one in line with the laws of quantum physics rather than the linear world of Newton.

Haier’s model has developed its own — sometimes perplexing and lost somewhere in translation — language but at its heart are a number of key points:

1. Change leads to change.  Haier seems addicted to change.  At every stage when it looks as though a period of calm would be the answer, the energetic Zhang Ruimin has driven through even more change.  Instead of being an isolated initiative or a programme, change is viewed by Haier as a fact of life. It is.

2. Level 5 management: Jim Collins refers to Level 5 leaders.  These are leaders characterized by humility rather than the over-arching egos often on display in the C-suite.  What is interesting about Haier is that humility has become a core part of the company’s culture as well as Zhang Ruimin’s personality.

This is manifest in a variety of ways.  For example, when it takes over companies it does not send over a large swat team to convert the acquired company to their Haier way.  Instead it plays a long and gentle game of persuasion.  A handful of Haier executives may be sent to the acquired company.  Their role tends to be passive rather than active.  It is not missionary work. Instead they wait to be asked, ‘How would you handle this at Haier?’ When Zhang Ruimin visited the United States earlier this year he didn’t visit the company’s most eye catching acquisition, GE Appliances. He was content to let the company find its own way. It is difficult to imagine a Western CEO employing such an arms-length approach to assimilating a business into an already successful organization.

3. Learning constantly.  The lead, as ever, must come from the top.  Zhang Ruimin is a voracious reader.  One of his aides shakes his head at the very thought of how many books he gets through. ‘If we are sitting in an airport lounge he will be there reading a new book he has just picked up. Five a week he gets through sometimes.’

Talking to Zhang the truth of this is quickly apparent. He is hugely well read.  His conversation moves easily from quantum physics to Henry Mintzberg, from Drucker to blue ocean strategy.  He quotes from Kant and Frederick Taylor as well as Chinese inspirations. For a senior business leader, this is highly unusual – perhaps unique.  CEOs, for one reason or another, generally prefer to spend their time differently than devouring the latest business blockbuster.

To the self-educated Zhang Ruimin learning is as natural as breathing.  From early on in Haier’s development he has traveled to meet up with the world’s leading thinkers.  He picks their brains and cherishes the conversations.  Hardly a week goes by without a business luminary visiting Qingdao to meet with Zhang.  Some, such as Gary Hamel, have become intellectual sparring partners.  Hamel’s anti-bureaucracy message has found a willing disciple in Zhang.

And Zhang is not alone.  Listening to the CEOs of Haier micro enterprises it is clear that they are enthusiastic converts. They are effectively creating their own businesses under the Haier umbrella.  The corporate home is reincarnated as an incubator, a platform for individuals and the organization to grow. And so, entrepreneurial energy and dedication — ‘You may see the marks under my eyes, I have been awake for 30 hours,’ one of the microenterprise leaders confides — becomes part of the corporate fabric, or the very loose and large tent which now constitutes a modern corporation.

Stuart adds one anecdote to conclude:

A few weeks ago, we had a tortuous problem with our bank.  We talked to low level employees who were very pleasant but essentially powerless.  Emails to senior directors were rejected.  This situation is all too common in large organizations.  People on the frontline have been stripped of independent decision making and organizational power. Meanwhile, senior executives come up with strategies and seem careless of their execution. In such organizations there is a managerial vacuum.

Management is at a crossroads.  The robotic age will alter the world of work in fundamental ways. The negative perception is that jobs will be lost and that is the end of the story.  Jobs will, indeed, be lost, but therein lies an opportunity.  It frees up workers to assume the innovative position of responsibility created by Haier.

Companies exist to create and retain customers.  Zero distance to the customer is one of many Haier mantras. It is one which Peter Drucker would have approved of.

Go-Jek is Indonesia’s first unicorn is currently the fastest growing start-up in South Asia and the largest in Indonesia in terms of valuation, funding raised and number of transactions.

Go-Jek is one of the fastest-growing and most visible tech startups in Indonesia. It uses previously informal motorcycle taxis — ojeks — to courier, transport and provide shopping services to its users. Instead of heading out into congested streets, people now simply use the Go-Jek mobile app to book a motorbike taxi, order a food delivery or even door-to-door cleaning services, beauticians and masseuses. After partnering with some of Indonesia’s biggest banks, the firm is in the process of making its payment system cash free.

It has partnered with over 300,000 two wheel and four wheel drivers and 5,000 trucks across Indonesia, all of whom, collectively cover an average distance of 7 million kilometres each day.

Go-Jek is now the largest food delivery company in the world outside the China market, and is the equivalent of three Indian Unicorns combined in the transport, food delivery and payments markets. With over 40 million app downloads, Go-Jek’s platform powers the Indonesian equivalents of Indian Taxi Aggregators, Food Delivery Start Ups, HyperLocal Start Ups, Digital Wallet startups and Home Service based startups, all in one, at a comparable scale. Its GO-FOOD business alone does more daily orders than all Indian food tech start-ups combined.

This mobile app service now has some 200,000 freelance drivers, and millions of downloads. Its success is down to the huge congestion in Jakarta. The capital of Indonesia has an estimated population of more than 10 million people and is home to about 18 million vehicles.

The disruption potential is enormous. Currently, the average speed a car can travel across Jakarta is about 8kmh, a situation economists agree is hurting the city’s growth capacity. Business visitors say they usually schedule just one meeting per day as the traffic is too bad to accommodate two. The motorcycle taxis are changing that rapidly.

