I feel like this is something I should watch once a week to remind myself not to get caught up in the minutia of daily life. I bought their manifesto poster a few years ago and have it hanging in my office somewhere, or maybe in someone else’s office, either way I haven’t looked at it in a while. I was reading an article this morning on Good which reminded me of them and I watched their manifesto video and fell in love with it all over again.
If you haven’t heard of Holstee, this might be a nice little hug to give yourself this morning. Holstee was started in 2009 during the recession by two brothers Mike and Dave and their partner, Fabian started Holstee. More than a company, or clothes, the trio wanted to create a lifestyle. Starting in the summer of 2009 they dove head first into the world of design and production. After six months and a huge learning curve, Holstee launched its first line of Recycled Tees made of 100% recycled plastic bottles that were milled, cut and sewn within 150 miles of each other in North Carolina. Starting with this first round, 10% of all sales were lent to entrepreneurs in extreme poverty through non-profit micro-lending organizations like Kiva.org – a tradition they are proud to still embrace.
Starting out as a side project, the guys realised that they wanted to create more than just t-shirts. Having all quit their jobs and filled with a ton of raw energy, emotion, and ideas – a feeling that they never wanted to forget, they wrote down exactly what was on their minds and the tips of their tongues. It wasn’t about shirts and it wasn’t about their old jobs. It was about what they wanted from life and how to create a company that breathes that passion into the world everyday. It was a reminder of what we live for. The result became known as the Holstee Manifesto.
Whether you’re a believer or not, do yourself a favour. Turn off your iPhone. Shut down your email. Close your office door. Take a moment and watch. Whether you’re a cynic or not, sometimes it’s good to remind ourselves of the things we should be prioritizing in our lives. Even if the people doing the reminding are still trying to sell us something.I’m buying.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Beatbox Burger, Melbourne food trucks, Raph Rashid, Taco ruck
Portland food trucks
I was in Portland earlier this year and dropped in to get a feed at one of the Portland food trucks with some local friends. Regulars to LA will be familiar with the food truck trend which has exploded over there, they have regular food truck nights in Venice Beach and indeed some of the best LA restaurants are in 4 wheel rotation during the day to keep the locals fed and watered. Locals follow them on Twitter to find out where they’ll be serving that time of day, and LA trucks are often met on street corners by groups of hungry bystanders waiting for the tasty mobile to pull up & spread the love. In true Portland style, the Portlandia food truck scene is a little more low key and old school. Portland local Talia’s “Whole Bowl” is undoubtedly the tippity top of the pop in my mind and I’m sure I’m not the first person to google Talia’s special sauce in an attempt to recreate the goodness offshore, likewise the People’s Pig does a cracking roast pork sandwich, but I digress….
A little closer to home here two foodie vans are starting the scene in Oz and making their way around Melbourne serving parcels of deliciousness on the streets. And that my friends, is the point. Raph Rashid’s Taco Truck and Beatbox Kitchen are trawling round Melbourne town serving up his famous Taco truck Burger by the hundreds. You can keep abreast of where this delicious mobile will be by following him on . . wait for it, twitter.So for those of you residing south of the border, go forth and enjoy. As for Sydney, well we’re still waiting to catch up to the foodie trend. Lord Clover has been pushing for Sydney to trial late night food vans but shopkeepers and restaurant owners are pushing back saying it will create an unfair playing field given the lower start up cost of the food van. Since when did we not innovate within distribution channels and business models because it might put pressure on other businesses? As a rule, food trucks are not necessarily serving cheaper food but they are innovating in how, where and what they serve. It’s true they’re more nimble and have greater flexibility but industries change and this is a small example of change within hospitality. As with most industry, the best way to remain competitive is to read the trends shaping your space and innovate. Food trucks like small bars will park their wheels in Sydney. It’s just a matter of when. In the meantime, Sydney can watch Melbourne put another notch in their city street life innovation bedpost alongside pop up foodie offers, small bars & street art.
Filed under: Uncategorized
‘if you want knowledge, you must toil for it; if you want pleasure, you must toil for it. Pleasure comes through toil and not by self-indulgence and indolence. When one loves his work, his life is a happy one.’
-Sarah Louise Arnold 1917. A Mastery of Words.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: rhys giles jones, the day the media died
Was surfing a new site this morning by Giles Rhys Jones and found this little musical ditty. All sensationalism aside this is a great little toe tapper. Enjoy.
I’ve been trying to make a claim (or in fact about 40 claims) with HBA my health insurer today. It has become so difficult to even make the claim that it’s becoming laughable. I pay an extraordinary amount for health insurance a month, I mean a lot. I looked up on the net today to see whether I could make a claim online to start sorting out my receipts, you can claim online but not for medical, dental and some other category. Right.
