Originally posted on my Medium on June 14th 2016 -- Original Link Here:
This post was actually supposed to be about “finding YOUR creativity”, but like most things with me, it ended up somewhere else…
The other day I asked myself, “Why are YOU creative?” “How do YOU come up with so many ideas?”
And I think all creativity boils down to just two main factors:
Courage and the type of questions you ask.
Questions
Creativity is really about asking the right kinds of questions, questions that are so open-ended, your mind just wanders into space. Questions to invite curiosity and discovery. I visualize it literally as my mind, floating in space, attaching to things.
For an example, here’s a question I recently thought to myself:
“What if Amazon wanted to localize product fulfillment? What would that look like?”
By no means am I an expert on creativity or how the mind works, but “What if …. (this)?” has always served me well in Life. Open ended questions really help you suspend your judgment and free your mind from constraints, which mostly arise out of trained thought behaviors.
Courage
You have to be courageous enough to let whatever arise, arise. What I learned in Improv is that you have be fearless, you have to, and this is my strong point, have no boundaries. In Improv, I make fun of everybody, and everything. Literally every object, and every human interaction has a comedic element to it, you just have to tease it out. No limits, no boundaries, and no fear allow you to be truly FREE to follow whatever your heart and your mind reveal to you. Just let it flow.
As my mind is drifting here and there, I pick up little clues of how the system would look.
Here’s how I think it would look if Amazon wanted to have orders filled on a local level to shorten up delivery times.
A customer would log on to Amazon.com or the app, they’d find their products they were looking for and then check out and pay. So this looks like any other Amazon order right? RIGHT!
Here’s what would go on in the background though.
- Amazon’s servers would show the customer products offered only by Amazon merchants located nearby (first offer would obviously be the closest to the customer).
- Once payment is received, local merchant receives order and pulls product from their shelves to either ship or deliver immediately.
Neither Amazon nor Ebay are doing this, but a new entrant on the scene can definitely pull this off. In fact, an Indian Startup by the name of SnapDeal currently does this in India. It’s a marvelous idea that has at it’s core, customer service.
SnapDeal Localized Delivery
The entire emphasis in this system is SPEED!!!
How quickly can you get your customer their goods? Super quick if you have the balls to decentralize fulfillment. A true Marketplace has one **sole job — bring buyers and sellers together— to be a Middleman. **This is my philosophy and it has been for years now, and I got it from one of my favorite films of all time, the Matthew Vaughn directed “Layer Cake”.
In it, there’s a scene that has stayed with me for Life. I’ve embedded that scene below for reference, but I highly recommend watching the film in it’s entirety. It’s Amazing and I love it.
Getting back to the idea of Localized Product Fulfillment: I think this system can be the saving grace for department stores here in America. If you think about it, department stores are really just massive warehouses of products… not really much else other than a few shiny displays. With the growing reliance on E-Commerce coupled with the changing consumer discovery process(among other variables), the market is ripe for opportunity. You see, younger consumers don’t stroll around stores, they scroll to discover things. They scroll to discover the day’s news, what their friends are up to, what products people are using, and everything in between.
They don’t Stroll, They Scroll
The point I want to make is that Stores need to GET PRODUCTS IN FRONT OF THEIR CUSTOMERS!!! Currently, there aren’t many internet products that provide tools for these stores to integrate into where the eyes of the consumer are, that also allow consumers to purchase instantly. This is what Givengi will provide — tools for stores to get in front of their customers — to meet the consumer where they already are. I think that’s a powerful idea and I look forward to implementing systems to help bring the market to that point.
If you know of any up and coming E-commerce ideas/startups, let me know, I’m always looking for cool new things: kelly (at) givengi.com