 

goHenry helps young people learn how to manage money responsibly under the guidance of their parents. Combining web and mobile apps, with a Prepaid Debit Card with Parental Controls, goHenry gives 6 to 18 year olds hands on experience of managing money within a safe and controlled environment.

Set up by a small group of parents and friends, unable to find the right tools to teach their own children about money. In the time that has passed since our first members joined goHenry, we have developed to incorporate more and more features, making it an invaluable tool for young people and their parents – 80% of whom tell us it’s helped their children become more financially responsible.

In 2016, goHenry saw incredible success with our Crowdfunding campaign with Crowdcube. Our original target was £2million which we reached during the first 48 hours after we opened our funding round to our members. It has been great to see how many parents believe in goHenry so much that they wanted to become our investors too. We raised £4 million in total, happily exceeding our expectations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVMXHIGYQ3g

goHenry is designed to create a way for kids to build financial independence and responsibility – all whilst being safely and remotely overseen by their parents. Parents set up an online bank account, with their children’s account linked to their own. Children have their own debit cards, which they can use within the parameters parents set. Due to the careful rules, there is no risk of the children going into debt or overdrafts, and parents can limit where the debit cards are used (both online and in shops), as well as immediately block the cards if they get lost or stolen.

This is the first digital banking company aimed specifically at families. Visa debit cards and mobile banking apps are specifically designed for children as young as 6, resulting in safeguards that aren’t available with other leading debit cards, which usually have a minimum age of 11 for their users. Children have the chance to learn about responsibility and finances in their own way through a number of unique opportunities offered, such as choosing themselves how much to save each week or doing set chores to earn extra money. Parents receive real-time spending notifications and can view their children’s earning, saving and spending habits with ease on both mobile and web applications, giving them unparalleled control.

With 78% of children in the UK alone receiving pocket money, and similar figures in North America and Europe, there is a large potential audience, especially by decreasing the minimum age. With over half a million users in the UK alone already, goHenry has the potential for a lot of future growth.

 

Grail is a life sciences company whose mission is to detect cancer early, when it can be cured. GRAIL is using the power of high-intensity sequencing, population-scale clinical trials, and state of the art Computer Science and Data Science to enhance the scientific understanding of cancer biology and develop blood tests for early-stage cancer detection.

Grail’s mission is to detect cancer early – even before any symptoms appear. Although not yet fully understood, scientists believe that people who go onto develop cancer initially possess tiny amounts of tumor DNA (ctDNA) in their circulatory systems. If scientists can pick up on this before a tumor develops, the chances of surviving the cancer are greatly increased.

In order to understand this process better, scientists from Grail are collecting vast amounts of this ctDNA data, with the intention of using it to build intelligent prediction models. Once the trials are concluded, it should be possible to develop products which will be able to detect cancer early in asymptomatic individuals, giving people far better odds for being cured.

Effective screening only exists for a few cancer types, meaning most cancer is detected in later stages, when survival rates are much lower. Reliable detection of cancer at an early stage before symptoms appear has the potential to dramatically decrease global cancer mortality.

Investors behind this early-cancer screening project include Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and genetic analysts Illumina, with total funding currently sitting at $1 billion. The majority of which comes from the $900 million gained in a series B funding round in March this year, with the lead investment from ARCH Venture partners.

 

The “most promising startup in Israel for 2015″​ (according to Globes), StoreDot is a leader in the innovation of materials and their device applications, developing ground-breaking technologies based on a unique methodology for the design, synthesis and tuning of new organic compounds. These proprietary compounds dramatically improve the performance of a range of devices, including batteries, displays, sensors and digital memory.

The battery system works like a highly dense energy sponge that soaks up enough power to run in just five minutes, storing it to last an entire day. The FlashBattery architecture also withstands sufficient charge/discharge cycles, thereby allowing fast charging without the need to replace the battery over the phone’s lifetime. Competing technologies are based on heavy and toxic metals. By contrast, StoreDot’s organic compounds are non-toxic and environmentally safe. Moreover, they are readily available and manufactured at a fraction of the cost.

Compatible with smartphones, tablets, and laptops, the FlashBattery is set to revolutionise phone charging. This unique technology not only has the potential to become the ultimate fast-charging standard in mobile devices, but also in electric power tools, toys, home appliances and others. StoreDot have announced they are in the advanced stages of development for electric vehicles using their FlashBattery technology, with their battery pack offering up to 300 miles on a five minute charge.

By 2020, there should be 6.1 billion smart phone owners. The ability to charge a smartphone fully and safely in five minutes clearly has a global market.

Beijing Bytedance Technology Co., Ltd. is a tech company underpinned by AI and mobile Internet. Its flagship app “Toutiao”(which means “headline” in Chinese), one of the fastest growing mobile products in China, initiated personalized information flow, thereby creating a new way to connect people with information through massive information gathering, in-depth data mining and user behavior analysis. In addition, Bytedance continuously strides in video, Q&A, image and other fields, powered by a range of products including “Tik Tok/Douyin”, “Hypstar/Huoshan”, “Xigua Video”, “Neihan Duanzi”, “Wukong Q&A” and “Tuchong”. With impetus from robust technology and continuous innovation in the team, Bytedance products keep a leading position in all areas involved and are still growing rapidly.

