Last week I had a pair of the brand’s shoes comically and awkwardly disintegrate on my feet during a long day of meetings.  I wrote a post about it and did not name the brand.  I did not think it was relevant.  The shoes were old.  Although it was a dramatic “footwear fail,” I figure these things do happen. Further, my co-founder Joanne used to run product development for the $380M Keds brand and she told me the shoes were possibly an early use of a new material, so they likely were not cured correctly.  As a product designer, I kind of cheered Stuart Weitzman for taking the risk.

Whatever.  I just shared the crazy shoe experience because it was bizarre.

But then I Tweeted my post to Stuart Weitzman, figuring we’d have a little fun banter.  Here is my Tweet:

I waited a day.  The Tweet went unanswered. I found my good humor waning.  So I gave them another chance:

Now two days after this Tweet, the silence is becoming deafening.  Expecially because Stuart Weitzman is Tweeting A STEADY STREAM OF INANITIES.  But look at how this Twitter profile is set up:

“The official twitter?”  “Global press office?”  An intern at Daily Grommet would know better than to set up a corporate Twitter account that way. But Stuart Weitzman looks like “those people” with blue Tintin silhouettes on Facebook,  whom we affectionately indulge because they are our Luddite friends who have not learned to upload a photo.  This is not the best image for a contemporary fashion brand, however.

But this is not a rant.  Stuart Weitzman is at least showing up at Twitter, and they will find their way.  Their 13,000 followers will expect that.

The fact that I am having this ridiculously annoyed reaction at their silence is the real news.  It is admittedly a bit insane, but many of us expect every company to respond nearly instantaneously, no matter our choice of medium:  Phone, email, Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, blog comments, product reviews.   This shift is dramatic and fairly recent.

The dirty secret of social media is that it is incredibly laborious.  But worth it.

I saw this first-hand when I did direct customer service at Daily Grommet in December for two weeks.  We got in over our heads with growth, and it was “all hands on deck” to help our ops team make sure customers were happy.  But we were choking on the volume and did not perform perfectly.

Here was the predictable pattern.  If we did not answer a phone call, a customer email on the same topic immediately appeared.  (Which immediately doubled our work load and further buried us.) If that email was not answered quickly, a second, more impatient one, appeared.  And our customers were right.  They deserved very prompt responses.  They were making holiday gift purchases and they had to be perfect.

I learned more in those two weeks than in the prior two months.  So maybe I am a tad bit sensitive about Stuart Weitzman’s silence, working on the assumption that they have a heck of a lot more bandwidth than Daily Grommet.  Our team starts collectively twitching if a Tweet or site comment goes unanswered for an hour.  Maybe we are crazy.  But our customers seem to love that brand of crazy.

It’s not hard to understand.  Connecting with a human being in a distant company is satisfying.  It can turn a bad situation into a great one.  But being simply ignored is aggravating.

In the old days you would not let your customers ring through to an answering machine at your business if you could help it.  It was rude and unprofessional.  Not responding to modern media is pretty much the same thing.

As my high platform shoes spontaneously reorganized themselves into wobbly Earth Shoes, I got shorter and shorter with each step.   Just to cap a long day of back-to-back meetings off, I had to end the night in these crazy half shoes by attending a crowded office open house.  It was held at the pristine and spacious new digs of a local venture capital firm.  No amount of awkward mincing could prevent the showering of black rubber crud that traced my every step on the brand new white carpeting.

Think PigPen–with a beer and a limp–meets high finance.

Photo by Rob Carlson, for his Synthesis blog, which covers Garage Innovation

I’ve been struggling to get a simple stat that adequately captures the explosion of “garage-works” R & D we at Daily Grommet see originating from regular people, not just large companies. This grassroots investment in innovation is an essential cornerstone of Citizen Commerce.

Stats are thin on the ground.  No one has studied Daily Grommet, or Quirky, Big Idea Lab, or Edison Nation, or KickStarter or all the entities and individuals participating in this area.  Or at least I thought so.

But HAPPY DAY, my neighbor Marcia sent me an MIT Sloan Management Review article “The Age of the Consumer Innovator” that delivers just what I need.

An American MIT professor, a Japanese Kobe professor and a Dutch Erasmus professor studied the “consumer innovator” R & D investments in the US, Japan, and the UK.  The findings are impressive for the US and the UK:

• US consumer innovators are matching 33% of the R & D investments made by commercial enterprises.  That is enormous, given our R & D intensive economy.
• UK consumer innovators actually spend more!  They log in with 144% of what all commercial enterprises spend as a group.
• Japan is a little wimpy, at 13% but even that is not bad for an R & D intense nation.

