Here is a real world example straight out of our Bridal Party Tees Adwords account: for a while we had been noticing that our “Bridal T-Shirts” Adgroup was being triggered by search terms such as “Bachelorette Party T-Shirts”. This was particularly frustrating because we already had a different Adgroup focused specifically on bachelorette party t-shirts. This adgroup included all keyword variations of “bachelorette party t-shirts”, it had ads specifically for that product, and most importantly, it had a landing page specific to that term. People were searching for bachelorette shirts and even though we had a beautiful landing page built just for them, they were being taken to our landing page for bridal t-shirts.

In fact, this was happening all over our account. Almost every adgroup was being triggered by keywords from adgroups we already had in place.

Despite this, our margins were still excellent. I could see that people searching “bachelorette party t-shirts” were still converting at a good rate, even if they clicked on one of our Bridal T-Shirt ads. Perhaps the rate was not as good as if they had been shown the correct ad, but still pretty darn good. I assumed this was because the site itself is relatively simple. We sell custom t-shirts to bridal parties and bachelorette parties and that’s about it. (Well, we actually sell a lot more than that, but those are definitely the majority of the business.) I also assumed the good conversion rate was partly due to our easy-to-navigate menu (designed by me, by the way /humblebrag), which lets users easily jump from bridal to bachelorette.

Because of this, we chose to let it ride. The only thing I could think to do would be to add negative keywords at the adgroup level, thus forcing the correct ad to show up for the correct term. But the Adwords auction machine works in mysterious ways, and I was afraid adding those negative keywords would result in a loss of volume.

This went on for a while until one of my newer team members was going through the Bridal Party Tees account, adgroup by adgroup, and using the See Search Terms feature. This particular team member was rather anal about keywords, which is usually the exact quality you want in a paid search specialist, but in this case it might have been a hindrance. The fact that search queries were triggering the wrong ads was driving her nuts. I couldn’t blame her, it had always bothered me as well.

We finally agreed to take the issue to our Google Adwords Reps. They advised us to use negative phrase match keywords in every adgroup. For example, add “bachelorette” as a negative keyword in our Bridal T-Shirts Adgroup. Then they told us to wait a couple days while they double checked with their colleagues. A few days later, they reconfirmed: add the negative phrase match keywords. So we did.

Over the next week, our account tanked. Impressions were down, clicks were down, and revenue was down. The difference in our margins was not significant. We had made a mistake.

We immediately deleted all of the negative keywords we had just added. Eventually, things went back to normal.

So what happened? First, let me tell you how our adgroups are structured. We are very precise with our adgroups. Each one represents a single, specific concept such as “bachelorette party t-shirts”. We have different adgroups for bachelorette apparel, bachelorette tank tops, and custom bachelorette t-shirts. Within each adgroup, we have every keyword duplicated three times, once for each match type. In essence, each adgroup is three individual adgroups, consisting of broad, phrase, and exact match types. We adjust bids by match type and create very specific ads for those keywords.

For the most of our keywords, our quality score is a 7 out of 10. But throughout our Bridal Party Tees Account, we actually have a good amount of 9s and 10s too. And this is went wrong with our negative keyword plan: we underestimated the importance of these quality scores.

I said earlier that the Adwords Auction machine is a mysterious beast, and it is. No one knows the details of how it works, but this is the general idea: let’s say I have a quality score of 10 and my competitor’s score is 5. If we both bid $2.00, then my total score is 20 (10 x 2 = 20) and his score is 10 (5 x 2 = 10), which puts me in first place. If he wants to beat me, he has to more than double ($4.01!) my bid to win the auction and get to first place. (Again, this is roughly how it works.)

It is my estimation that our broad match keywords with a quality score of 10, sprinkled throughout our Adgroups, were winning a lot of auctions for keywords from a different Adgroup. They were beating not only our own exact match bids for that keyword, but our competitors’ bids as well. Once we put the kibosh on that, our competitors started winning more auctions. (I use the word ‘winning’ as short hand for ‘ranking well’.)