By October 2017, Toutiao serves over 100 million daily active users, average use time per day sits at 76 minutes and on average each user starts the app nine times per day, ranking top among Chinese Internet enterprises in use time and traffic volume. As Bytedance consolidates its China market, it also adopts the strategy of globalization through self-construction plus investment. “TopBuzz”, the overseas version of Toutiao’s news app, and “TopBuzz Video” have made a foray into Japan, the US, Brazil and other countries. Toutiao also acquired US popular video app Flipagram and invested in information products in emerging markets such as India and Southeast Asia.

A big step was its acquisition of video app make Musical.ly which has more than 215 million users (or “Musers” as it calls them) for its lip-syncing and short-video app, skewing toward teen girls. It also has a sister app, Live.ly, for live-streaming video. There’s also a collaboration with Chinese mobile-app developer Cheetah Mobile to provide $50 million in funding to Live.me, a top live-streaming app majority-owned by Cheetah, which has a community of about 40 million users.

Besides Musical.ly’s passionate user base, Bytedance will get inroads into Hollywood with the acquisition: through deals with NBC, Viacom and others, which have developed short-form shows for the video platform. Media execs will be keeping an eye on how those partnerships evolve under Bytedance’s well-funded auspices.

There’s no revenue associated with original content on Musical.ly at this point, but clearly the app has different paths toward monetization. “With Musical.ly, we are able to bring a new form of entertainment and a host of new video content to the millions of teens who engage with the app each day,” Brian Madden, VP of audience at Hearst Magazines Digital Media, said when the pact was announced this summer.

The Musical.ly and Live.me deals will give Bytedance, which has more than 4,000 employees, an expanding portfolio to push further into mobile video, including in the growing live-streaming space. Under the terms of Bytedance’s Live.me investment, Live.me will have priority to provide live-streaming services to Bytedance in overseas markets. Live.me broadcasters create 350,000 hours of unique content daily, while viewers spend an average of 40 minutes each viewing live broadcasts, according to the company.

Here’s how Zhang Yiming, Bytedance’s founder and CEO, explained the rationale for the Musical.ly deal: By “integrating Musical.ly’s global reach with Bytedance’s massive user base in China and key Asian markets, we are creating a significant global platform for our content creators and brands to engage with new markets,” he said in a statement.

How Bytedance brings together its assets to bear in catering to audiences in America, Europe and elsewhere remains to be seen.

But artificial-intelligence technology will certainly come into play. Bytedance last year formed an R&D division, called the Toutiao AI Lab, headed by Ma Wei-Ying, formerly Microsoft Research Asia’s assistant managing director. The lab’s mission is to develop machine-learning algorithms for personalized content recommendations.

According to Musical.ly co-founder Alex Zhu, “Bytedance’s leading AI technologies and top-notch AI developers can empower us to innovate faster and roll out new user offerings unlike anything users have experienced before.”

For now, users shouldn’t expect any huge changes for Musical.ly. The company’s co-founders, Alex Zhu and Louis Yang, are joining Bytedance and will continue to run Musical.ly. The startup had raised $147 million to date from investors including GGV Capital, GX Capital, Qiming Venture Partners and Susquehanna International Group. Also worth noting is that Cheetah was an early investor in Musical.ly, in which Cheetah held a 17.4% stake of the end of 2016.

Meanwhile Bytedance also made another acquisition this week, to augment its flagship Toutiao service (officially called Jinri Toutiao — which means”Today’s Headlines”): It’s buying New Republic a global mobile news aggregation service based in Bordeaux, France, from Cheetah Mobile for $86.6 million.

News Republic, according to Bytedance’s Zhang, will give the company “access to high-quality content from thousands of high-profile media partners around the world, making an exciting step forward in our international expansion strategy.”

Alia Adi is founder of Basmaty, an Arabic website featuring Middle Eastern recipes. Born and raised in Switzerland, the Syrian noticed a gap in the market for online food recipes in Arabic and launched Basmaty (‘my smile’ in Arabic) in Damascus in 2011.

Her four-strong team used to produce around 100 Arabic-language cooking videos a month from their studio in Damascus. In the civil war causing her to flee Syria, Adi spent a year in London, being trained in video production at YouTube, before coming to Dubai to establish her company (for the second time).

Here is an extract from a profile in Gulf News, 2017:

Alia Adi has a soft voice brimming with determination. The founder and CEO of basmaty.com, a portal that offers Middle Eastern recipes in Arabic, says a typical day begins with her waking up at 6.30am and checking her social media accounts before planning the hours ahead. These moments may be stuffed with recipe collection, shooting, production work or social media promotion but also they are infused with Adi’s love for food.

The name the Syrian chose for her platform, Basmaty, is a glimpse into the thought behind it. “In Arabic, basma means smile and basmaty means my smile. So the idea behind this [platform] was for me, food is something that you can put a smile on someone’s face [with], and it is something that really make your senses smile,” she says. And that’s what she’s passionate about.

The Swiss born and bred Adi says food is an old flame. “I discovered food with my mother as a kid and I’ve always loved being with her in the kitchen. So I got my passion of food from a really young age,” she says.

“From what I remember, she [Adi] always liked trying new stuff and new recipe[s]… she did also [attend] a dessert school in London for one year, so since then we have been enjoying very good meals,” says her older brother Omar.

However, the route to making her hobby her day job took a while. After university, Adi — the middle and only female sibling — moved to Syria where her older brother was handling the family business, an olive oil production company. There, she handled the marketing of their product through various channels, one of which was using the oil in various recipes.

