City of Melbourne’s over-arching vision for the annual Melbourne Spring Fashion Week is to position Melbourne as Australia’s premier fashion destination, and have a real economic impact by driving increased sales for retailers in the city.

In partnering with IBM for the second year the intention was to extend the impact of the event beyond the week and to drive ticket sales and in turn sales by tapping the social currency of influencers.

Melbourne Spring Fashion Week is unusual in fashion shows in that everything on the runways can be bought at stores in the city. This contrasts to the traditional role of fashion shows as breaking new fashion, which may not be available for many months after it is launched.

Melbourne Spring Fashion Week used IBM Social Media Analytics on Twitter and Instagram to uncover the top 50 relevant fashion influencers, used Watson Personality Insights to work out how best to approach them, and invited them to be MSFW “insiders”, asking them what content would be most useful to them.

Ticket sales have been considerably higher than last year, with 4 of the events sold out.

The initiative is particularly interesting in showing how social analytics and engagement can help drive shoppers into shopping centers and physical stores.

While individual stores can do a great deal to merge their digital, social and physical engagement, the real power comes in bringing people to a shopping center or area, or even an entire city center.

All shopping is becoming social. Retail strategies for merging physical and digital are best envisaged and implemented on a large scale, tapping collaboration and activating buyers.

Image credit: Eva Rinaldi

If consumers are smarter, they are expressing it with not just increased expectations, but an increasingly active expression of their displeasure if expectations are not met.

The following chart, provided to me by IBM in response to a request for more detailed information, shows that in all major countries advocates – those who actively advocate for their primary retailer – have decreased, while antagonists – those who would actively discredit their retailer – have increased.

Source: IBM

In fact from 2012 to 2014, advocacy rates in Australia have declined from 34% to 10%, while antagonism has increased from 12% to 37%. Sobering statistics for retailers.

Increased expectations are supported by the shift to online and mobile buying. The pace of the shift to online buying is highest for the most expensive goods.

Where there is trust, customers are more willing to share information with retailers than before. However this is happening in conjunction with heightened expectations, meaning that they will only continue to do so if that information is used to create clear value for them.

And it is clear that consumers are want to be in control. They understand the issues and while they will share information if there is trust, their expectations include personal control.

In summary, people are less likely to actively support retailers and more likely to attack them in increasingly public forums such as social media.

However trust can still grow, but it will only create value for retailers if it first creates real value for their customers.

The Strand is the best possible location for her in Sydney, with its classic Victorian architecture and rosta of leading Australian designers such as Akira, Alex Perry, Scanlan Theodore and sass & bide.

The Strand is producing a series of videos titled We Are The Makers, featuring the stores in the arcade. Below is the video of Victoria, which in less than 2 minutes successfully captures some of the vitality and creativity that is expressed in her jewellery. A very nice write-up of the interview is also available.

Over the last few years I have been drawn increasingly into the future of retail, not least due to the degree of uncertainty in the industry.

In my keynote next week at the International Retail Congress in Lima, Peru I will be sharing some of my latest insights, while recent work has included working with a large supermarket chain with their suppliers, a US pharmacy/ convenience store in developing future-oriented strategies, and fashion retailers in exploring shifts in the industry.

One of the key issues that will drive the future of retail is uniqueness. In many retail sectors it is very difficult to have unique elements to their offer, however it can be a critical differentiator. In sectors where offerings truly are unique, through design, on-premises craftmanship, and truly personal service, that needs to be made as visible as possible.

This is why the Strand’s video series is so apt, focusing on and capturing the uniqueness of the artisans in the arcade, including restauranteurs and shoe craftspeople.

Have a look at the video. You will catch a glimpse of how unique personality and creativity is being made available in a world in which so much is exactly the same.

Click on the image to see a video of my interview.

We discussed emerging consumer technology trends, shifts in retail, and the idea of “self-creation”, which was one of my 14 themes in our 2014: Crunch Time report.

As I wrote in the report about the theme:

This is one of the most fundamental issues of our time. Whether we realize it or not, our volition is shaping our future.

The job of ethicist will – or at least certainly should – be one of the fastest growing domains of work. It is not easy to grapple with the implications of the power we have at our disposal, yet we must.

