The Official Fluid Blog

Fluid is pleased to announce the launch of a new site design for Diapers.com. The new site, designed by the Fluid team, also leverages the Fluid Experience merchandising suite to create a compelling brand and shopping experience. The redesign enables Diapers.com to scale into thousands of new products while continuing to provide a convenient, helpful and fun place to shop for moms and dads of young children.
You can read more about the site in this article on Internet Retailer.

Fluid client Diapers.com (a fresh new redesign will be launching soon) has been running a great little television ad capitalizing on election fever. Needless to say, it takes potty humor to the max. No word yet on whether an investment in traditional TV media like this is returning a positive ROI, but it is starting to get some mentions in the blogosphere and some momentum on You Tube. Take a look:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3ofap_vT_Q

Turns out RBKCustom.com has a loyal customer in comedian Seth Rogen. He’s got several pairs of custom Reebok’s and is a big fan of the text personalization feature. As hilariously described in a recent appearance on Conan O’ Brien he has a particular knack for getting creative with the offensive language filter. When Fluid built the site we spent a lot of time on realtime, true-to-life visualization of the sneaker personalization to ensure end-users see exactly what they are getting as they design their shoes. We also spent a lot of time brainstorming the dirty words list. Kudos to Mr. Rogen for sneaking a few by!

You can see the Conan bit here:

http://www.nbc.com/Late_Night_with_Conan_O%27Brien/video/episodes.shtml

Choose the August 7th episode and then jump to 24:50.
You can also read about it in a few places:

Extract:
http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2008/07/seth_rogen_unlikely_spokesman.html

Full quote appears in context on page 2 here:
http://www.elle.com/featurefullstory/14098/seth-rogen-movies-gossip-articles-pineapple-express.html

At Fluid we believe (passionately) in the intermingling of merging of the brand and shopping experience. As a practical matter, this consists of blurring the line between content and commerce so shoppers are not forced to choose between one or the other, but instead have a great experience that (hopefully) leads to a transaction.

Quite aside from the realities of doing this in a seamless manner, there are often organizational issues at play (brand content is often owned by marketing and commerce is owned by either consumer direct or the ecommerce team). But we believe strongly that this convergence is not only good for retailers but is good for consumers, allowing them to navigate to their interests without being blocked by some artificial, vendor created, division.

Thus, the something I saw today really caught my attention.

I am probably not alone in viewing CNN as a content-focused company. So you can imagine my surprise when I saw an icon for a t-shirt next to the news story I was reading. See the screen grab below:

Certainly they couldn’t be featuring apparel on their site?!?! Time Warner is a media company!

Further investigation, as shown below, pretty clearly shows that selling t-shirts is exactly their intention.

Personally, I think this is a brilliant move. Quite aside from the trend toward embracing the ironic in apparel, it should be a wake up call to retailers everywhere: The companies that engage their shoppers, whether with content or product, will carry the day. The line between content providers and retailers is getting fuzzier every day. Given the current upheaval in the media world, if you don’t believe the fashion magazines you advertise in now will be selling your competitors’ goods in the relatively near future you are in for quite a rude awakening.

Of course you can’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. If you are a company that makes shoes, your business isn’t going to be based upon writing critiques of Sarah Jessica Parker’s latest pair of  Manolo Blahnik’s over night. But it does encourage you seriously consider to how you can draw shoppers into your store, whether it be through rich interactivity or content, and engage them with your products.

Interesting times we work in…

Today American Airlines announced it would start charging passengers to check baggage.

Read the News

While other company’s businesses are always complex and I try not to judge others, this strikes me as an extreme example of making a problem and making it worse. Traditional carriers like United and American are hemorrhaging money hand over fist while upstarts like Southwest, Jet Blue and Virgin America take market share from them. Their response? Start charging for things that used to be free (food, now bags) while instituting policies that make flying their airlines more unpleasant (crowded cabins just got worse, since everyone will try to carry everything on board). Seems like a recipe for driving customers screaming for the exits.At Fluid we take our responsibility for our customers’ satisfaction seriously and expect to deliver above expectations. It is our sincere hope that when customers are not happy with our delivery rather than charging them more to fix it we offer to increase our delivery to exceed our clients’ needs.

While it is just my opinion, the new policies airlines are instituting to try and squeeze every dime out of customers fly directly in the face of building a long term, successful customer relationship and business.

Hey everyone – Nathan Moody here, Director of Creative Services here at Fluid, Inc. My first post on Flog brings some great news from my recent trip to South by Southwest [SXSW] .

I’m happy to announce that on Sunday, March 12, 2006, Fluid won the SXSW 2006 Web Award in the Business: For Profit category for our work on Timberland.com’s Custom Boot Configurator.

We’re obviously thrilled, and proud to have been recognized by the SXSW judges for creating a usable, fun, and innovative user experience that’s had measurable fiscal success for our client as well (how’s doubling customer conversion sound?). While I accepted the award, the true winners of this award are Fluid’s internal staff that worked on the project: Andrew Sirotnik (Account Manager, C0-Creative Director; Debbie Lefkowitz (Project Manager); Paul Spitzer, Darren David, and Ameet Mehta (Engineers); Brian Cherne (Information Architect); and Marty Kenney, Tom Hirashima and Jesse Gerstein (Interactive Media Engineers). I was the Visual Designer and Co-Creative Director.

We’d also like to thank our client, Timberland, for having the faith in us to take their product offering to the next level. Thanks especially to Troy Brown, Jill Areson-Perkins, and Joshua Deane at Timberland for their help, trust and deep collaboration on this project.

For more information, visit Timberland.com’s Custom Boot Configurator or read our case study on Fluid.com.

I decided to take a bit of time this morning and update to Mozilla Firefox 1.5 and took a look at the latest and greatest extensions. Here is my personal list of must-have extensions for both productivity and fun.

• Foxpose View all of your tabs in one window like in OSX Exposé. Fun!
• Web developer Toolbar The defacto standard plugin if you do any web development.
• IE Tab Open Internet Explorer within a Firefox tab. Very useful for cross-browser testing.
• Dictionary Tooltip Double-click a word to get a popup dictionary definition.
• Foxytunes Control your music apps via your browser toolbar.

Have fun!