“For four years I worked with my brother in the field. And I realised very quickly by searching for online content about recipes in Arabic [that] there was a gap in terms of what was available online. So the idea of launching my own platform emerged at that time. The Middle East has such a strong food culture, and I [wondered], ‘How come there are not more platforms that are providing content in Arabic?’ And I decided to launch Basmaty… to target the Arab world,” Adi says.

The idea of Basmaty proved an opportune investment. She launched the website in 2011 in July and hired a team, including a chef, and started producing videos — she says it made sense financially too as the costs incurred to hire qualified people in Syria were much lower than they would have been anywhere else in the Middle East.

The ensuing civil war however made things difficult. Adi had to relocate the next year and between moving to Dubai, where her target audience is and Europe — her parents moved back to Switzerland — she found herself torn. What made things worse was the fact that others in her team would find themselves similarly untethered soon.

“So I came to Dubai for a little bit and then I went to London. I was still managing my team [in Syria] from here and from London. And I was hesitating between going back to Europe or establishing my company here, which was a big step for me because the cost involved was much more than when I was in Syria. So I had to make a decision. So for two years, I was still managing my team online,” she says.

Then, when her team left the country, she decided to go it alone. She learnt slapdash ways to put her videos together, to post and promote the segments.

But seeing her platform doing well on YouTube — “my platform quickly grew to generating a million views on YouTube” — she didn’t want to give it up. “I just told myself you have to teach yourself these things you know and keep going.”

“I moved to London as I have [my team] at YouTube in London, and I thought let’s give it a shot… So I went for a year, got a lot of training from YouTube, a lot of support from them and eventually, after one year, if I wanted to take my business to the next level… I really need to raise funds and [being] in London isn’t really a possibility for me because my market is here.”

She returned to Dubai and established her company through a training programme and entrepreneur incubator called In5.

However, there were hiccups. First, with funding and then with the technical promotion of her website. This is where Ayman Al Barbary came in. Al Barbary, who worked as a website developer in Syria and when he came to Dubai nine years ago went into digital marketing too, explained the importance of subtle tweaks when trying to garner online hits. “I was introduced to Alia and Basmaty almost three years ago. And actually Alia approached me at the time to take care of the marketing of the website, where she actually struggled to get too much traction and traffic from the market and through digital channels such as search engines, through social media and all that.”

After doing an analysis, Al Barbary found “she’s missing a lot of opportunities… we did quick fixes for the website and the traffic spiked: I think we have almost double the traffic in a few months. And that all came organic from Google.”

Going through the ups and downs of starting a business, Adi felt a need to evolve her business into a platform. “[I] actually evolved it into a network that is involved in identifying and promoting, and assisting food talent in the region,” she explains, “So basically, through my collaboration with YouTube I met a lot of content creators and I identified those who are consistent with what they are doing and the struggles they have — and a lot of them are women; about 90 per cent. And I’m helping them to produce, to strategise their content, to sell and reach and monetise their content. So that’s the direction I’m going in with my platform.”

Adi’s steely determination becomes apparent when she talks of Syria and wanting to do something for her country. “Everyone I know from Syria wants to go back to Syria, including me. I’m thinking how can I later on be an asset for my country as well. And every Syrian I know thinks about what they can do to rebuild the country. As soon as I see there’s some sort of stability I want to reopen production in Syria.”

Until then Adi’s focused on dishing up smiles, one recipe at a time.

HelloFresh supplies everything you need to prepare quality, delicious, home-cooked meals that require no planning, no shopping and no hassle.

Every ingredient needed for our thousands of exclusive recipes is carefully planned, locally sourced and delivered to your door when it’s most convenient for you.

Founded in 2010 by Dominik Richter, the Berlin-based company aims to provide each and every household in its 9 markets with the opportunity to enjoy wholesome home-cooked meals with no planning, no shopping and no hassle required.

Take a look at the mission statement:

Everything required for weeknight meals, carefully planned, locally sourced and delivered to your door at the most convenient time for each subscriber.

Behind the scenes, a huge data driven technology platform puts us in the prime position for disrupting the food supply chain and for fundamentally changing the way consumers shop for food.

The soft subscription model business enables us to leverage our weekly subscriber touch points to consistently manage supply chains and demand, and to optimise the customer experience as well as our business economics.

HelloFresh is at the forefront of disrupting a multi trillion dollar industry at the very beginning of its online transition.

James Jebbia, the man who, in 1994 founded and to this day runs the SoHo-based company that has been making clothing and skateboards and a lot of other things that the people who love it absolutely have to have, doesn’t think of Supreme the way most people in fashion might—as a brand that started out in a small  store on Lafayette Street, and has since inched its way to global status.

He thinks of Supreme more as a space.

When Jebbia was a teenager in Crawley, West Sussex, in the eighties, working at a Duracell factory, listening to T. Rex and Bowie on breaks and spending his spare cash on trips to London to buy clothes, it was always in a certain elusive kind of store, one that became the model for Supreme.

“The cool, cool shop,” says Jebbia, who is 54 and dressed in jeans and a plain dark-blue T-shirt, label-free and low-key, with closely cropped hair and deep blue eyes. “The shop that carries the cool stuff that everybody was wearing—no big brands or anything.”

Jebbia’s office a few blocks west of the Supreme store is adorned with a skateboard designed by Raymond Pettibon; some drawings by Jebbia’s kids, age 8 and 10; and a larger-than-life-size portrait of James Brown—whom Jebbia, crucially, sees as not just the hardest-working man in showbiz but as a guy who never played down to his audience. Jebbia is, likewise, ever-mindful of his customer, who is generally aged eighteen to 25 and wants simply to buy cool stuff—and who will pay for it, assuming it’s worth it.

