66. eliminate raise
table seated
restaurant
no kitchen
− fitness,
we
areas, s t
pa
reduce create
✚
67. eliminate raise
table seated
restaurant
no kitchen
− fitness,
we
areas, s t
pa
reduce create
price
room
space
✚
check-in concierge, etc.
process
68. eliminate raise
table seated bed &
restaurant pillows
n
rn desig
moderniture
no kitchen
− fitness,
fu
we living room
areas, s t atmosphere
pa
reduce create
price
room
space
✚
check-in concierge, etc.
process
69. eliminate raise
table seated bed &
restaurant pillows
n
rn desig
moderniture
no kitchen
− fitness,
fu
we living room
areas, s t atmosphere
pa
reduce create
price free
room free Video-o
n
space WiFi Demand -
✚
check-in concierge, etc.
process
70. eliminate raise
table seated bed &
restaurant pillows
n
rn desig
moderniture
no kitchen
− fitness,
fu
we living room
areas, s t luxury in mid- atmosphere
pa
segment
reduce create
price free
room free Video-o
n
space WiFi Demand -
✚
check-in concierge, etc.
process
103. ?
So how does one come
up with successful
business models?
Editor's Notes
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The iPod is a portable media player designed and marketed by Apple and launched on October 23, 2001.\n\nOpening as the iTunes Music Store on April 28, 2003, with over 200,000 items to purchase\n
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originally released in 2007\n\nThird-party applications are available from the App Store, which launched in mid-2008\n
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http://www.corpus-e.com/grafix/lightbeam_screenshot_03.png \n\nFinancial Times March 7 2007\nThe Left® Shoe company is a good example of a manufacturer who supplies their customers with a product, and also delivers a service because of process. The company provides custom footwear over the internet. The process begins with a detailed scan of the client’s feet. This must take place at a participating dealer, currently only available in Europe and Asia. Once the details and measurements of the clients feet are entered into the system, the customer can specify desired shoe design, color, leather type, outsole and lining via the website. The shoe is made to order, and the customers “signature”, name and customer number, are imprinted into the right shoe. The custom-made shoes ship 3-weeks from time of order.\nThe shoe that is sure to fit By Peter Marsh\nIf you hate the idea of buying poorly fitting shoes but don’t like shopping, you are just the kind of customer Jarno Fonsen is interested in.\nMr Fonsen runs Pomarfin, a Finland-based shoe producer that is setting up a new line of business offering customised footwear over the internet.\nMr Fonsen’s vision is intriguing. In his plan, shoe shops around the world purchase or rent specialised scanners to measure customers’ feet with great accuracy. The details are passed to Pomarfin’s headquarters in Pomarkku, Finland, then sent to the company’s main shoe factory in Estonia where the footwear is made to specification.\nOnce a person’s details are on file, any further orders are made according to their personal measurements.\nAlthough the internet service – which operates alongside Pomarfin’s mainstream business of making conventional shoes – is still in its early days, the 46-year-old Mr Fonsen is convinced it offers a sound business model for many similar types of Europe-based manufacturers, which see their products becoming less competitive because of high production costs.\n"Offering customised solutions in this way is the way forward, certainly for a shoe manufacturer based in a high-cost region," says Mr Fonsen, who took over as managing director of the family-owned company 13 years ago.\nHe began examining the concept of customised shoes in the late 1990s, and launched his ideas, using the trade name LeftFoot Company, in 2001.\nTechnology development and setting up the service have so far cost Pomarfin about €10m ($13.1m). While some of this has come from cash generated by the company’s conventional shoe activities, Pomarfin has also received an undisclosed financial injection from Helmet Business Mentors, a Helsinki-based venture capital fund, in return for a 35 per cent stake in Pomarfin. The rest is held by Mr Fonsen’s family.\nThe funding is now in place, but Mr Fonsen admits the customisation idea suffered a false start as a result of his trying to do too much too soon. For instance, he has had to scale back the number of stores equipped with foot scanners from about 12 after launch to just seven, of which five are in Finland, one in Osaka, Japan, and another in Kaiserslautern, in Germany.\n"Early on, we did not get the details of the system right. Some customers bought our shoes but often they weren’t happy," he says.\nMr Fonsen reckons he has now sorted out the technical difficulties. "I think we are on course to have a total of 20-30 shops linked to our service within three years," he says. "The places where I think we have a decent potential market outside Finland include Germany, Britain, Sweden and Denmark."