When we look back and see who we have become, we will discover our wisdom – or lack of it.

It was a fascinating discussion, which was definitely useful as I develop my forthcoming Future of Retail framework. (Still working on it, I don’t know when it will be ready for the public, more later.)

Michael Fox, founder of the highly innovative and successful Shoes of Prey, spoke about some of what they envisage for the future of retail.

One of their internal initiatives is an app they dub “Shoezam”, which acts like Shazam in that people can take an image of a shoe they like in the street, which the app analyzes so that users can immediately order that shoe for themselves.

Michael said that the team is working on the app in background mode, for example during in-house hackathons, as it is a challenging problem and will take some time to develop an app that can extract the subtleties of the shoe it is looking at.

Of course there is a major difference to Shazam. In Shazam users that hear a song and like it can identify it in order to buy the song, with the creators of the music getting paid (hopefully).

However Shoezam – as I understand it – won’t identify the actual shoe it is looking at so that users can order the same shoe by the same maker. It identifies the characteristics of the shoe so they can be duplicated, or approximated as closely as possible, in the Shoes of Prey custom shoe creation process.

The implications of this are profound.

With 3D printing and other customized manufacturing techniques, apps that allow the essence of items to be captured through images will mean that anything can be duplicated virtually at will.

What will this mean for designers?

In a world of open information flows and inexpensive manufacturing all recognized designers are already getting copied wholesale. Yet this may be miniscule compared with what is coming.

Of course recognition technologies used in the app and the manufacturing processes will not be fabulous for some time to come. Customers will only be getting an approximation of the original.

Over time the quality will improve, gradually and surely.

Yet even at the apogee of replicating technologies, there will of course be a premium for buying original designer clothes and objects, for many reasons. It will give prestige and status to have originals, people will prefer to reward designers, and there will always be some quality difference. Quality will be truly to the fore.

But will fashion designers, among others, see their earnings plummet, as they have for many musicians?

I suspect the best will do very well indeed, even in a world of possibly wholesale replication. But there are many unknowns.

We have to recognize that these replication technologies are inevitable. And one of the issues we need to focus on is that the creators – rather than the copiers – must be sufficiently rewarded for the value they create.

It described how a couple had bought their dream home after finding it on the Facebook page of a real estate agent. They arranged to inspect it immediately after it appeared on the page and bought it the next day, before the for-sale sign had been put up in the yard.

The journalist writing the article called me for some comments and included this at the end of the piece:

Social-media expert Ross Dawson said Facebook had enormous potential, but many real estate agent’s efforts were “terrible”. “They just don’t understand it. It’s a completely different mentality. They just want to sell,” Mr Dawson said.

This is true, but I think what was more interesting was the rest of what I said to the journalist, which wasn’t quoted in the article.

Social media is a massive opportunity for real estate agents, which remains largely untapped.

Buying houses is an intrinsically social activity.

When you move somewhere, you are moving into a community as much as to a location. You want to know who lives there, and you would like to know if any of your friends is connected into that community. Certainly once you move there you want to connect into local activities and find like-minded people.

Real estate agents are almost always focused on a few suburbs or a small geographical area. They should be connected to the other businesses and retailers in that area, and absolutely should support them as much as possible.

Their business depends on a thriving community. Certainly their social media activities should be significantly focused on connecting to and supporting local businesses.

The starting point for any social media engagement is to give genuine value to the community. Inevitably value comes back.

The approach of using social media simply to sell – which is unfortunately still the norm in real estate, financial advice, and other high-value personal services – will never get very far. In actively seeking to add value to the local community, by supporting businesses, promoting local events, providing people opportunities to meet and connect, and highlighting local issues, real estate agents can bring themselves to the center of the local community.

Real estate should be a relationship business, and unfortunately it often is not. When people are ready to sell their property, they should know immediately who they will ask to help them. That will be someone who is connected into the community, helping and adding value, being visible very likely through their highly local social media engagement.

Even if someone does resort to online searches to find the best local real estate agent, almost inevitably the agent with the strongest social media presence will come up on top.

In short, social media is an enormous opportunity for real estate agents. Hopefully many more than have so far will seize that opportunity to create value for themselves and others.

Different issues are raised by each of these stories, showing the breadth of the impact of 3D printing. I have made brief comments under each story.