“My thing has always been that the clothing we make is kind of like music,” Jebbia says. “There are always critics that don’t understand that young people can be into Bob Dylan but also into the Wu-Tang Clan and Coltrane and Social Distortion. Young people—and skaters—are very, very open-minded . . . to music, to art, to many things, and that allowed us to make things with an open mind.”

Recently the fashion world has been waking up to Supreme. In the past decade, the company has opened stores in Tokyo, London, and Paris, while the passionate devotion of their customers has brought it into the conversation with both teenagers at skateboard parks and the front rows of high fashion—with Paris in particular swooning over Supreme’s collaboration with Louis Vuitton. Jebbia loved working with Kim Jones, Vuitton’s menswear designer, to make skateboard trunks and backpacks, bandannas and gloves, shirts and jackets. The feeling was mutual.

“When you see the lines for Supreme in New York or London,” says Jones, “you see so many different types of people, and they are people you can relate to—they understand high-low, they’re smart, they’re intelligent, and they’re humorous. They know what they want, and they are very loyal—and a customer who is loyal is a real aspiration for anybody with a brand.”

The Vuitton collaboration was also, for many in fashion, their first glimpse into the secretive world of Supreme, which has become a kind of shorthand for authenticity, immediacy, speed, and deftness in its way of doing business. More than just selling sweats and tees and hats, the brand brings out a new collection two times a year, like any fashion company—generally, an online look-book, followed by a few pieces dropped every Thursday, each item available both online and in the stores. A Supreme drop is a big event.

“We can have a leather jacket for $1,500, and if it’s a good value, young people will understand that,” Jebbia says. “But we also want to have the feeling that this won’t be here in a month. When I grew up, I think everybody felt that way. It’s like, If I love this, it may not be here, so I should buy it.”

Rather than try to give an insight into the brand myself, I turned to millennial social media analyst Sumo, to explore why and how Supreme reigns in the world of streetwear.

You can see from the Google Trends report below that worldwide interest has steadily rose over time for the Supreme brand:

The best part? Supreme has grown — and continues to grow — WITHOUT spending insane amounts of money on advertising or marketing. This means you can do it for your ecommerce business, too.

TRAFFIC SOURCES SUPREME USED TO BUILD IT’S CULT-LIKE FOLLOWING

Supreme is a streetwear brand that started as a skateboarding shop in New York City in April of 1994.

The brand produces clothing centered around their ‘red box logo’ which is shockingly simple, has transcended its skateboarding roots, and is fueled by the brands ability to create desire.

Here’s how Supreme gets most of their web traffic.

With a cult like following, and a focus on exclusivity, it makes sense Supreme relies on direct and search traffic as their main traffic drivers.

Supreme is the most sellable clothing brand in the world. The stuff they make is statistically more likely to skyrocket in value than the merchandise of pretty much any other consumer company in the world.

To increase your own following, product demand, and direct traffic, here are nine ecommerce marketing tips you can apply in your business.

THE LIMITED SUPPLY METHOD TO CREATING VIRAL CONTENT AROUND YOUR BRAND WITHOUT A BLOG

Supreme product drops are powerful, and the user generated content around the brand has been enough to allow Supreme to remain in a mostly ‘underground’ status in terms of marketing with almost no paid search investment.

Here’s just one of the online communities that create viral content for Supreme without them having to do a thing:

Supreme Talk UK/EU (aka SupTalk) is Europe’s largest Supreme fan group. It’s also one of Supreme’s biggest Facebook reselling groups.

The group started in 2012 when founding members Adam Rose and Peter Mitchell were frustrated at the lack of a UK secondary market for Supreme compared to the USA. So they started SupTalk for Supreme fans to buy, sell and trade Supreme products without having to pay obscene shipping costs.

Supreme have been able to get groups like SupTalk and major news sites with millions of followers like Hypebeast and Highsnobiety to promote their products by limiting supply of their product. Every week dozens of articles are published around how/when and who is involved in the resale of Supreme products, like this one:

When you look at Supreme’s top backlink, you can see the enormous amount of shares it has received, and traffic it provided:

Actually, Hypebeast alone have generated over 113 content pieces around Supreme with total shares over 200,000 in the last year. Again, just one example of content and momentum created outside Supreme itself.

But even though now more people than ever want Supreme, they’ve always kept supply controlled and never released a ton of pieces. This means demand gets higher as supply stays the same, manifesting an overblown hype that creates a secondary resale market for when Supreme release new products.

To get this level of virality and organic user generated content around your brand, it means you need to be very disciplined. When a Supreme product sells well, they never make it again. That’s what creates the hype and insane resell prices that get as high as 1200% or more, like this:

When you make things in smaller quantities, it makes people:

• Feel special
• Want to have it even more
• Increase the value for the buyer

While many businesses are trying to use “Limited Edition” as a selling point, with Supreme if you don’t get it you may never have the chance to get it again.

Supreme is the only company who sells it (they only have one retail distributor called Dover Street Market) and they only sell product through their online store and limited retail locations around the world.

• USA: New York City, Brooklyn, Los Angeles
• Europe: London, Paris
• Japan: Tokyo (Shibuya), Tokyo (Harajuku), Tokyo (Daikanyama), Nagoya, Osaka, Fukuoka

Supreme do weekly product drops every Thursday where they release a fresh batch of streetwear via its online store and international retail locations (with Japan getting it two days later on Saturdays). However they never say what’s coming.

