2014

“If you know what tomorrow will bring…what would you do different today?” That is a byline from chlorosphere, the French trends consultants. I had the opportunity to present alongside this company at a Belgium DIY and garden conference in October. Chlorosphere are the only trends consultancy company that purely looks at trends in outdoor living

Retailing is about being an entrepreneur and some of the winning ideas can be quite simple. Take for example the peach truck in Ohio. A farmer in the southern part of the State contacted local garden centres and asked if he could place his peach truck in the parking lot of garden centres of a

While in the USA I presented some workshops with my colleague Sid Raisch. One of his presentations is how are independent retailers building a strategy to combat the Amazon effect and how it is changing all our shopping habits. One person in Sid’s audience mentioned he sold trees and that tree retailing would not be

Whilst I am mentioning Sid, he was adamant we went to Voodoo while in Portland. This is a one-store operator, not in the best retail location, that only accepts cash, will not give cents change, and you have to line up to be served for at least 30 minutes! This is not what I would

Following my Voodoo experience Sid and I travelled to Mount Hood and to the hotel and restaurant at the National Park. There we were exposed to a “bacon experience”. The breakfast offered different selections of artisan bacon. Think what experiences you could offer that makes you, as they say in Portland, WEIRD

Whilst in Oregon I met up with Gary Oppenheimer, A CNN Hero and founder of AmpleHarvest.org. What Do AmpleHarvest.org Do? They enable consumers to eliminate hunger and malnutrition in their own community. AmpleHarvest.org connects, in the USA, 40+ million Americans with excess food in their garden and local food pantries. Garden by garden, home and community

I have worked with libraries around the world for many years, but in recent years many libraries a have become a problem for Local Councils as they have not kept up with consumer trends. Over the last two months I have discovered two entrepreneurial libraries, Mundijong in Western Australia who won the best library in

Finally farmers markets are moving into the management software arena with the introduction this month of a software program coming out of Australia. Farm Market managers can now mange the market from their iPad. Sitetrak is the name of the program and it is worth checking out.  

I was working in Tasmania, Australia at the start of the month and dropped into the Tourist Bureau and discovered a great leaflet from the town of Burnie. It was entitled “meet the MAKERS of BURNIE. There’s a story around every corner”. The leaflet talks about the people first and then the businesses. It was

Many of you will have attended one of my Ghost Town, Clone Town, Home Town workshops. One of the main concerns in communities is what do you do with empty shop fronts. Look what Liverpool in the UK are doing. “Opera for Chinatown ” is held in Duke Street which is the oldest Chinese community