Anyone looking at the future must keep abreast of the growing scope of capabilities of 3D printing and what it could mean for industries and society.

First completely 3D-printed gun shown

From Forbes (includes pictures):

Early next week, Wilson, a 25-year University of Texas law student and founder of the non-profit group Defense Distributed, plans to release the 3D-printable CAD files for a gun he calls “the Liberator.”
…
All sixteen pieces of the Liberator prototype were printed in ABS plastic with a Dimension SST printer from 3D printing company Stratasys, with the exception of a single nail that’s used as a firing pin. The gun is designed to fire standard handgun rounds, using interchangeable barrels for different calibers of ammunition.

Technically, Defense Distributed’s gun has one other non-printed component: the group added a six ounce chunk of steel into the body to make it detectable by metal detectors in order to comply with the Undetectable Firearms Act. In March, the group also obtained a federal firearms license, making it a legal gun manufacturer.

Of course, Defcad’s users may not adhere to so many rules. Once the file is online, anyone will be able to download and print the gun in the privacy of their garage, legally or not, with no serial number, background check, or other regulatory hurdles. “You can print a lethal device,” Wilson told me last summer. “It’s kind of scary, but that’s what we’re aiming to show.”

3D printing of guns is, among other things, part of a broader trend of lack of control of technology and weapons. How far this goes could have a massive impact on our future safety.

Australian 3D printers on track to print body parts

From ABC (includes video):

Australian scientists say they have found a way to grow human body parts using 3D printing technology.

The University of Wollongong’s Centre for Electromaterials Science is opening a research unit at Melbourne’s St Vincent’s Hospital where 3D printing will be used to reproduce tissue material.

The bio-fabrication unit scientists have already begun animal trials to reproduce skin, cartilage, arteries and heart valves.

“It’s possible to print devices and structures that can be implanted in human bodies, and these devices can have cells grown on them so that bodily functions can be replicated on these very tiny devices,” he said.

“In the future, these sorts of devices will be able to recreate parts of people’s joints and bones, conceivably, in the future, even organs.”

There is a long way to go on this, however it appears highly feasible that we will be able to print out individualized body organs, potentially substantially increasing average life span.

Printable bionic ear that hears radio as well as audio frequencies

From Phys.org:

Scientists at Princeton University used off-the-shelf printing tools to create a functional ear that can “hear” radio frequencies far beyond the range of normal human capability.

The researchers’ primary purpose was to explore an efficient and versatile means to merge electronics with tissue. The scientists used 3D printing of cells and nanoparticles followed by cell culture to combine a small coil antenna with cartilage, creating what they term a bionic ear.
…
Ear reconstruction “remains one of the most difficult problems in the field of plastic and reconstructive surgery,” they wrote.

To solve the problem, the team turned to a manufacturing approach called 3D printing. These printers use computer-assisted design to conceive of objects as arrays of thin slices. The printer then deposits layers of a variety of materials – ranging from plastic to cells – to build up a finished product. Proponents say additive manufacturing promises to revolutionize home industries by allowing small teams or individuals to create work that could previously only be done by factories.

Creating organs using 3D printers is a recent advance; several groups have reported using the technology for this purpose in the past few months. But this is the first time that researchers have demonstrated that 3D printing is a convenient strategy to interweave tissue with electronics.

As we are able to manufacture body organs we will readily be able to both incorporate and extend human capabilities, making the first cyborgs transplant recipients who choose to upgrade.

Now You Can Buy 3D Printers From Staples

From Mashable:

Staples just became a little more cutting edge.

The office supply chain announced Friday that it is now selling 3D printers through its website and will start selling 3D printers in select stores by the end of next month. Staples is touting itself as the first “major U.S. retailer” to sell the product.

Staples, which announced in November that it planned to bring the devices to its European stores, will be selling the Cube 3D Printer from 3D Systems for $1,299. The printer has built-in WiFi and comes with more than two dozen 3D design templates, with more available to download online. Staples will also sell accessories for the 3D printers like plastic cartridge refills.

This move makes 3D printing on the verge of mainstream. It is still too expensive for most people, yet if we track the cost of home printers over the last couple of decades, we can readily envisage 3D printers in many and then most homes over the next decade and a bit.