Lessons learned:

• If your ads are being triggered by keywords from a different adgroup, and those search queries are still profitable for you, don’t sweat it.
• Your Google Reps will almost always have good advice when it comes increasing volume. But not always.
• Pay close attention to your quality scores, especially if you are about to force the right adgroup to show up for the right search query.

Click these images for bigger versions.

This post was featured by Sketchnote Army. Go check it out to see what the other, super talented Visualizers created.

Years ago, while learning about YCombinator, it became clear to me that all the elements that made a successful reality show were present in the YC process including:

• the drama of interview day, the anguish of rejected teams and the utter joy of accepted teams
• the history of startups from previous batches, big exits and quiet closings
• the occasional interlude of YC alumni milestones (Imagine a startup from the current batch clicking on TechCrunch and seeing “AirBNB just raised $100 million on a $1 billion valuation”)
• the weekly dinners
• the dramatic pivots
• the preparation for, and excitement of, demo day
• the pressure and the potential

All of these factors would make a show worth watching (for me anyway), and on top of that, the exposure could be hugely beneficial to the startups themselves

In 2009 I started following the 5 minute videos posted weekly on Techstars.tv.  These guys were doing it right: nice editing, great music, a high quality production all around. It kept me coming back every week, and it made me even more sure this idea would be a great tv show.

Clearly, I’m a little late. The Techstars reality show launched two weeks ago and the third episode airs tonight at 9PM ET on Bloomberg.

So why should you watch it? Well, many of the reasons are in the bulleted list above, especially the pressure and the potential. But you should also check it out for the following reasons…

Everything Seems Eerily Familiar… In a Good way

Watching Top Chef, it took me a while to get used to some of the jargon, and when a celebrity chef is introduced I never recognize the name or the face. Techstars is the exact opposite.

One of the first founders they introduce is Jason Baptiste of Onswipe. Hmmm, that name sounds familiar. Wait a minute, is that jasonlbaptiste, the prolific HN commenter? Ah, indeed it is.

And what’s his company? Onswipe? It’s goal is to “make your publication look great on tablet web browsers”. Huh, that’s the exact idea my friend, whose graduate thesis is about designing long form publishing for tablets, was just talking about.

While I never recognized a celebrity restraunteur from Top Chef, it seems like every mentor on Techstars is also a prolific tech blogger. Hey, isn’t that Fred Wilson? And isn’t that Gary Vaynerchuk? Why yes, yes it is.

Heck, even David Cohen was wearing my sweater. I’ve never seen anyone with that sweater!

Companies in the Midst of Customer Development

“So we’re trying to figure out what I call Product/Market Fit.”

- Melanie from To Vie For

As I was watching the show, I couldn’t help but constantly think back to Steve Blank’s book The Four Steps to the Epiphany. In it, Blank argues that startups and new projects within existing companies should start with Customer Development instead of Product Development. When I first read it, I felt a little giddy with excitement. Maybe it was the self-published feel of the book, what with its terrible cover art (no offense, Mr. Blank), but it was like I had some kind of secret manual. Maybe everyone in the tech startup world had heard of it, but not too many in my part of Ohio had.

The Techstars show is exciting because these companies in the middle of the Customer Development process, and we get to watch how they navigate it. Based on the fact that Techstars has to turn away thousands of applicants, I’m a bit surprised more of the companies are not further along in the Customer Discovery phase.

Listening to the startups talking about their businesses and the language they use, you can sense that each team is thinking consciously about where they are in the Customer Development process. When I heard Melanie of To Vie For utter the phrase “So we’re trying to figure out what I call Product/Market Fit”, I couldn’t help but think, yeah, you know who else likes to call it that? People like Steve Blank and Marc Andreessen who use it constantly in their writings. But give her credit because she was literally “getting out of the building” and talking to potential customers, another element of the Steve Blank mantra.

In fact, the influence of Steve Blank is so thorough, the man himself appears on screen as part of a demo for another startup, SocratED.

This Show Was Made For You

Ultimately, we as readers of HN represent the ideal target market for BloombergTV. They have made this show for people with our specific set of interests, and I’m finding it very interesting indeed.

I can’t wait to hear what advice Fred Wilson and the other mentors dole out.