This allows Supreme to gain brand momentum and organic traffic to their site every week through viral communities like SupTalk and major news sites like Hypebeast, because their fans want to know what’s coming next.

Supreme’s limited supply strategy created a demand frenzy that got so big once that when the “Supreme Foams” were released at Supreme’s New York Store they were forced to not sell it by NYPD due to concern for public safety.

The takeaway: Intentionally release every product in limited quantities to ensure sellout and engineer viral content around your brand (Supreme does this by limiting the quantity of every product they sell and varies the number available depending on the product and collaborators.)

THE MOST UNUSUAL HOME PAGE LAYOUT IN THE WORLD THAT GETS ALL THE BOYS AND GIRLS CHASING YOU  

Supreme’s homepage is largely different from most retailers homepage. You’ll notice that Supreme uses a ‘stripped down’ website theme that combines a minimalist approach with a ‘too cool for school’ feel, leaving visitors wanting to know more vs. bombarding them with information.

The brand’s stripped down homepage contains:

• Zero call to actions
• A stripped down minimalist design
• Only one graphic → Their logo

When compared to other big name brand homepages Supreme’s homepage is strikingly different, and relays a different message. Just take a quick look at Nike’s homepage for example:

It’s clear what message Supreme wants it’s visitors to understand: you need to chase them, they won’t chase you.

Supreme has been described as being: “the girls that gives you her number but never answers wen you call.”

The takeaway: Will this homepage approach work for everybody? Absolutely not; however, if you are looking to create a high-end, luxury brand, it’s something you should look into (Supreme does this with a site design that hasn’t changed since it launched in 2006 to stay elusive and on brand with 1 logo, 9 page links, 2 social links and 1 link to their mobile app).

THE EMAIL MARKETING STRATEGY THAT MAKES YOUR CUSTOMERS CONSTANTLY CHECK THEIR SPAM FOLDERS

Supreme’s mailing list sign up is not plastered all over their website.  There is a very modest link to their mailing list page in two places:

1. The bottom of their homepage
2. Their ‘shop’ page for a few months before their next collection releases

 

When you sign up for the Supreme Email List you get… nothing!

Crickets actually start chirping as you wait for any sort of email from Supreme.

SUPREME’S EMAIL MARKETING STRATEGY ACTUALLY MAKES CUSTOMERS IMPATIENT FOR THEIR NEXT EMAIL. 

It’s no surprise that Supreme uses their email newsletter in a different way than most retailers. Following suite with everything else they produce, Supreme’s email sign up is not the norm.

In an age where consumers are bombarded with emails highlighting specials, sales, and content — Supreme uses their email list as another tool to portray the message that ‘you chase us’ in their marketing.

Supreme uses their email list for two main purposes:

1) To update consumers on their weekly ‘drops’

“Each week you will be notified of a location where you can go and sign up for your spot on Thursday’s line. Once you receive the email you can proceed directly to the location given.” – Supreme Reddit Forum

Supreme has been known to send messages and updates to a select group of customers. The way they come up with this list is a mystery.

Supreme’s email tactic is such a mystery that sometimes they do not even send order confirmation receipts. There are dozens of conversations online regarding order confirmations:

The takeaway: Do not follow the crowds. Just because 90% of retailers spam people with emails and push for sign ups does not mean it is the best tactic for your email list. Make sure your email marketing strategy is in line with your branding (Supreme does this by only sending emails when their products drop and “mystery” customer-only emails).

THE ECOMMERCE “LOOKBOOK” CONTENT MARKETING STRATEGY YOU CAN USE 3 DAYS BEFORE LAUNCHING YOUR NEW COLLECTION

Three days before their new collections are available for public sale, Supreme launch something called a “lookbook” on their website. Supreme doesn’t have a blog on their website; however, their “lookbooks” provide customers with rich visual engagement with the brand, like this:

When the “lookbook” goes live on Supreme’s site, you can look through and see what Supreme is going to drop over the next few months, but you don’t know when those items are going to drop. You can basically see all the items Supreme are going to come out with in the coming season, except for collab drops and surprise drops.

Here is one of Supreme’s lookbooks for their Fall/Winter collection (they release two per year):

By releasing the lookbook before the product is available for sale, it creates a massive amount of buzz across social media and major news sites like Vogue, Highsnobiety, Complex and Hypebeast:

Fans get so hyped about the lookbooks that they make videos on YouTube reviewing the whole season’s collection (pictured above). You can see some of these videos are so popular that they get over 100,000 YouTube views.

Outside of seasonal lookbooks, Supreme do collab lookbooks. These are based on collab drops with other high end fashion and clothing brands. Here is a Louis Vuitton/Supreme lookbook from a collab drop Supreme did with Louis Vuitton:

Supreme use their “lookbooks” to further convey the exclusiveness and allure of their brand.

Notice how the images portray a sort of ‘clique’ that further motivate customers to try to be a part of the brand culture by purchasing their products.

The takeaway: Use “lookbooks” as part of your content marketing strategy so you can build up hype and social buzz around your brand before your new products drop (Supreme does this through their biannual Fall/Winter and Spring/Summer lookbooks which they release three days before you can buy their products.)

