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 This week's offering of savvy new businesses includes members' clubs for mothers, the world's first solar-powered robot lawnmower, a high-tech coat check, wallpaper for outdoor spaces, and more. Our next edition is due on 2 April 2008. In the meantime, check out our daily postings on www.springwise.com, send us your tips, and please don't forget to tell your friends and colleagues about us. Much appreciated! |
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In the same way that freelancers are flocking to shared working spaces, stay-at-home moms are happy to find a third space that accommodates both them and their offspring. In London, private members clubs like Maggie & Rose and Cupcake Mom, offer mothers a place to convene and relax, where they're welcome to come and go as they please, 7 days a week. Maggie & Rose, based in Kensington, features several play areas and offers children's lessons in art, cooking, dance and more, as well as a weekend movie club and birthday party services. Parents are catered to with a comfortable and quiet café (with wifi access, of course), as well as seminars and access to a family advisory service: "well researched info on nannies, tutors, schools, holidays, etc." Memberships are priced at GBP 500 per year. Set to open in Wandsworth next month, Cupcake also aims to provide a grown-up but child-friendly environment. Its focus, however, is mainly on pregnant women and new mothers. In addition to a crèche and an organic café, Cupcake also offers personal trainers and a spa. The top floor of the club, where the spa is located, is a "baby-free zone" and features treatments tailor-made for pregnant women and new moms, from the "Cupcake in the Oven Massage" to the "Mermaid Wrap." Cupcake also plans to install a sleep pod for much-needed powernaps, and will offer a concierge service to help busy moms complete their to-do lists. Membership is GBP 149 per month. Founded by Karen Hastings, an American MBA graduate who lives in London, Cupcake is backed by Trapezia Capital, a UK venture fund that solely invests in women-led businesses. Hastings plans to open clubs in affluent areas across the country. We’re pretty sure British moms (and dads) aren’t the only parents who would gladly pay for access to a being space, a community of peers and the opportunity for some pampered me-time. Entrepreneurs across the world: start planning. Website: www.maggieandrose.co.uk — www.cupcakemum.com Spotted by: Tamara Shand
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We've written before about product life stories and how they're bringing new transparency to the creation and distribution of consumer products. Dole Organics did it for bananas, and now Crop to Cup is doing something similar for coffee. Crop to Cup, founded last year, buys directly from African coffee farmers and represents them in consumer markets. With the goal of improving farmers' livelihoods, Crop to Cup trains and educates them in sustainable practices, and it coordinates the coffee's processing, export, import, roasting, marketing and distribution. Not only do farmers get paid fair prices, but they also have the opportunity to realize additional per-pound bonuses connected to sales on the coffee drinker’s end. Meanwhile, Crop to Cup also reinvests 10 percent of its profits in farmer communities. So far, so good, but not new—most fair trade companies work that way. Where the innovation and product life stories come in, however, is through what Crop to Cup calls the digitization of coffee farming. Through Crop to Cup's website, consumers can trace their coffee back to the farmers who produced it and interact with them (along with roasters and other drinkers) through message boards, forums, ratings and reviews. The result is that drinkers of Uganda Bugisu AA coffee, for example, can read profiles of the farmers who produced the beans, including Bernard Walimbwa's 17-member family, which manages roughly 30,000 coffee trees in the Bugisu Region of Uganda. The company's founders explain: "By training and working directly with family farmers we're able to control quality of our coffees. By virtue of full disclosure and farm-level transparency, we're able to ensure a fairly traded product without costly certification schemes. We involve the farmer and their ultimate customer—the coffee drinker—in a dialogue to determine what's important." Website: www.croptocup.com
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Robot vacuum cleaners are slowly taking off, and robot lawn mowers have been around for over a decade. What's new this month, however, is a mower that not only trims the lawn all by itself, but does so using solar power. Sweden's Husqvarna just introduced the world's first solar/electric hybrid robot lawnmower, which has no exhaust emissions and uses approximately the same amount of energy as a standard light bulb. Cleverly targeting time-starved consumers as well as tree-huggers, Husqvarna claims: "It's been calculated that using Automower Solar Hybrid to cut the lawn in an average garden can save 40 hours of labour every year—the equivalent of an extra week's holiday." Owners just lay out a boundary cable that tells the robot where to stop cutting, saving the delphiniums from an untimely death. Cuttings don't need raking, either: the grass is cut so finely that it can be left where it falls and acts as a fertiliser. Combining two powerful trends—convenience and eco-friendliness—has to be a winner. Who's next? (Related: Indoor composting made easy.) Website: www.husqvarna.com