\nLast year, about 10 per cent of Pomarfin’s total revenues of €6.5m came from customised shoes. By 2010, Mr Fonsen believes, the customised products could account for as much as half.\nIf this were to happen, Pomarfin would become a much more international business in sales terms. Today its total revenues (including the internet operation) come almost entirely from Finland and other Nordic nations, with Finland accounting for 70 per cent.\nWhat do customers think of the service? Chris Lueb-keman, a director of global foresight at Ove Arup, the UK-based consulting engineers, is impressed.\nMr Luebkeman, who travels the world looking at technological innovation, says the experience of having his feet measured in a shop in Helsinki, then receiving a "wonderful" pair of shoes a few weeks later, was so convincing that he has ordered a second pair.\nRecalling that before mass-produced shoes came along, many forms of footwear were made to measure by the local cobbler, Mr Luebkeman says: "This is a great example of ‘back-to-the-future’." The shoes cost between €180 and €250 retail.\nTeething problems are not unusual for businesses that try out new ideas. Mr Fonsen tackled his with the help of three groups of collaborators around Europe.\nFirst, he enlisted the help of three Finnish software companies – whose identities he declines to disclose – which worked on the crucial links between the shop-based scanning hardware, the telecoms-based internet system and the factory in Estonia where the shoes are made.\n"We needed some specialist help in the electronics side of the system, to make sure all the links in the chain worked properly, and we had to go outside for this," he says. Since the start of the service, Mr Fonsen has replaced the original laser-based scanners used in shoe shops with a new set of equipment based around digital camera technology and made by Corpus.e, a Stuttgart-based high-technology company.\nFinally, Mr Fonsen says he was forced to confront a more fundamental problem with the shoes that Pomarfin was originally trying to sell using the internet service. "Customers outside Finland on the whole did not like the shoes. They had a Finnish style, not a European style," he says.\nWith the assistance of Mazzucato, an Italian shoe design business based near Florence, Pomarfin has re-thought the designs sold through LeftFoot Company. "I am much happier with the style of shoes that we are selling now and I think customers are too," he says.\nEach shoe is made to order by workers in Estonia, where 120 of Pomarfin’s 140 employees are based, with the rest in Finland. Yet while each shoe is unique, its components may be standardised.\n"It would be too expensive to make each shoe as a one-off completely from new," Mr Fonsen says. "So we have found a way to put together the shoe reasonably cost-effectively from a number of basic building blocks in an example of ‘mass customisation’. The customer benefits from getting something that is made just for him."\nUse of the plant in Estonia, where wage costs for shoe production are a third of those in Finland, is a vital part of Pomarfin’s strategy. But even Estonia, where wage costs are gradually rising, is expensive compared with China, where much of the world’s footwear is made. There, the cost of employing someone in a shoe plant are about a fifth of that in Estonia.\nIf Pomarfin can offset its higher cost base by offering something different from the competition, Mr Fonsen thinks it will have a future in Europe. Much depends, therefore, on the success of his plan to offer customers a shoe fitting that lasts for ever.\nA model appeal to retailers\nJarno Fonsen, head of Finnish shoe company Pomarfin, has had to find a way of keeping retailers happy when they sign up to be distributors under his innovative system to sell customised shoes.\nThey will be expected to hire a special scanner made by Corpus.e, the German manufacturer, for €600 a month, or buy one outright for €20,000. Retailers use this to measure consumers’ feet when they come in for a one-off "fitting". From that point on, the same person need only log on to the website and select a style of shoe; the products will then be posted to him.\nHow does the retailer make any money from such a service? Mr Fonsen has a simple answer. No matter how many shoes a customer buys using the internet, the retailer who took his first order will gain the same marginal profit every time he places an order over the internet for another pair of shoes made to identical measurements.\n"Under this process the retailer ‘owns’ each consumer who buys using the internet, even if the consumers no longer have to go into any shops to get their shoes," says Mr Fonsen.\nFeminists might have a problem with Pomarfin’s customised shoe service: it does not yet cater for women. But the omission is deliberate. Mr Fonsen believes the system’s minimal retail contact is more likely to appeal to men than women.\nCopyright The Financial Times Limited 2007\n\n