THE ONLY GUARANTEED WAY TO GROWTH HACK REDDIT WITHOUT BEING TROLLED

Here’s a look at Supreme’s top social traffic sources:

To get traffic from Reddit Supreme get one of the moderators of the subreddit to post a “super thread” under the News post flair category with links that go straight to Supreme’s website with their newest lookbook:

If you tried to do a post like this by yourself in Reddit, you would get 762 Reddit trolls swearing at you for shameless self-promotion. But by getting the moderator of the subreddit to post, Supreme got 762 comments discussing their new lookbook collection.

Here is a full list of all the moderators for the Supreme subreddit:

Every subreddit has a page like this, all you need to do is type the below URL in your browser window (then replace “supremeclothing” with the name of the subreddit you want to find a moderator in):

reddit.com/r/supremeclothing/about/moderators

Once you click on a moderator’s name, on the top right of the page you will see a text link you can click on to send the moderator a private message:

The takeaway: When you have a big product launch incentivise Reddit moderators in your chosen subreddit to share your product launch so you can drive massive traffic from Reddit to your ecommerce website (Supreme does this by getting moderators in the r/supremeclothing subreddit to post their newest lookbooks.)

CELEBRITY INFLUENCER MARKETING: HOW TO GET COLLABS WITH LADY GAGA, KANYE WEST, DRAKE AND KATE MOSS 

Supreme has built their brand and boosted exposure by getting the attention of celebrities. Dozens of celebrities are captured wearing Supreme’s class box logo tee.

Their clothing can be seen on high profile celebrities such as:

• Lady Gaga
• Kanye West
• Drake
• Kate Moss

Kate Moss in her Box Logo Supreme Tee

Lady Gaga sporting the Box Logo Supreme TeeSo how does one go about getting a celebrity to endorse a product?

One word. Authentically.

Supreme’s celebrity endorsement actually started with their collaboration with music artists. In the 1990’s Supreme began collaborating with different music artists to inspire their collections. Supreme authentically created relationships with music artists to gain momentum and establish collabs.

Here is the first ever artist collaboration Supreme did (with late graffiti artist Rammellzee when they opened their New York City store in 1994):

The hand-painted Supreme trucker caps with neon clouds Rammellzee helped create are amongst the rarest of Supreme products.

After the trucker cap collab with Rammellzee, Supreme created dozens of celebrity inspired t-shirts, hoodies and caps over the next three decades. When a music artist works closely with Supreme to create a piece of clothing inspired by them, there is a bond that is formed.

Celebrities who work with Supreme can feel the authenticity oozing out of everything released by Supreme, and are likely to wear the products themselves.

Supreme’s key influencer marketing tactics for getting collabs with major celebrities and brands are:

• Authentically create real relationships with brands/influencers that you want to collab with. You do this by helping them with things they are involved with (attending events where they are, connecting via social media, etc.)
• Do things that allow your collabs to actively participate in the collab with you. Create a product together.
• Outline the benefits of working with you (massive exposure, tapping into a new market, etc)
• Ensure that the brands/collabs you are trying to reach out to are in line with your morals, values, and overall ‘culture’ you are creating with your brand

If you do these four things right, then leverage the success of your first collab to get your second and third, you can get celebrity influencers promoting your product for you.

The takeaway: Look at the influencers your target market admires then brainstorm ways to help them with what they’re working on in order to authentically gain their trust and collaborate with them (Supreme does this through collaborating with top names like Lady Gaga, Kanye West, Drake and Kate Moss – all artists who their target market admire).

USE THIS INSTAGRAM GROWTH HACK TO GROW YOUR INSTAGRAM ACCOUNT TO 6 MILLION FOLLOWERS

Supreme’s instagram posts average over 100,000 likes, and over 700 comments:

To maintain brand consistency, exclusivity, and mystery for each of their Instagram posts, Supreme uses simplicity and celebrity endorsements/collabs to gain followers.

They posted their first Instagram post in March of 2013, and use the social media platform to post images from their lookbooks and highlight their collabs.

Their top hashtag is related to their collab with Louis Vuitton — #LVxSUPREME

The brand has collaborated with brands and influencers such as Vans (pictured below), Nike, Fila, Levi, and dozens of well known brands.

• Nike
• Fila
• Levi
• Vans (pictured below)

Supreme has nailed doing collabs with well-known brands and then promoting that collaboration on their Instagram. By focusing on growing one social media channel (ie: Instagram growth) Supreme are able to show collab partners they are able to promote the collab to their over six million Instagram followers, creating a flywheel for more collab opportunities and more Instagram account growth.

The takeaway: You can’t win on every social media channel. Focus on growing one social media channel and finding the types of posts that work best for your business. I saw a marketing company called HubSpot doing the same thing, but instead focusing on Facebook growth by using Facebook video posts (Supreme does this by collaborating on products with major brands like Vans then using that as social proof to hack their Instagram follower growth).

THE POSTER ADVERTISING CAMPAIGN YOU CAN RUN TO BUILD INSANE HYPE

Instead of the standard PPC advertising campaigns most clothing brands do, Supreme instead chooses to do periodic celebrity poster campaigns to stay true to their brand exclusivity.

When a campaign runs, Supreme will glue posters of celebrities rocking the brand’s signature box logo design on walls, scaffolding, and mailboxes around New York City and other cities where they have retail stores, like this one with Kate Moss:

Supreme will then make a photo t-shirt (based on the poster) available for sale to Supreme fans in future months. These t-shirts are some of the most desired pieces in Supreme’s collection.

