October 2009
Fake it til you make it: 10 ways to make your business appear bigger than it is
“Being perceived as professional by outsiders is a common challenge for small businesses. Many startups reach a stage where meeting clients in cafes no longer cuts it. Here are 10 simple ways that your company can make itself look bigger it is.” Read on
Rowena Murray Australian Anthill
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Rebooting Remo
His heroes are graphic designers, global thinkers and big design-driven brands like Apple and IKEA “and authentic brands like Coopers”. In the 1980s he started a cult following with a shop that went from boom to bust and back. Remo Giuffré talks with Peter Salhani about reinventing an iconic corner store as an online global community.
A missing piece of Sydney’s retail history has been resurrected. In July this year, REMO General Store opened the doors to a new ‘kiosk’ in Bondi, 14 years after the iconic Sydney store closed its doors. REMO has been back with an online Global Community General Store since 2003, but the kiosk signals the return of something special.
Like our very own Mr Magoriam, Giuffré curated a wonderful emporium in the old Gowings building on Oxford Street from 1988 to 1996 selling the classic, kooky and the everyday. From Fortune Teller Miracle Fish and Fisher Space Pens to Cuisenaire Rods and Cornishware mugs – everything had a sense of humour, nostalgia or inventiveness to it. “People didn’t really need anything we sold,” says Giuffré, “but they connected to the objects through the stories they told. They were just things that people loved. Our idea of an old General Store was a place where people would come not just to buy things – a bit of everything – but to feel connected to the shopkeeper and one another; a place where they check the noticeboard, have a cup of coffee, collect the mail, it’s got a kind of cosy community feel to it.”
Clearly there was more to it than just stuff – the store had a little beatnik café and a working photo booth. Its mail-order catalogues (designed by Giuffré and graphic designer Aivi Juske) became collectors items and won design awards. Responding to the burgeoning local design scene, Giuffré opened the Pacific Design Source for the Japanese department store Seibu, representing local crafts and design talent like Robert Foster of FINK. Between the shop and the catalogues, REMO touched tens of thousands, but in hindsight Giuffré says it was probably too much too soon. In 1995 the business went into voluntary administration and the shop was shut.
“No amount of training prepares you for the sheer terror and chaos of a fast-growing small business,” says Giuffré, who had previously worked as a lawyer in Sydney, before moving to New York to do an MBA at Columbia University. It was here that the seeds for the business had been sown. Giuffré is a compulsive doodler and likes to draw complex relationships and business models using arrows, interconnecting circles and naïve stick-figures. In New York he was drawn to the advertising artwork of Tibor Kalman, the late graphic designer and former editor in chief of Colors magazine.
“The aesthetics and intelligence and sensibility really resonated with me and I thought I had to meet him. We connected and liked each other…I remember he had this little fortune-telling miracle fish lying around in his office, so did my friend Tucker Viemesiter [co-founder of Smart design]. I realised there was like a secret society of people who find these graphic images appealing. There were a few such things and people and ideas that I felt a magnetism towards. I was struggling at the time to work out how to build a life around my affinity with those things and I wondered whether I aggregated all that stuff I was passionate about into a retail space, whether other people would like it too.” They did, and even when the business closed, there was an outpouring of support.
After that, Giuffré moved with his wife Melanie and daughter Lola to the US and reinvented himself as a brand strategist with the global innovation company Frog Design. “There weren’t really any brand strategists then. My idea was to bring a strategic focus to branding in a holistic way. Also, I was secretly thinking about how to reboot REMO General Store without any money.”
The Internet was the answer. In 1994, REMO posted its first online brochure, and this remained online, though it offered no merchandise. By 2000 it had become a gathering of people who registered and voted for products they would like to buy…if they could. “It demonstrated to us the power of the brand we’d built – here was a retail website not selling anything, but with thousands of people registering. It made me think about how we could scale that alchemy, that loyalty, to a global audience using technology.”
With renewed belief in the business, Giuffré and family (which now included youngest son, Roman) returned to Sydney in 2001. By 2003, Remo and Melanie had launched “REMO for the 21st century” as an online retail community dubbed the Global Community General Store. The old favourite merchandise is there, expanding all the time, but does it deliver the same warm fuzzies as the shop?
“To me, the Internet can be far less impersonal than a shop, because there, people walk in, put their money down and leave, and you don’t know who they are (unless it’s a country town). Online you digitally know who everybody is – and you can program warmth and personality into the system.” Key to building loyalty online is communication: “Just be direct and human with your customers. Customer profiles, feedback loops, open forums and blogging are some of the tactics for that, but it comes down to respect. The higher level thing is to engage customers in a peer to peer dialogue that’s a collaborative conversation.”
Those customer conversations are now the major source of new REMO product: “We have a very involved global network of customers and that’s the development engine for the business.” And the engine is ticking along nicely. The new kiosk – a corner store on Bondi Road – is set to expand into the shop next door, though it won’t replicate the REMO of old. “We learnt not be so literal about what we were doing – we were sending ourselves broke selling things that were ubiquitously available – trying to fill product lines we thought a general store should sell. Now we just look at unique products and then figure out where they fit into the mix. It’s not so much a ‘general store’, but a store that sells general things, more of a metaphor for a general store. Curation this way is a lot more rewarding.”
As well as enjoying bringing REMO back to life, Giuffré is also bringing TED talks to Australia. He was first invited to TED (ideas worth spreading) in 1993 by founder Richard Saul Wurman, on the proviso that he supply all the speakers with Remo T-Shirts and attendees with a copy of the award-winning 1991 REMO mail-order catalogue. The search for talent has begun and TEDxSydney is scheduled for May 2010 at Sydney’s Carriageworks. Just as this pied piper has conscripted customers to help expand the product range, Giuffré has assembled a team to help collect inspirational speakers. “I’m very naturally a curator of things, but curating people of this calibre is quite another thing. It’s a huge challenge, but I’ve got great people helping – so it’s going to be fantastic – and that’s the joy of it.”
What advice does he have for designers or those in the business of design? “Persist and be passionate about what you do. Financial rewards are a byproduct, but you need to be enjoying the process for the whole endeavour to be worthwhile.” On our last meeting Giuffré is cutting giant decals into digital numbers for the Bondi window display – a count-down to REMO’s 21st birthday sale. Happy birthday and welcome back.
By Peter Salhani
Images courtesy of REMO General Store.
© Peter Salhani, 2009. All rights reserved.
