Blog & Inspiration

Recently, Amazon has started offering a new delivery service for household and daily items exclusively for Prime members. The online mail-order company is becoming an increasingly significant competitor for supermarkets. Boxes of supplies can be ordered containing preservable food items, household and beauty products as well as office supplies.

Wearables are topic number one in the IT world at the moment. In particular, smart watches can do a lot. The question is whether the applications will be used. While many manufacturers overload their devices with features which only a few end users find use for, Blocks has chosen another path.

Most little boys usually spend their day at school and later play video games, do homework and spend their pocket money on sweets and comics. But not Moziah (Mo) Bridges from Memphis in the United States. In 2011, at just nine years old, he founded his own fashion business, ‚Mo’s Bows‘, and started producing colorful bow ties.

The scent of warm, freshly ground coffee floats through the streets of San Francisco. Blue Bottle is a coffee company which puts the taste of the freshly roasted beans into the foreground - without wifi and deep armchairs - but with coffee of a standard unknown to many. What the guests are served here could be the beginning of a coffee revolution, just like it began with Starbucks in Seattle at the end of the 80s. On the west coast, Blue Bottle Coffee, whose name is a homage to the legendary first coffeehouse ‘Zum Hof der blauen Flasche’ in Vienna, has long been seen as the ‘apple’ of the coffee world.

Some products are just design icons. They are unbelievably beautifully and elegantly shaped, and just as simple as practical in their functionality. They have the stuff of classics - just like Lumio. Is it a book? A fan? Or an accordion? Neither nor, it is an LED lamp. The Lumio Book Lamp looks like an elegant hardback book when closed. When opened, the ‘pages’ of the book unfurl as if by magic into a fan sculpture with bright, warm light.

When hotelier Greg Marsh was on his way home after work in London one evening in 2009, his route took him through the residential area of the luxurious district of Mayfair. Everything looked as always. Despite this, he had the feeling that something was not quite right. Suddenly he saw daylight - namely that there was no light. All these wonderful large houses were dark. There was hardly anybody at home, the residents were all out somewhere or were completely out of town. Their flats and houses in the middle of one of the most exciting cities were virtually empty.

Versace is one of the most extravagant and glamorous labels of the luxury fashion world. The style is striking and splendid. A golden medusa head as logo and a baroque signature pattern have been the trademark for the fashion house from the beginning. We asked Gian Giacomo Ferraris, CEO of Gianni Versace SpA, for an interview and enquired about the plans to go public and how the expansion plans of the fashion house are developing.

NEO 7EVEN’s turnaround. We would like to find out how the 100 percent investment of Heidelberger Druckmaschinen affects the software company by asking its leaders. How will the enterprise and its solution look in the future? Seven questions - seven answers.

Digital transformation has become an important topic in many industrial and economical areas. Realised in the right way, it means profit-bringing and service-supporting effects. Just how Digital Asset Management can help with this realisation was discussed at the Canto DAM Summit in Gießen.

You need patience to be a good rally passenger. You have to be conscientious and well organised. Tina Thörner is all this and successful. During her motor sports career she won three ladies’ world champion titles and gained second place twice in the Grand National rally world championships. Two of her most excellent positions are second and third place at the famous Dakar rally.  

He is one of the most well-known graphic designers in the world - Erik Spiekermann. He represents German typeface design and brand leadership like no other, and has had an unparalleled influence on contemporary graphic design for over 30 years. The immense quantity of work he has is thanks to, among other things, his ability to find partners and employees who support him in his plans and activities. He explained to us what it is about the most normal thing in the world - typeface - that fascinates him and what peculiarities this can bring with it.

A watch never runs completely accurately. It is absolutely normal that even the mechanical timepieces with reliable Swiss clockwork have a deviation of a few seconds per day. This is not a bad thing, we won’t miss our plane due to a small deviation of a few seconds, for example. This looks completely different in the software area. This is where the smallest mistake or deviation can cause problems and possibly cost the company a lot of money.