We see 100 ideas a week submitted at Daily Grommet.  That doesn’t happen for free.  People are investing in R & D from their paychecks, and from friends and family, and investing proceeds from other ventures.  These are the people creating the future of business.  I am glad to put some numbers on it.  It’s big and it is going to rock our world.  In a good way.

From: http://sloanreview.mit.edu/the-magazine/2011-fall/53105/the-age-of-the-consumer-innovator/

We earned our keep; our Irish friends can rest assured we spent their tax dollars (Euros) wisely.  We’ve sent the summary of about 15-20 finds back to the home team to start investigating.  (Tough work if you can get it.)

Joanne commented, “We have to be careful or Daily Grommet is going to look like Daily IRISH Grommet if we don’t space these cool finds out.”

Here’s  a random photo gallery of our trip.

I bought a couple products at this terrific Dublin shop, Designist,  featuring affordable European home product innovations.

I had no idea that some of the items I bought at Designist were designed and manufactured by this pair of entrepreneurs from Shanghai, now living on the northside of Dublin.  It was only when attending a trade event, Showcase Ireland, that I made the connection.  How refreshing!  The Chinese people I knew when I lived in Dublin were largely students.  Some of them are obviously settling right in, a few years later.  This is a huge sea change for Ireland.  It was so homogenous when I first lived there that when I saw a black, Asian or overweight person I automatically assumed they were a visiting American.

One of the things I struggled with regarding Irish craft during my residency in Dublin (2001-5) was the aesthetic.  The materials and techniques were gorgeous.  But the vibe was kind of 1970′s tourist for some of the bigger producers.  It was hard to understand, given the very contemporary sensibilities of Irish people.  Thus I was really happy to see this man applying wonderful Irish wools and knitting techniques to some great modern menswear.  (This scarf is better in person…not leopard printy!)

Similarly, this woman was putting a modern spin on Irish linen, but using very fine age-old manufacturing techniques.

This black box is not a mistake.  It was supposed to be a picture of us with the President of Ireland.  He was scheduled to speak at noon on Sunday at the show.  At 11:40 we started looking for the assigned room.  We were told…”Oh he’s just after finishing.  He did it early. You can probably find him walking around the show.”  That was true.  We never did find President Higgins, but we found an official photographer who showed us shots of him mixing and mingling.  No Secret Service.  Just the Pres rambling about, having a chat here and there.  Alas, Joanne’s visions of a very stunning and impressive Facebook post were dashed.  All we have is this black box.

My very favorite Irish brand is Avoca, founded in 1723.  It is one of the oldest continuously operating manufacturers in the world.  It’s known for its woven blankets, and wonderful fashion, but it’s also a dynamic retailer, and a superb restaurant operator. In my estimation, contemporary companies like Anthropologie–as great as they are–are only copying Avoca.  It’s the original. Thus, I was very thrilled to meet one of the company’s family members, Ivan Pratt from Avoca.

I wanted to buy this blanket for my sister.  He joked, “That blanket.  It’s a classic.  We call it No. 7.  It put me through college.  I think my parents could have used that money more wisely, but I will always be grateful for this auld blanket.”

Avoca is so inspirational to me.  Their cafes are full of delicious, freshly prepared food.  Joanne and I had to visit TWICE to have this berry compote served with greek yogurt and an amazing homemade granola loaded with bits of citrus and big fat nuts.  Alas, Avoca does not sell it outside of the cafes.  If they ever do, it is a Grommet for sure. I owe it to my countrymen.

Organic “Crackers” eggs (probably harboring a fair quantity of rich Irish grass-fed cow butter) were a revelation.  They really are life-changing.

And I solved a personal decorating dilemma at the Avoca cafe–how to cover some huge windows in a family room that have been annoyingly bare since they were added in 1998.  (I can be crazy patient about doing “without”—until I see what I want.  Then I go on a tear.) This simple use of fairy lights is going right into my home, possibly covered with some thin filmy voile to create a bit of mystery.

No reason for the photo of this Avoca baked goods counter.  I just thought the café worker was adorable.

No visit to Ireland is complete without a misty mountain walk.  This was taken at Glendalough.

Finally, at Dublin airport, Joanne commented:  “This is the only country in the world where they would be sampling whiskey right out in the corridor, free for the taking.”  (The woman was a Duty Free shop worker who was quite nice but we had to prod her to smile. This was the best crooked grimace she could manage.  Not the usual Irish response.)

I am NOT sharing the photos of our late nights with friends new and old.  But they were plenty!  That is the true treasure of Ireland.  Its social life and its sociable population are my favorite “products” of the land.

Delivering numbers (which boils down to customers) matters a lot.  Every company hits the same wall when it comes to taking their better mousetrap to a larger stage:  it is really, really hard to find the thousands of customers these products need to survive.  The number one reason new products fail is not the product at all–it is failure to reach a big enough market before the cash runs out.