I can’t wait to see what startup “wins” the next 10:10 meeting. (Once a week, Techstars holds a meeting at 10:10 pm where all the founders gather and where at least some Jack Daniels and Heineken get involved. The founders present, a winner is decided, and a special prize is awarded. On episode 2, that special prize was a visit to one of the technical advisors on Spielberg’s Minority Report.)

And I can’t wait to see what some of these really smart companies, like Wiji, a company who is trying to customize outdoor advertising based on the viewer, are able to produce. I suppose I could find out just by Googling them now, but I’d hate to ruin the suspense.

I hope you tune in too.

The Stir Symposium seeks to provide an opportunity to collaborate, think, and discover new ways to approach big global issues. Participants from many disciplines will bring their own expertise to the table, thereby allowing us all to start addressing problems and issues in ways we never would have thought of on our own. The Stir Symposium is about collaborating and thinking in new ways, no matter the discipline: business, architecture, engineering, design, agriculture, geography, and more.

Interesting, right? I’ve been fascinated by this upcoming symposium since the beginning, and I was hoping there would be a way I could get involved. Then I found about the role of Visualizer. It seems that each Stir session (workshops and discussions) will contain a Visualizer who will summarize and visualize the process and outcomes of that session. Unsurprisingly, I was in no way allowed to simply waltz in as a Visualizer.  I had to apply like everyone else and so I did.

The following images represent my application (click to embiggen).

They wanted to be sure each Visualizer had the ability to come up with quick and attractive infographics, so the first image requested was an infographic covering a specific Stir theme. I chose the theme “Moving: taking public transportation to work”.

They also asked for a portfolio of 3-5 pieces.

This first image is a mockup of a website I’d been tossing around in my head. It’s called Screenshotput, and it’s a huge library of images from pop culture, mainly screenshots from film and tv, and it is also a tool that lets users put their own text on these images. I created this mockup a couple years ago, before comixed gained much traction, and before the Rage Face generators and Quickmeme even existed.  I still think comixed has a lot of room for improvement, so perhaps there is still opportunity in the world for a site like Screenshotput.

This next image is a mockup I created for a couple friends who are starting a classified ad site for dog breeders. It’s a pretty neat idea: take a classified section that craigslist doesn’t do very well and create a niche site dedicated to it. They could certainly expand past dogs quickly.  Not sure when this will launch.

These final two images are from websites I have designed. If you dig them, check out my posts on Customized Girl and Follow Function. (This is the “custom t-shirt” landing page on Customized Girl).

• Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore - The sixth novel in the Harry Potter series, The Half Blood Prince, begins with Dumbledore coming to visit Harry on Pivet Drive. Harry notices Dumbledore’s hand is blackened and dead-looking. He asks about it almost immediately, but Dumbledore shrugs it off, saying “I have no time to explain now. It is a thrilling tale, I wish to do it justice.” Harry asks Dumbledore several more times throughout the book, but each time he is rebuffed. At the end of the novel, it is still a mystery. Well, sort of. The biggest mystery at the end of the book is the one of Snape’s allegiance. J.K. Rowling very cleverly unravels the story to make it seem as though Snape is evil, and aligned with Voldemort.  But if this is true, then Dumbledore was wrong about him, and Dumbledore was almost never wrong, particularly when it came to wartime strategizing. So at the end of the Half Blood Prince, if you wanted to get to the bottom of the biggest mystery, all you needed to do was concoct a little thought experiment.  If Snape was good, then the only reason he would ever kill Dumbledore would be on Dumbledore’s own orders. But why would Dumbledore want to be killed? Only if he knew his own death was imminent. And do we have any indications that Dumbledore might be ill?  The hand. Sure enough, near the end of the seventh and final book, it is revealed Dumbledore tried to wear Marvolo Gaunt’s ring, which was protected by a very powerful dark curse. The curse started at his hand and was spreading to the rest of the body when Snape was able to stop it.  But a curse such as this one could never be completely stopped. Dumbledore would be dead within a year, but he would be killed in the manner in which he chooses.