Jewelry Television (JTV) is one of the largest multi-channel retailers of jewellery and gemstones in the world.  To more effectively sell and manage over 1.6 million products and 50,000 new product introductions per year, JTV is implementing Riversand’s PIM solution.

Philippe Starck is a phenomenon. As one of the most famous designers of our time, he masters the range of product design in an unbelievable bandwidth. There is hardly an area of our daily lives that has not been made more beautiful and friendly through a design by the Frenchman. Philippe Starck is a chameleon, shrill and omnipresent as well as subtle, elegant and quiet. He observes his environment with never-ending curiosity and almost inexhaustible energy. New experiences are food for his spirit and creativity. The result are works that are always original and full of surprises, and often they – like their inventor – transcend the traditional boundaries of design.

On 16^th January, a man was elected HORIZONT “Agency Man of the Year” at the Alte Oper Frankfurt. He stands for a new era in the marketing sector. For years, Matthias Schrader has been one of the leading figures in the German digital scene. In the last financial year, the listed agency group SinnerSchrader, which he founded in 1996, increased its revenue to over 50 million Euros. With a stronger focus on platforms of IT, commerce and services, and less on communication, the group’s offer is exemplary of the reorientation many digital providers are striving to achieve.

What do Beatles drummer Ringo Starr, the fashion model Twiggy and entrepreneur Enzo Ferrari have in common? They were all big fans of a small car. When the ”classic Mini“ was introduced in 1959, the compact car was supposed to have three main properties. It was to be affordable yet economical and, above all, offer lots of space in the smallest of areas. To this day, no other car maker has enjoyed a community like the one that has taken shape around the MINI over the years. We spoke with Oliver Heilmer, Head of Design at MINI, about brand development, brand management and the automotive design of the future.

Smooth, robust, timeless and individual – that’s how the products from Meindl are supposed to be. Like a second skin. Alpine and urban ideology dictate the design language of the company. Owner and CEO Markus Meindl lives for this subject and for his brand - which has been producing the finest clothing for 11 generations - and so a design language which links both worlds together has developed over the past few decades. The look of a modern mountain-city dweller, so to speak. He doesn’t just dress the alpine folk in high-class trousers and jackets – celebrities throughout the world love his products too.

What would Italy be without its renowned Lavazza coffee? The company founded in 1895 with its headquarters in Turin has been in ownership of the family for four generations. As one of the most significant coffee roasters in the world, it owns a market share of almost 45 percent of Italian retail. A success which Francesca Lavazza‘s grandfather can be thanked for. With hard work, courage and the right sense of taste, he laid the cornerstone for the worldwide thirst for this brown gold. Today, Giuseppe, Marco, Antonella, Manuela and Francesca make up the fourth generation of the traditional company. Aware of its history, the company management is influenced by future orientation in view of continuity. We spoke to Francesca about her role and the responsibility connected with this.

The wait for the first Karl Lagerfeld online shop has come to an end: since the beginning of November it has been possible to buy the new ladies’ clothing collections as well as accessories, watches, fragrances, glasses and other novelties around the clock on the website of the fashion designer – in 97 countries and five different languages. In order to duly celebrate the long-awaited launch, the new capsule collection ‘Karl around the world’, which is now available at all Lagerfeld stores worldwide as well as at selected luxury department stores and online shops has been released. CEO Pier Paolo Righi spoke to us about the realisation of the project.

The SAP takeover of hybris caused an incomparable transformation in the E-Business area of both companies in the past two years. With the formation of the CEC group within SAP, a powerful holistically-thinking unity is to be created.

I often ask myself how online trade can grow so rapidly without losing the appeal of the physical shopping experience for the consumer. On single's day in China on 11 November, Alibaba, the biggest internet platform in the country, reached a sales volume of $10 billion by midday!  The advantages of purchasing online are quite obvious: you can research quickly and extensively, independent of time and place, and get your items delivered where you want at a time to suit you.