After working with over 800 enterprises we can help so many of our partners avoid pitfalls and attain success much faster than they would by working in isolation.  In the process, we can help them avoid a terrible “splat” they may not see coming (capital crunches, beating back knock-offs, negotiating with the big guns of retail, creating profitable margin structures, avoiding supply chain issues).

Daily Grommet stands out because we really do it with heart.  This recent note from one of our partners pretty much says it all:

Check out Monica Burke’s awesome lamps here.  (I gave five as Christmas gifts last month.) Monica’s enthusiasm about Grommet is partly a reaction to our advising her very concretely on how to structure her company for meaningful scale and profitability.

But back to the numbers, here they are, as told by our study of our Grommet partners:

Here is some other new data about our email list, that contributes directly to the success above.

Grommet team party, January 6, 2012

The Boston-based Grommet team happily kicked off the New Year at Joanne’s house.

By the way, this is not the first time the front of this solid brick house has been broadcast online…alas, it was on the cover of a dozen online papers when the freak Halloween snowstorm felled a massive ancient tree in Joanne’s front yard.

The only accident at this party occurred whe Joanne’s favorite child (her dog Sydney) helped himself to our cake.  His ghoulish blue mouth clued her in before the team arrived.  (We just ate around the gashes.  Making do–in true startup fashion)

Even at a party, we tend to be testing Grommets.  In this case, we had set up a tequila toast because JULIA GOT ENGAGED the very night before our party, to her sweetheart Damian.  The man has great timing.  Gadzooks….our first Grommet wedding!

Julia and Damian had their celebratory tequila shots in a very cool upcoming Grommet:  Himalayan Salt Cups made by Spice Labs.  You freeze them ahead of time for the best tequila shot ever.

We have a new software engineer who, in his first three days,  has experienced a tearful good bye party for our first employee Jen, a full-team birthday celebration, and a Tequila Shots/CakeWrecks party.  Hmmm, what will we spring on him next week?

As a mother, I have only one annual over the top activity.  It’s in the form of an exuberant advent calendar.  Shameless bribery?  Perhaps.  Guilt-reducing?  Check.  As much for me as for my sons?  Definitely.

But its appearance can be deceiving.  The 24 little gifts I package up and hang from our kitchen light fixture are not exactly iTunes cards, electronics, or valuable baubles.  They shade a little more towards Morticia Adams.  Things like little skulls and antique pathology slides.  I’ve described my sons’(decidedly mixed) reactions to these things before, in this older post.

A couple times, I’ve tried to give the whole thing up, but the natives revolted.  This sealed my freedom to go “weird.”

OK, they already know “weird” because they grew up with me.  But in the face of all the holiday sparkles, I like to share my belief that treasures are not always new, pretty, or valuable.  They only have to capture your eyes, heart, or sense of humor.  Below is a sampling of the ones they’ll be getting this year.  (And since the kids don’t read my blog, no surprises are spoiled.)

Glass slides of WW2 aircraft.

Strange little vaguely Egyptian or Cambodian beads.  I hope no one thinks they are edible.

Big tall glass pipettes.  Yes, these will kick around my house forever.  They will start on the kitchen table, until I move them to the boys’s rooms.  Then they will get stuffed in various corners.  Then one will roll off a desk and break.  One will get lost.  And the third one will somehow mean something to one of the boys and it will end up on display or in a piece of art.  I’m in it for that one.

Seaweed.  One of my boys asks for this. The other two will twist up their faces in disgust and give their packages to the happy one.Antique dental molds.  This, my friends, is the main event.  It will inspire the “Nightmare on Dane Road” discussions with a future therapist.

This is not so bad.  Honey cones from the Netherlands.  When I was having my annual stress out November moment over finding 24 gifts, I happened to have a little fit in front of a friend who was travelling to Amsterdam.  He brought these back to help me cover one of the 24. Sweet!

I would not even want to sample this drink, but I bet one of my three guys will love it.  Probably the seaweed guy.  The one who gets H-Mart gift certificates for his birthday.

Just what is “Brown Mixture” anyway?  Of course shaking it makes all the difference.These are kind of sweet.  The little bird “perches” (or impaling implements, depending on your sensibility)  are paper scrolls you can pull out from under the tiny Tweety birds.  I did, and wrote nice “mom” messages on them.  But then I decided to get fancy and color the birds with felt pens and I pretty much destroyed them.  Not on purpose.  I wasn’t going for weird at all–but I got it–by Golly!

There are always some kitchy foods.  This is not antique.  Antique kitchy foods would just be disgusting.  And I suppose the “rainforest chicle” ingredient would be a good clue that these are VERY 2011.  Yes Mr. Glee, I will now buy your gum because I am also being a virtuous environmentalist saving tropical eco-systems when I blow these bubbles.