  

• Marty McFly – “Pretty mediocre photographic fakery; they cut off your brother’s hair!” This was Doc Brown’s comment after seeing Marty’s proof that he really was from 1985.  It was a photo of all three McFly kids, and his sister was wearing a sweatshirt that said Class of ’84. Soon, they realize Marty’s Mom is in love with Marty, and it all becomes clear for the Doc. They look at the picture again, and Marty’s brother’s head is now missing. Erased… from existence. The timer has started, and Marty needs to make his parents fall in love before his brother and sister are erased, because Marty himself will be next. It all comes to a head during the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance. Marty is playing guitar on stage when some jerk cuts into George and Lorraine’s dance (laughing maniacally, for some reason). Marty’s hand starts to fumble at his guitar, and when he looks at it, he sees it disappearing right in front of his eyes. But of course George mans up, shoves that jerk to the floor, and kisses Lorraine. Marty pops up, narrowly avoiding imminent demise. Interestingly, problems with the same hand also play a role in the plot of Back to the Future Part II. In the original version of 2015, we learn that Marty was always a sucker whenever someone called him “chicken”. He had been goaded into a drag race with Needles (played by Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, incidentally), and had crashed into a Rolls Royce, thus ending any hope of a music career. Luckily, Marty learns his lesson in the old west, never races Needles, and presumably goes on to become a huge Rock N Roll star.

  

• Roy Batty – Roy is a Nexus 6 Replicant in the film Blade Runner, which means he is an incredibly advanced robotic humanoid. It also means he was programmed to live only four years, in the hopes that he would be unable to develop complex emotions in such a short time period. Roy is perhaps the most obvious entry in this list, because his bodily failure begins with his right hand. In an effort to regain control of his hand, he takes a nail and jabs it through his flesh like some kind of zombie Jesus. At this moment, the audience realizes Roy’s time is quickly running out. At first it seems his last goal in life is to kill Deckard, but once he realizes death is so near, Roy saves him instead. Roy uses his final moments to wax poetically on life and death, saying “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe: Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion; I’ve watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.”

  

• Captain John H. Miller – Tom Hanks’s hand shakes in the opening scenes of Saving Private Ryan because he is not an invincible war hero. He’s just a regular guy, a high school English teacher, thrust into war, trying to do the best job he can. He’s not John Wayne and he’s certainly not Superman.  He is, on the contrary, extraordinarily mortal. And this makes his character all the more heroic. This is also why the casting of Hanks is so perfect. Unlike Vin Diesel, who would use this film to propel himself into action stardom, Tom Hanks is the anti-action-star. He is the Jimmy Stewart everyman, and he makes us fellow non-action-stars ask ourselves: if we were in that position, could we do it? Speaking of Diesel, Saving Private Ryan featured a huge number of actors in small parts who would later find much success on the big and small screens including: Nathan Fillion (Firefly), Bryan Cranston (Breaking Bad), Barry Pepper (True Grit), Jeremy Davies (Lost), Paul Giamatti (American Splendor), Ryan Hurst (Sons of Anarchy), not to mention established actors like Dennis Farina, Giovanni Ribisi, Matt Damon, Ed Burns, Tom Sizemore, and Ted Danson. Ted Danson plays a character named Capt. Hamill, whose name, along with the line “I’ve got a bad feeling about this”, are references to films of Spielberg’s good friend George Lucas.  These films lead us to the last character on this list…

  

• Darth Vader – Although Vader loses his hand immediately before his demise, I’m including him on this list as an exception to the rule. The loss of his hand does not foreshadow or lead to his demise, but it does the opposite: it nearly saves his life. The scene takes place in the final moments of Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi. Luke is trying not to engage his father in a light sabers, but when Vader threatens Leia, Luke fights back with a fury. He slashes at a fallen Vader, cutting his hand off at the wrist. Vader is finally vulnerable, and it’s Luke’s chance to kill him. But Luke looks at Vader’s stub of an arm and then he looks at his own mechanical hand. He had lost his cool, he had stooped to Vader’s level, and he was through fighting. Vader is spared due to the sympathy gained from a missing hand. He is the anti-Dumbledore-McFly-Miller.

