morning boy's letters on serious matters and commentary on funny things aplenty
Something’s changed inside. And for now it is also a torment.
Brand Manager / Marketing Manager jobs don’t excite me. Even if you replace Manager with Head or this or that, not exciting.
Product Shaping is absorbing for me. Crafting Messages is very very absorbing for me.
AC = Air Conditioner
Servicing = ?
In India, it means removing the dust from filters in the AC. That’s it. No more. I swear, it involves no other thing.
Repairing? AC just don’t know. They have some measurement tools and this and that but all they can handle is gas-leakage. Beyond that they know nothing. Nothing.
Hello Google,
In the coming week, I am going to skip the first 40 results or so in the search results you show to me. Okay?
Air pollution
Water pollution
Noise pollution
How does Data Pollution sound?
Data Poisoning sounds crazy. But real.
One that has defined and differentiated itself well.
And one that is looking forward to finding its definition and differentiation.
The way things have happened, both kinds have gotten funding.
Both want amazing employees.
Amazing employees should go for the first kind, irrespective of the difference in monies on offer.
A picture lets you stare at the product. A video is fleeting; it doesn’t let you stare. You can play the video over and over again and yet you can’t seem to get a grip of how the product is.
The sequence below is hypothetical but powerful in its simplicity to reveal the tragedy that is garment selling and shopping in India.
Sometimes even tailors got the fit wrong in spite of all the measurements. And most of the times, tailors didn’t have the fancy skills to match the desires, visions and fashions.
In-store readymades changed that. Plenty of variety, plenty to try in front of the mirror and variety of looks to pick from. The errors in ‘tailoring’ and ‘making’ got obscured by the sheer number available to try and fit into. Even if one unit didn’t fit, you could try another unit of the same design and it would fit.
When they started with online readymades, they kept the errors in ‘tailoring’ and ‘making’, removed the facility of ‘trying’ any number of things to get into a good fit, and instead started tom-tomming variety of lacs and crores of units.
Selling fashion online is tragic for a lot of people, sellers and buyers both. But then tragedies consume time and the time spent in contributing to tragedies eventually flips them into happiness. Starting up over and over is happiness too.
If I can’t spend time on moving my body, I refuse entertainment that occupies my time and makes my body sit.
If an ad crosses the usual few seconds of running time, it might feel like a short film. Such are the times.
If an ad is paragraph of 48 words, it might not be called an essay or a book. Long ad one may call it.
Sometimes they call it advertorial as if it means anything at all.
The long ad has to battle with the variety that scrolling on the mobile screen offers. Also has to battle the dance videos and silly videos.
Why am I writing about the long ad!
Sorry, good morning! This was such a long essay. Thanks for reading.
Buy a flat or house at an insane price and pay EMIs till eternities. Space is that expensive.
Once you have the space, you want to fill it with design called Interior Design.
Is empty space better than filled space?
Was space bought for emptiness or to fill the emptiness of space?
How much space should be filled? And how much should be empty?
Another short form and another expression. Personal Knowledge Management.
Hmm… Niklas Luhmann’s system of arranging his notes could be classified as that. And that tells us how difficult or painstaking PKM could be.
I’ve been too restless for such undertakings.
Just opened a promotional email from Myntra with the subject line:
Your Fashion Horoscope Is Here
The email shows women’s outfits and all in yellow. Irrespective of the views dispensed by Mr. Chandrachud, I am not interested in women’s outfits for myself but I am surely interested in colors.
My Dad, who sells Indian natural stone, receives plenty of inquiries for yellow stone these days.
I’ve been telling my Dad, as much as we think that we are selling construction material, actually we are in the business of fashion.
But then I also maintain that Stone is not Fashion.
Woman puts in a lot work to prepare some luscious food. Family enjoys the food but fails to appreciate and compliment her. Woman feels bad.
Woman wants to look great. Wants to go to gym, wants to buy lovely dresses and jewelry.
Pays the gym for her own effort.
Pays the boutique for designer’s and tailor’s efforts.
Wants to pay for silver, but not for the effort to turn silver into lovely jewelry.
We’ve interacted with thousands of Indian women like that in the course of running Mississippi Earrings.
After getting dressed when she looks at herself in the mirror and evaluates her look and evaluates her self…
The contribution of such evaluations to fashion and spread of fashion and spread of words of fashion.
Start your business, turn it into an organization over many years, 5 years, 10 years, 20 years, 30 years. Insane! Feels like a strange beast, this thing called ‘organization’ that a business gets transformed into.
The struggle is real, as I understand myself and my awkwardness in more detail. Who will guide me?!
I am naïve in certain ways. Words and expressions in fashion often elude my awareness.
It turns out that Customer Experience (Design) is shortened to CX. Like UX. Where else has ‘experience’ been turned into ‘X’?
While the shortened form sounds and looks amazing, so many organizations offer the same lousy customer service experience, perhaps lousier than earlier.
I have a solution in mind. I will write in detail about that.
I was tempted to title it Selling Fashion Online?
But then that would be too vast and my point wouldn’t hold.
When making a garment, the garment-maker or conceptualizer or creator has certain measurements in mind that go beyond the commonest measures of S, M, L, XL, XXL and so on.
Strangely, most fashion ecommerce managers don’t bother with those measurements. And also complain about returns.
I don’t see anyone working in that direction either. Most are busy uploading yet more SKUs and on-boarding yet more garment sellers.
Readymade Fashion doesn’t mean you pay attention to the look but you don’t pay attention to the measurements.
How big a part does big software take from an employee’s working time every day?
Is there a way to compare such times?
My hypothesis is that an organization that demands a lot of such time every day is already less effective or will be less effective very soon.
As good as the argument above sounds, it still feels vague but important nonetheless. Still a few terms to be defined and observed.
I spotted this in today’s newspaper.
The Air Specialist?
In matters of air-conditioners, this was the most shocking realizations for me: the split-conditioner in my studio doesn’t let the outside-air in or inside-air out.
Means one keeps breathing the same air until windows and doors are opened and there is sufficient wind to circulate the air, and bring the air from outside to mix with the air inside.
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