I do include some tasty treats too.  Locally produced or treasures from my travels, when I am enough on the ball to remember to collect them throughout the year.  Which is pretty much never.  The reality is I might have a maximum of five Advent items collected before November, and then I go on a crazy kamikaze quest for a couple weeks.  (See Dutch honey cones above.  Having fits in front of kind friends helps.)

This is just plain sweet.  I always seem to have some kind of nest or egg theme for one of the days.  My source for many of the non-food items is called “Nesting”…so there is no shortage of aviary-type items.

There is always at least one gift that features the boys’initials.  These are some kind of metallic letter decals.  Very Archie and Veronica.

These teeny tiny books are so old and brittle that the Rudyard Kipling (Original Mr. Weird) one I opened to make the photo almost broke in half.

OK so the Advent is up earlier than ever.  (Pat on back for OTT Mom)  And what am I hearing,?  Ooohs and ahhs and little sprinkling of excited clapping?  Uh… no.  It is:  “Mommmmmm.  Why did you go all earthy and Prius-driving on us?”  Browns?  Greens?  This looks like mud.  Where is the red?  Where are our old cool packages?  This is not Christmassy at all.  It is depressing.”

See below, at what I did for too many years in a row, carefully saving and reusing the packages.  I was sick of it.  But I guess I am still failing massively on the “teach weird” front.  They want red and sparkles.  Grrrrr.

Some post Christmas additions:

• I hadn’t noticed this when I selected it, but the main ingredient in Brown Mixture is…opium!  Always a popular gift from a mother to son.
• When the boys opened the pipettes one commented “Why did you give us pipettes?”  The other boy wryly commented, “Aren’t we beyond asking why?”
• The seaweed went down exactly as predicted.

I saw a 3-D printer project I loved a couple days ago.  I’m not the only one coveting this printer.  This project was funded in a crazy-fast 45 minutes!  And it’s not backed by chump change.  We are talking $157K in five days, against an initial goal of $25K.  The higher level backers get a fully-assembled and calibrated 3-D printer out of the project.

Having a 3-D printer in every home is now getting one step closer to reality, thanks to the people who invested in this project.

I’d love to have this in our office.  Hint. Hint.    We’d learn a lot about the tools available to our Grommet partners, and maybe even be able to help them out with fabricating a prototype or two.

In that vein, I was recently swapping “great backer” stories with another entrepreneur.  He’d been delighted when one of his investors flew him in a private plane to the Nantucket Conference.  Anything that can reduce road warrior wear and tear is better than chocolates or champagne.  (I’d had a similar investor “gift” of a jet taxi ride, and also loved it.)

One of our investors actually topped my private plane ride experience two days ago when he personally gave me a few more productive hours at my desk.  How? I was whining to him about my long to-do list for the short Thanksgiving week.  He pushed me to think about what I could “outsource.”   And then he became investor-of-the-year by actually offering to make the five pie crusts I had to get done!  He did it.  The pies came out great.  And I got a lot more work done that day.

So, from plane rides to pie crusts, there is no end to what a committed investor can contribute to a start-up.

I’d love to hear what other great investors have done for their portfolio companies.

Heather Ainsworth photo, for the New York Times

The New York Times reports today that  “A Town in New York Creates Its Own Department Store.”  In Saranac Lake, a picturesque Adirondacks town, the 5,000 residents  were watching their downtown steadily decline after the Ames department store went out of business.  It got so bad that they had to drive 50 miles for a pair of underwear.

A proposed WalMart created a debate about the direction of the community.  Some just wanted to get a pair of socks conveniently, and some were worried about the WalMart’s threat to the remaining local retail.  So rather than just block WalMart or do nothing (like most towns do), these people collectively invested $500,000 to build their own department store!

The article states:  “Think of it as the retail equivalent of the Green Bay Packers — a department store owned by its customers that will not pick up and leave when a better opportunity comes along or a corporate parent takes on too much debt.”

“Community-owned stores are fairly common in Britain, and not unfamiliar in the American West, where remote towns with dwindling populations find it hard to attract or keep businesses. But such stores are almost unknown on the densely populated East Coast. The Saranac Lake Community Store is the first in New York State, its organizers say, and communities in states from Maine to Vermont are watching it closely.”

Opening day for The Community Store. Photo by Heather Ainsworth for the New York Times

Here’s my favorite quote:

“It drives me crazy when people criticize how our system works, but they don’t actually go out and try anything,” says Ed Pitts, a lawyer from Syracuse who along with his wife, Meredith Leonard, is a frequent visitor to the area and has invested in the store. “This is more authentic capitalism.”

Local retail matters.  I wrote a post about this a year ago: Why you are not a sap for buying high priced milk.  Yet, I hadn’t imagined a town taking the bull by the horns quite so directly. It’s inspiring.