  

This list is definitely not comprehensive. There are probably hundreds of successful businesses that have started this way, and this list is merely a start to the conversation.

In no particular order:

• Threadless. The first chapter of Jake Nickell’s book on the founding of Threadless is called “The Accidental Business”. In it, he explains how he was part of a small online design scene, experimenting with computers, code, and art. He posted often on the forums on dreamless.org.  One day, the New Media Underground Festival held a competition on the boards to design a t-shirt for the fest. Jake won the contest, and had an idea. In an IM conversation, he told his friend Jacob DeHart about the idea: start an ongoing competition for t-shirt designers where the best designs would be printed and available for sale. The first competition was posted on the Dreamless forums, and it quickly evolved into an independent business. Threadless was founded in 2000. The term “crowdsourcing” wouldn’t even be coined until six years later.
• DailyBooth. Jon Wheatley, one of the founders of DailyBooth, tells the fascinating history behind the startup in one long, excellent blog post. In it, he details his specific inspiration for the site.  Back in 2007, the internet became fascinated by a series of videos uploaded to YouTube in which a person will take a single photograph of themselves every day for several years. They edit the photos together into a video, add some cool music, and the end result is a visual evolution of a single identity. The most famous example of this is probably Noah.  Jon thinks these videos are great, and he thinks more people would want to jump on this trend, if only they had a tool to ease the process. DailyBooth is born. The main idea behind DailyBooth remains the same, but with the parallel success of Twitter, it is now more popularly described as Twitter with images instead of 140 characters, rather than a tool to collect pictures and combine them into a video. As a sidenote, online communities were particularly important to the founding of DailyBooth, as that is where the founders first met.
• Flippa and 99Designs. Sitepoint launched in 1999, and its content has become an important resource for web designers and developers. The Sitepoint forums are humming with activity. It is especially interesting to see how closely the founders of Sitepoint have monitored their forums, and how quickly they can recognize a business opportunity when they see one.  When they noticed that their users were downloading and printing their content, they began publishing books. When they noticed that people were using their forums to buy and sell websites and domains, they set up Sitepoint Marketplace, which was eventually spun off as Flippa.com. The story of 99designs begins much the same way as Threadless.  The Sitepoint forum users were throwing impromptu competitions to see who was the best logo designer. Someone would create a fake project, 20 or 30 designers would enter, and a winner would be crowned. This went on for a while until someone who actually need a real logo offered to create a competition, and pay the winner $100. Sitepoint started charging users $20 to post a project in the forums, and in 2007, they spun that section off as 99Designs. Earlier this year, 99Designs announced the first outside investment in any of the Sitepoint properties, for $35 million.
• Imgur. Two and a half years ago MrGrim was a reddit user like any other.  Reddit sends massive amounts of traffic across usually to simple, funny pictures.  MrGrim and the rest of the community were tired of photobucket and imageshack. They were tired of bandwidth limits and being forced to compress their files. So MrGrim built a solution: an image host that required none of those restrictions while adding simple things like crop, resize, and rotate. He posted about his new hosting service, Imgur, and that post went on to win reddit’s Best Submission of the Year 2009.  In 2011, reddit is even more popular and it seems like almost every single image post on links to Imgur. As of this writing, Imgur is getting 6,320,064,355 image views per month.

• Concept art where the concept is “Surprise! I’m a monster!”
• Harrison Ford character names
• The hand dies first

We can split the apparel print-on-demand industry into two groups: those companies that allow users to create and sell custom apparel from a storefront, and those who don’t. In the first group, we have Cafe Press, Zazzle, Spreadshirt, Printfection, Skreened, and a few more. In the second group, we have CustomInk, Customized Girl, Blue Cotton, and many, many more.

All of these companies have one thing in common: they take advantage of the fundamental principles of the long tail. Because they don’t print anything until it is ordered, and because they allow customers to create whatever design they like, their inventory of designs is digital, which means it is essentially infinite. The only physical inventory they need to worry about is the blank apparel, but even that can be reduced to almost nothing by using just-in-time inventory, like we do at Customized Girl.

