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Good Pair Days matches wines to shoppers’ palates

Good Pair Days. Branding by Universal Favourite, Australia

Sydney – The digital-first, direct-to-consumer wine service has been relaunched and rebranded with a new focus on personalisation.

Good Pair Days calls itself ‘a wine retail experience built for the Netflix generation’. Specialising in product discovery, the company aims to engage novice wine drinkers and long-time aficionados by mixing expert curation with personal recommendations. Its range of wines are chosen by a team of sommeliers and sourced directly from independent winemakers in a variety of countries.

To identify wines matched to their individual tastes, customers take an initial palate quiz online before choosing three bottles from a list of suggested wines. These are then delivered directly to buyers throughout Australia along with tasting cards, food pairings and recipes. ‘For every bottle we calculate the chances you’ll love it,’ says Beto de Castro Moreira, co-founder and CTO of Good Pair Days. ‘This allows a level of personalisation and customisation for our customers’ tastes that can only be matched in the current market by having a personal sommelier.’

For more changes taking place in the alcohol sector, explore our Food & Drink vertical.

Future objects could be designed by brainwaves

Mind Vases by Studio José de la O

Mexico City – Studio José de la O is experimenting with brainwaves to see how they could be used to design objects.

Mind Vases is a project by the Mexico City-based studio and Japanese company Mirai Innovation Lab, in which participants use brain signals to manipulate a computer-generated model of a vase. The experiment uses a device called Aura, a headset covered with sensors that monitor bio-signals from the brain. Wearing the headgear, individuals are able to modify an existing 3D model of a vase by relaxing or concentrating on different aspects of its shape, height and diameter.

Mind Vases investigates the idea that sophisticated digital interfaces could empower people to design without the need for technical skills. In future, learning a specific craft or software might no longer be necessary in order to design and produce objects. Similarly, we consider how gestural design could democratise coding in our Programmable Realities macrotrend.

Fabscrap is a thrift shop for recycled fabrics

New York – The retailer is making secondary materials accessible to the city’s budding designers and eco-conscious fashion brands.

Located just a block away from the Fashion Institute of Technology, Fabscrap Shop is stocked with a plentiful supply of scraps generated by New York’s continual stream of commercial textile waste. Bringing unused and discarded fabric from 255 fashion brands directly to shoppers, the physical store serves as a reminder of the city’s problem with excessive production.

Previously, consumers and designers were required to sort through materials at Fabscrap’s 4,100-square-feet warehouse in Brooklyn, but the new store makes it even easier for fashion brands and burgeoning designers to use recycled fabrics in their production methods. ‘We are not just selling fabric. We want to educate people about the textile waste situation. If you are just entering the industry, how can you rethink the processes?’ says Camille Tagle, its director of reuse partnerships.

For more on the retail innovators pioneering a circular approach to fashion, read our round-up.

Fabscra, New York

Ikea and National Geographic want to save our sleep

Bedroom Habitats by Ikea and National Geographic, US

Global – The lifestyle and media brands have joined forces to position sleep as an endangered species.

Entitled Bedroom Habitats, the campaign takes inspiration from nature documentaries. The first episode of four features a couple facing the challenge of a small, uncomfortable bed ‘where sleep itself is on the brink of extinction’. The short films each lead viewers to an educational microsite, which offers sleeping tips as well as the ability to ‘shop the solution’ with Ikea products.

With one-in-three Americans not getting enough sleep, Ikea has spent several years focusing on the sleep market and presenting its furniture as an affordable remedy. This is the first time, however, that the retailer has worked with a media brand, and in particular one traditionally associated with global environmental issues such as extinction, ocean waste and climate change.

In an age of anxiety, sleep is also top of the agenda for health and wellness brands hoping to encourage a positive attitude to rest among consumers.

Stat: Duty-free resellers drive the South Korea market

The South Korean duty-free market is experiencing a lucrative boom, with 27% growth in the first quarter of 2019 and sales totalling £4.10bn ($4.95bn, €4.41bn). The growth continues successes recorded in 2018 for South Korea, when the market grew by 35% to more than £14bn ($17bn, €15bn), according to The Moodie Davitt Report. In particular, foreign travellers have become increasingly important as domestic sales fall due to increases in online shopping and a general decline in domestic spending.

One of the main drivers is Chinese travellers, who account for 31.2% of foreign visitors to the country and 76.7% of duty-free sales in South Korea (sources: Korea Tourism Organization, The Moodie Davitt Report). A large proportion of these are individuals, as well as corporate resellers who buy at duty-free prices to sell at a profit in China, with spending per person outpacing the increase in duty-free traffic.

The South Korean market is not the only one changing as a result of changes in Chinese consumption. For more, read our Chinese duty-free market.

Thought-starter: How can designers successfully brand a place?

Droga5’s Chris Chapman on why it is crucial to delve into an area’s past and present, but have a malleable vision for its future.

The Tide, which opened in July on London’s Greenwich Peninsula, is one of the latest examples of place branding – the branding of nations, regions, cities and local neighbourhoods. Fuelled by the financial rewards from attracting tourists, businesses and residents, place branding is an area of design that is growing rapidly – both in terms of investment and as a discipline in its own right. And it has its own particular challenges.

One example of effective place branding is the Meatpacking District, an area of New York with a gritty past but latterly refreshed by a vibrant art, culture, design, fashion, food and technology scene. The clash between the two inspired a powerful piece of branding – with a logo split between two different fonts and using the tagline ‘the new original’ to convey its dynamism and contradictions past and present.

However, the best place brand communications reflect and form the culture of an area – looking into the area’s past, present and having a vision for its future, providing a flexible framework and idea, so the place has room to grow and change.

Read the latest Opinion here.