Here are some of the most famous poster ad campaigns Supreme have run over the years:

• Raekwon & Elmo, 2005
• Dipset’s Jim Jones & Juelz Santana, 2006
• Mike Tyson, 2007
• Kermit the Frog, 2008
• Lou Reed, 2009
• Lady Gaga, 2011
• Prodigy of Mobb Deep, 2011
• Three 6 Mafia, 2012
• Kate Moss, 2012
• Neil Young, 2015

Other than the photo tee and poster campaigns, the closest Supreme comes to advertising is through their behind-the-scenes videos that you can find on the “random” link on their website. Here’s what it looks like:

The takeaway: When you find an advertising campaign that works, keep doing it (Supreme stay true to their brand identity and have been doing photo tee and poster campaigns since 2005.)

TURN YOUR CUSTOMERS INTO MILLIONAIRES BY FOLLOWING THESE 2 ECOMMERCE MARKETING RULES 

Every Thursday entrepreneurs (and hypebeasts) line up at Supreme stores to get the latest drop. The online web store sells out so fast that two guys built an ecommerce bot called “The Supreme Saint” that people can buy the option to use for sixty minutes every Thursday at 9am on their website.

From 9am to 10am on Thursday you can pay anywhere from $10 to $100 to get these guys to buy Supreme for you. Then at 11am when the Supreme online store opens, their bot will connect to Supreme’s servers with your shopping list and credit card number, and complete the checkout for you before other ordinary online shoppers can.

One time these guys made $20,000 in five seconds, by selling 200 pairs of Nike/Supreme Air Jordan 5 sneakers for $100 (that’s not the price of the Air Jordan’s, that’s the price people paid to use The Supreme Saint bot to get a crack at spending another $200 on Air Jordan’s.)^[*]

Another bot maker called EasyCop Bot sells a Supreme app-based bot for $595 that people can use on their own. By mid-2016, more than 500 people had purchased it raking them in nearly $300,000:

The reason add-to-cart bot services like this exist, and why so many resellers line up for Supreme is because founder James Jebbia follows two simple ecommerce marketing rules:

1. Scarcity: every product is sold in limited quantities
2. Consistency: new products go online only on Thursdays, and only at 11am

By following these two rules Supreme have created a culture where customers know when to come back and know that they will find something new every time. This strategy has been so successful that Supreme’s website got almost one billion pageviews in 2016 when a box logo hoodie dropped (data I found in a deleted tweet from Supreme’s web agency.)

Obviously a lot of that is from bot traffic, but the bots are actually helping Supreme sell out quicker and make more money. They work so well that items are selling out quicker every week (between 19 seconds and 173 seconds.)

The resellers then flip and profit.

Supreme is trying to reduce bots so customers who want to wear the clothing can buy (and not just attract resellers), but their two rule strategy has worked so well that the resale market has become insanely lucrative.

Wealthsimple, an investment company in New York found that if you flip 149 Supreme items at an average profit of $67 per item, you would make $10,000 profit per year. If you then invest that $10,000 every year and the market goes up by an average of 5.5% per year, in 35 years you will be a millionaire.

Most ecommerce companies can’t replicate this sort of math for their customers because they’re missing scarcity and consistency from their business model.

And just look at the math on this business model for Supreme (this Redditor said it best):

Supreme make this money in under 10 minutes every Thursday too, like damn 😉

The takeaway: If you want a predictable ecommerce business model where you sell out of stock every week and do massive sales volume in a short time period of time, limit your supply and drop your new product at the same time and day every week/month/year (Supreme does it by limiting supply and dropping new products every Thursday at 11am.)

9 TAKEAWAYS FROM SUPREME STREETWEAR’S INSANE SUCCESS

Supreme Streetwear has a marketing strategy so legendary, so mysterious, and so successful that entire documentaries have been created around it’s ‘marketing strategy’.

Supreme without a doubt displays the same characteristics of exclusive couture brands; however, their products are fairly simple.

Here are the nine key takeaways:

1. Intentionally limit the quantity of every product you sell. This is how you can build a demand frenzy around your brand and get people in internet groups and major news sites promoting your product for you.
2. Match your homepage design with your brand image. If you’re trying to go high-end luxury, keep your website simple and stylish.
3. Rethink your email marketing strategy. Are your customers replying to your emails excited to get the next one, or do you send out so many they just ignore you? Just because 90% of retailers spam people with emails and push for sales does not mean it is the best tactic for your email list.
4. Release content your target customers want. Just because everyone is writing blog posts, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the right marketing tool for you. Supreme use “lookbooks” that get the attention of their fans and the media. Think outside the box for what content your buyers want to engage with, and how often.
5. Find moderators inside subreddits of Reddit to promote posts for you. This is the only guaranteed way of getting links to your business promoted in Reddit without being self-promotional.
6. Get collabs with celebrities. You do this by helping them researching them and helping them hit the goal they are working on right now, building your product with them and showing them how you will promote them to your audience.
7. Focus on growing one social media channel. You can’t win on every social channel, but you can double down on one like Supreme did with Instagram by finding what type of posts your audience most like to engage with.
8. Double down on advertising campaigns that work. Supreme have being doing photo tee and poster ads for over a decade. They haven’t jumped around between different marketing channels, they just do what’s worked in the past. Look at what’s worked best for your business in the past and double down on it today.
9. Use these two ecommerce marketing rules together: Scarcity and Consistency. By limiting the quantity of product you sell and releasing product at a consistent time and day every week/month/year you can sell out of product consistently.

Credit: Sumo.com