What Cafe Press and Zazzle Do Well

Cafe Press and Zazzle have done an extraordinary job of recruiting massive armies of storefront owners. Each of these storefront owners bring in tons of sales to their individual stores, but perhaps more importantly, they bring in links. If you were to build a storefront on Zazzle, you would be bombarded with reminders and tools to encourage you to constantly link back to your storefront. This results in excellent organic search rankings. If you’re on Google, and you search “any-word-you-can-think-of” followed by the word “shirt”, Zazzle will almost surely show up as the first or second organic link.

Zazzle, in particular, has also done a great job of cultivating partnerships with major brands such as Disney, DC Comics, Harry Potter, Star Wars, and more. These branded t-shirts represent the “head” of the long tail.

My absolute favorite aspect of Zazzle’s business model is their ability to provide their partners with incredibly specific and powerful data about their own customers. For example, let’s say it’s the year 2006 and Disney is about to release a new Pixar movie, Cars. They’ve been promoting the heck out of it with trailers and TV commercials, and because they’re really smart, they’ve had a Cars Zazzle Store open for weeks. No Cars t-shirts have been printed yet, because Zazzle prints everything on demand. Soon, Zazzle is able to report back to Disney: Lightning McQueen t-shirts are the best sellers in New York and Los Angeles. Mater t-shirts are the best sellers in Texas and Ohio.  Disney can take this information and use it to direct inventory to their brick and mortar stores all around the country. (Just to be clear, I completely made up that data. I’m not even sure Zazzle get’s that specific, but I don’t see why they wouldn’t.)

Taking this one step further, imagine it’s your job at Zazzle to recruit new partnerships. How incredible would it be to walk in a room and say “Would you like to have everything you need to know regarding exactly how much inventory you need and where it needs to go?”.  Seems like a pretty easy pitch.

What Cafe Press and Zazzle Don’t Do Well

Cafe Press and Zazzle claim they sell “custom apparel”, and while that is technically true (you can upload a design to blank items), they don’t sell “customizable apparel”.  They have millions of designs in their shops, but almost all of them were uploaded by users creating designs in Photoshop or Illustrator. If you wanted to find a bachelorette t-shirt design that you could customize quickly and easily by adding your own name, you’d find it rather difficult at Cafe Press or Zazzle. If you did find a design you liked, but you wanted to change the colors, or the font, or the text, well… forget it.

That’s where companies like Customized Girl and Bridal Party Tees come in (and to a lesser extent, Custom Ink which offers a somewhat limited variety of designs you can customize) (also, if it is not obvious, I work for eRetailing, the company that owns Customized Girl and Bridal Party Tees, so this post is not without bias).

At Customized Girl, every design you see was created from scratch in our design center.  There are no uploaded images. Every piece of art you see is from our massive library. This means you can customize the design’s colors, scale it up and down, edit all of the text, change fonts, swap out the item, and personalize it pretty much every conceivable way.

The Future

Cafe Press and Zazzle have fantastic business models because they’ve been able to harness the true power of the internet. If Zazzle had wanted, it could have bought a bunch of direct-to-garment digital printers and then built powerful art and marketing departments to fill up their shop with high quality designs. But they realized that if they created a platform, and opened it up to anyone, then they would be able to grow exponentially.  Now their users are able to create a storefront and sell fully designed t-shirts from their bedroom. The user never has to buy inventory, or print anything, or even deal with customer service.

But the next step has yet to be taken. The next step is to take the Zazzle model, and instead of creating static t-shirt stores, the users can create another Zazzle, or at least another Bridal Party Tees. I don’t think this would be possible with the current Zazzle structure and design center, but if there was another platform, a platform with an incredibly easy-to-use design center, and a storefront that made it obvious each design was meant to be fully customized, then maybe… maybe users could build fully fledged custom apparel businesses.  They could sell softball team uniforms, family reunion shirts, and any other item that might benefit from customization.  There are a lot of different ways this platform could become a reality, and at eRetailing, we’re thinking hard about each of them…

I had earned my BS in Product Design the year before, and I was excited about some of the new, modern designers I had discovered.   Follow Function became an online store for modern goods.  To explain more, I’m going to copy and paste from the “About Us” section I wrote way back in the day:

————————————————————————————————————————————————

In the spring of 2005 I (Jeff) was perusing a popular design blog and I saw an article about an incredible product called Automoblox. It was well designed, it was fun, and it was brilliant. Then I read another article, this one about a design firm called Mint. The products erupting from this place were also well designed, fun, and brilliant. I said to myself, “Self, this is the type of stuff you should be spreading across the globe.”