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Last year we wrote about Blends for Friends, a British company that sells bespoke custom-blended teas, and recently one of our spotters came across Design a Tea, a similar—but more affordable—option. Founded last year, New York-based Design a Tea bills itself as the place "where tea leaves dream," and users of the site get to choose each element of the teas they create. The process begins when they select a base tea to start with—black tea, oolong, green tea or rooibos. From there, they can choose one or two flavours to add, selecting from a list of more than 40 that includes such options as cassis, mango and zabaglione. Users then choose whether they want their tea loose or bagged, and they give the tea a name or personalized message to include on its packaging. Pricing is USD 4.75 for 10 bags or 22g of loose tea, and 8.50 for 20 bags or 60g of loose tea; an assortment of signature pre-designed blends are also available. Website: www.designatea.com Spotted by: Bill McMahon
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Who hasn’t checked their coat at a restaurant or other venue and worried about losing the claim ticket? London-based Idscan aims to put those worries to rest with a biometric cloakroom system that it claims is a world's first. Cloakscan records a customer’s thumbprint via a small scanner, while a digital camera records the transaction. When customers return and touch the thumb-scanner once more, their pictures show up on a monitor, allowing the cloakroom attendant to verify their identity and quickly see where their valuables have been stored. Idscan explains that Cloakscan eases stress among customers and staff alike. Customers needn’t fear that a dropped claim ticket will be found and redeemed by someone else, while staff can use Cloakscan’s touchscreen monitor to log checked items faster and more accurately. Cloakscan even prints out reports if valuables do become lost, to aid in police or insurance investigations. The system can automatically charge customers for coat checking services and can also scan in promotional codes for special offers and services. Idscan rents its cloak-checking system for GBP 17.50 per week as a complete system or alternately sells the software running it with the scanner and camera for GBP 999. Idscan’s Cloakscan illustrates is how pervasive biometric scans and photo verification systems are becoming. Already widely used in banks, relatively inexpensive thumbprint ID systems particular can speed up operations in everything from a retail store’s merchandise pickup area to the checkout desk at a movie-rental outlet. Bottom line: lots of start-up opportunities exist for system integrators. All it will take is some software writing expertise to fine tune thumbprint and photo applications to new types of businesses. (Related: Drive-in cloakroom.) Website: www.idscan.co.uk
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Back in 2006 we wrote about wallpaper's renaissance and innovative wall graphics. While those offerings were intended primarily for indoor spaces, the D Garden Collection is picking up on the same concept and bringing it outdoors. Paris-based D Garden Collection has its sights set squarely on terraces, balconies and patios with its textile banners, self-adhesive wall stickers and waterproof cushion covers. Banner designs are individually produced to the customer's size requirements from high-quality textiles and inks to ensure UV protection, resistance to the elements and machine washability. A variety of designs are available in categories such as "country," "grasses" and "geometrics"; a 200-by-50-cm banner, for example, is priced at EUR 140. Wall stickers, meanwhile, can be adhered to any glass or plexi surface, outdoors or in; when outdoors, they'll last at least 3 years. The standard sheet size is 30 by 42 cm, for which pricing starts at EUR 15; custom sizes are also available. Finally, D Garden Collection's cushions come in no fewer than 50 designs, with or without the inner cushion. Standard sizes are 50 by 50 cm, priced at EUR 60 each, or 65 by 65 cm for EUR 95. No matter how tiny their terraces, consumers' desire for individuality and personal style remains super-sized. Plenty of room here for minipreneurs and others to make their mark on patios around the world! Website: www.dgardencollection.com
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Marketers caught on long ago to the advantages of involving kids in their brands at an early age. Now natural foods heavyweight Whole Foods is applying the notion to the YouTube generation with a video contest focused on green living. Earlier this month Texas-based Whole Foods launched the Whole Earth Generation, a video podcast series dedicated to raising environmental awareness among today's youth. Episodes of the series will address topics generated by Generations Y and Z, with highlights including interviews with celebrities and peers, ideas for a sustainable future, cool green products, and how to convince skeptical families and friends to go green. To kick off the new initiative, the company announced a contest to find six kids aged 8 to 17 to serve as hosts of