I then rang them to see if I could visit an HBA centre (how very old school I know) but guess what? they’ve closed every single HBA centre in Sydney apart from Chatswood which might as well be in Canberra given the proxiomity to Surry Hills and the CBD. They said I could claim over the telephone which I thought sounded labour intensive but at least it provided me with an option. But wait, you can’t claim amounts over $500, or anything to do with medical, sport and some other restriction.
Okay so I’m just a little peeved so far so I ask the nice lady on the phone what my options are to which she replies – Snail Mail. She says she can send me out some claim forms by post and I can return them in the post and get them to process the claims remotely, all of which will obviously take a significant amount of time. I check the website to see if I can circumvent even one step in this arduous process and download a claim form online but the link is broken. Of course it is. So I ring back another nice lady and ask if she can send me a soft copy of the claim form (it didn’t sound like HBA even made soft copies of the online forms available for their operators) but the lady was very helpful, however I suspect I shall have to wait to receive some claims forms in the post.
Admittedly I’ve been a little fluey off late and my tolerance is low but oh my lord HBA in the days of digital communication and electronic efficiency, you guys absolutely suck. Further to this, the fact that I pay such a ridiculously huge amount each month in health insurance (a preventative style anxiety I probably inherited from my mother), and you can’t provide me with a branch or an online service that works.
Health insurance has always been difficult to understand, impossible to negotiate and now, they’re making it near impossible to even make a claim. I don’t know about any of you but the health insurance industry is one space which is crying out for a new competitor to cut through the crap and offer real value, easy access and efficient effective service.
I was just flicking through some old newsletters from Australian Anthill when I came across this article about Quirky. Quirky is the brainchild of 22 year old Ben Kaufman and it’s a really interesting site worth checking out. So here’s the deal:
Entrepreneurs and other creatives can submit a product idea to the Quirky community. The community picks one product idea every seven days and then everybody gets busy on that one idea to see whether it could fly. Basically the idea is that you get a whole bunch of creative people involving themselves in the ideas from the very beginning, the product positioning, packaging, naming etc right through to the marketing and selling of the product which happens via the quirky online store. Once the product hits its pre-sales threshold, the product goes into the production and delivery stage. Thirty cents out of every dollar a quirky product makes goes back to the quirky community, with 12 of these 30 cents going to the person who originally suggested the idea.
An interesting idea, especially for those of you who are itching to get out of your advertising careers and make a million selling widgets all of your own. Stop by and take a look. Check it out here quirky
A little slideshow from Katie Chatfield over at Get Shouty I thought I’d share with you
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Gregory Page, Lazy Grazing, poltzy, steve poltz, sydney
Two mates of mine are very much into Steve Poltz and yesterday, they brought him to our place for a Lazy Grazing. He played with Gregory Page and the two of them were absolutely fantastic. He’s been touring round Oz for the past few months and apparently always does a couple of house concerts in each city that he visits. Yesterday was our turn. He came with his band and joined us for a long boozy lunch and a couple of sets and it turned out to be an absolute cracker event. Thanks to Mads, Poltzy made a cameo appearance just about everywhere. There was plenty of food, even more wine and lots of people united in their love of the Lazy Graze. Poltzy sang an original song for little Archie [pictured] for his first birthday and that was it, the little guy was mesmerised for the rest of the day. The idea behind Lazy Grazing is basically just to get together with a few peeps and listen to some music. As it turned out, it was quite the event. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Stev Poltz you can check him out here or here.
I don’t know about you but I’m always on the lookout for new thinkers that spread the gray matter a little further afield. Kevin Roberts’ latest email pointed me in the direction of a young lad by the name of Jonah Lehrer whom I hadn’t heard of before.
He’s a Contributing Editor at Wired and the author of Proust Was a Neuroscientist. He graduated from Columbia University and studied at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. He’s written for The New Yorker, Nature, Seed, The Washington Post and The Boston Globe and is also a Contributing Editor at Scientific American Mind and National Public Radio’s Radio Lab.
In his latest book How We Decide he looks at the role of emotions in shaping our brain’s responses to all the decisions we make from day to day. He explores intuition, that sense of just knowing and how our emotions affect our decision making. Lehrer concludes with a simple rule of thumb. We all know it and we all know we should follow it, but as we get more experienced and more educated it gets harder to do. If it doesn’t feel right, or it feels too good to be true, it probably is.
His website is also full of meaty articles that are well worth a look if you have some time to spare. Move over Gladwell there’s a new kid in town.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Channel Seven, double take, intestifresh, Intestigas, TRAY Spray
Ok so I clearly wasn’t the only one who was surprised by the TRAF Spray ad which aired during Grey’s Anatomy last Thursday night. Apparently it had a promotional super for Channel Seven’s ‘Double Take’ comedy show at the end of it, if it did, I along with a rather large group of other Grey’s fans, clearly didn’t notice it. So the mystery is solved, it is a promo for a comedy channel. Not that mysterious after all.
For those of you who didn’t see the ad – here it is here. Enjoy.