I called up Steven and said “Steven, look at this here stuff. It’s pretty awesome. We should sell it.” Steven was already the proprietor of a sometimes successful online store and he said to me: “Jeff, that’s a good idea. Lets put together a massive spreadsheet detailing every product we would like to bring to the people of Earth, and then narrow that list down to a few of our favorites.” So we did.

If there was one thing I learned in four years of design school, it was that I had an innate ability to recognize good design. So with my discerning eye and Steven’s business sense, we combined our powers like Voltron and gave birth to Follow Function LLC.

Our criteria for selecting quality products was threefold:

• Is it well designed? And by “well”, we mean “very, very well”. Can you see the imprint of that designer’s personality on each product? Is it clever? Is that designer exploding with talent?
• Does it separate itself from others like it? Maybe its because the product ships flat and blossoms into an unbelievable lamp (see MIO culture’s ‘Bendant’). Maybe its because the geometry of the objects interact in such a way that you just have to reach out and touch it (see Mint’s ‘Hug Salt and Pepper Shaker’).
• Is it reasonably priced? We love good design, but we have a problem paying a ridiculous amount of money for it. We also don’t really like shelling out the dough for shipping charges. If you look around you can find stuff that ships flat, stacks, or is small enough to fit in a reasonably sized box.

But wait, there’s more! As a professional industrial designer, I found that virtually no one outside the design world had any clue what defined the term “industrial design”. Usually, this meant that few people knew what good design was or how to look for it.

So part of our duty here is to educate folks on what exactly is good design. Therefore, it is our pleasure to bring you the story behind each product we sell. We interviewed or studied each designer and their products in order to gain a better understanding of what it is that lives in our homes.

————————————————————————————————————————————————

In 2009, we decided Follow Function would have a better chance for growth in someone else’s hands.  This is code for “it was still a side project and we just didn’t have the time to dedicate to it anymore”.  We were happy to sell the company to Wholesale Furniture Brokers.

This is the Follow Function home page as I designed it back in 2005.

I changed out the bottom banner frequently, depending on the season and whatever special offers we were promoting. I eventually developed a style using images of our actual products as repeating graphical elements.

This version of a Remarkably Specific List contains art featuring creatures who are, aboveground (or above water), seemingly inviting or harmless and at the same time terrible, terrible monsters just below the surface.

[Sidenote: This is in no way a commentary on each artists' originality. As far as I know, they each came up with their ideas independently. Even if they didn't, there's nothing wrong with taking inspiration from other work that impresses one's self.]

Mockfish by Peppi

Ye Pirate Muncher by Duddlebug

The Earth Grasshopper by Carlos Cabrera

Angler by Stephan Royer

Icebergs Just Wanna Have Fun by Mathijs Vissers

The Stepping Stone by Brian Cook

Flower Feast by Brian Cook

As I discover more of these images on the internet, I’m going to post them on Wookmark.com using this group:

http://www.wookmark.com/group/572/surprise-i-m-a-monster

Wookmark is a super useful image bookmarking site. They offer embeddable slideshows of their groups, so you can scroll through all of the images in this group using the slideshow below:

• Henry Jones Jr. – The Kingdom of the Crystall Skull – 2008
• Jack Stanfield – Firewall – 2006
• Jack Ryan – Clear and Present Danger – 1994
• Jack Ryan – Patriot Games – 1992
• Henry Turner – Regarding Henry – 1991
• Henry Jones Jr – The Last Crusade – 1991
• Jack Trainer – Working Girl – 1988
• Henry Jones Jr. – Temple of Doom – 1984
• Henry Jones Jr. – Raiders of the Lost Ark - 1981