the green-themed series, which will run through April 29. Children from all over the United States and Canada can either submit a video at Whole Foods' YouTube page, or they can show up in person at one of the designated Whole Foods Market stores in New York, Chicago and Austin throughout March for auditions on select days. Videos can include singing, dancing, rapping or documentary-style footage, for example, and must be no more than two minutes long. The contest closes March 24. Select videos will be featured on the site leading up to Earth Day, and ultimately, six winners—three from the YouTube entries and three from the in-store auditions—will be chosen to be hosts of the podcast series. "So many shoppers tell us they have learned how to be more environmentally conscious by listening to their kids," explains Heather Kennedy, Whole Foods' senior coordinator of national marketing. "We hope this program takes that trend to an even broader audience via the Internet." Besides helping to spread the green word, of course, Whole Foods' initiative will also involve kids in many of the company's core values and maybe even increase the likelihood that they'll be loyal customers themselves in a few years. Not a bad way to ensure your own sustainable future! Website: www.youtube.com/user/WholeFoodsMarket Spotted by: Bjarke Svendsen
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The online invitation marketplace is a crowded one, with heavyweight Evite and a raft of smaller contenders all vying for their share. But a new site recently launched in the hopes of taking online invitations to a new level. Unlike most of its competitors, pingg is taking an ad-free approach to online invitations. With a library of more than 2 million unique images, it's also focusing more on the appearance of its invitations, and incorporating more Web 2.0 features into managing the process. Users planning a party can use pingg's basic email invitations and event management services for free. That includes choosing pre-designed invitations from among 50 or so event types, creating an event page with photos and video, managing RSVPs, accessing event reporting, linking to charity or gift registries, collecting money and sharing event details on Facebook. In addition to its basic services, however, pingg offers several customisation services for a fee, such as access to unique invitation designs and invitation printing, as well as use of photos from the pingg Plus+ library. pingg users can also choose to communicate with guests using SMS/text for a fee of USD 1.50 per 20 messages. pingg gets a commission from its gift registry partners (currently just Amazon); other revenue-adding features on the way include offering the ability for users to sell tickets to their event, and a white-label service offering pingg's core functionality to other businesses. Cofounder Lorien Gabel explains: "We know that unrelated banner advertising detracts from the user’s experience and is one of the fundamental reasons online invites have not evolved. Our approach from day one has been to identify revenue sources that actually add value to the invitation and event planning process." New York-based pingg just launched in February, so it remains to be seen how well its ad-free model will work. If nothing else, however, the site is further evidence of one of our favourite refrains: everything can be upgraded! Website: www.pingg.com
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We've written before about small-scale wind turbines that consumers can use to generate their own power, and now a new device uses wind power to create mesmerizing outdoor light. The Firewinder, also known as the Original Windlight, is a decorative and completely wind-powered outdoor light from the UK-based Firewinder Company that transforms the ebb and flow of the wind into an upwardly spiralling glowing light. Wind from any direction spins a small turbine on the helix-shaped device, thereby lighting up LEDs along its outer edge. With light winds of at least 3 mph, the Firewinder emits a dim glow, but as winds increase, so too does the brilliance of its light. In variable winds, the result is a pulsing, twisting glow that appears to float in mid-air. The Firewinder can be hung or mounted to a post or wall, and it's made of recyclable materials; no batteries or wires are required. It will be available starting late summer in the UK priced at GBP 99.95. As the greening of the consumer world continues apace, the market for ecologically sustainable goods will only increase. There's no end in sight to the benefits of thinking green! Website: www.firewinder.com Spotted by: Bjarke Svendsen
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Childhood obesity is a growing problem in the developed world, and the widespread obsession with sedentary computer games certainly doesn't help. Nintendo's Wii has been applauded as a step in the right (more active) direction, as have gyms that integrate gaming. Now a UK-based firm is gearing up to go a step further—and right out the door. LocoMatrix hopes to expand its offerings into role-playing games, strategy games and games of cooperation. It is also working on making its platform open so that other developers can create their own games for it.... Ideas, anyone? Website: www.locomatrix.com Spotted by: Bryan McAndrews
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