Make sure you see the wood for the trees
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Sometimes we kid ourselves about how much we know. I’ve been working with PlayBlue for a number of years now and you kind of get used to being surrounded by sex products. But we hired a new member of staff last week and he came in on his first day and it reminded me how surreal our working environment is.
He was a little wide-eyed looking at some of the products because no matter how much you think you know or are open minded there are some products that will knock you back on your heels.
With the constant growth at PlayBlue there are always new products arriving which need to be added to the systems and stocked so even still I will find some new thing that surprises me.
Constantly upgrading the products also allows us to see the trends, for instance the rush to chrome and colours that all the manufacturers seem to be running with.
It got me thinking, the vast majority of manufacturers are like sheep chasing after the trend setters. Most do no innovation and just blindly mass produce a copy of what everyone else does. But I think this is true everywhere not just in sex toys, sure isn’t that the basis of the fashion industry. We all operate on auto-pilot some day’s buts it’s important that you break out from this regularly. It’s like when I lived in Sydney in my younger wild days. When I landed I marvelled at the Opera House and the Harbour Bridge and the Rocks and Sydney Harbour, then 4 months later I was daily commuting on a train to North Sydney and I found myself with my head in a newspaper while we crossed the bridge, I didn’t even glance at these beautiful sights.
Well at PlayBlue we hate to get stuck in a rut and following everyone else, don’t get me wrong if a competitor comes up with a great idea we’ll happily take it, improve it and run with it but we won’t follow the industry off a cliff and we won’t stop thinking about our only path to success which is making sure we constantly serve our customers better than anyone else.
I read a quote by Jeff Bezos (Amazon.com Founder) the other day “There are two types of companies one works hard the raise prices the other works hard to lower them…we’re the latter”
Well we’re the latter too.