marketing and branding

sometimes it just happens

Today’s picture has nothing to do with the pre-spring feelings that we are treated with, here in Zurich. It just happened. I made it in oil, a little bit following the Bob Ross technique, wet in wet. If you wonder who Bob Ross was: Here’s a picture in a newsweek article. After a crazy day in the factory, with felt hundred mails about shipments from here to there and the other way round, I hit the canvas and started with nothing and ended up with this.

To me, it is the moon shining through heavy rain clouds over a rough sea.

Anyway: I just wanted to share this with you because the picture just happened. At some point, I saw the clouds and the sea and followed the pattern and just finished it. The same is true in my business life. Sometimes, I am working there on a scent or an idea for a set or something else and suddenly, without me doing much, there’s a line appearing, a thought, and suddenly I know what I have to do. Often, it does not work out, really, and while thinking it through the glorious plan shatters and falls apart because it is not feasible. Sometimes, I follow it to the end and have to inform my business partners about it.

Quite often they do not like it, because it is different. Mostly, I have to argue like “I have the gut feeling that this is going to work”. Because of this and because I just HAVE to do it, I’ll do it and then we see what’s gonna happen and if it fails we change.

One of the plans for 2016 wants me to start selling in the US on Amazon. Here in Europe, there is something suspicious about selling on Amazon, although we all buy on Amazon: It feels a bit like real niche should not be sold on Amazon.

But here’s the thing: I often feel that many of my perfume loving friends are on Facebook where they meet friends, share some pictures on another platform or two where they find beauty and fun, and they are on Amazon where they shop. And I am convinced that the longer the more, the internet is for many this, and that the longer the more we all will not need to leave amazon and facebook etc. and that these platforms cover the internet and the 90% of the time we spend on the “internet”.

And, I think, one needs to be there where your clients are.

And then: I have the gut feeling that this is going to work.