Spontaneous beauty

There’s a site/blog I’ve passed around to some peeps in the past called the Daily Monster. When I first discovered it, designer Stefan Bucher was on monster #87 or something like that. Today, he’s just posted monster #200 and it’s yet again impressive. I can relate to the spontaneity of his illustrations because I also often make an illustration out of spilled coffee on my notebook.

It’s a great exercise to try out because you’re drawing your creativity from a deeper place within.

It’s been quite some time since I had visited but Stefan sent out a polite email announcing his completion of the 2nd 100. The public evolution of his illustration style has been fun to observe. Over the course of time, he’s built up a great following, been featured in some prominent pubs like Wired, Business Week and the Onion. All of this because he did an idea just to do it. This passion of his has turned into books, DVDs and surely it’s been an exposure vehicle to win new business for his design profession.

Well done, Stefan. You’re an inspiration.

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Fascinating Decay

My daughters were in our back garden over the weekend and returned indoors with the skeletons of tomatillos. I have been wanting to play with the Leica’s macro capabilities so this seemed like a great subject.

I could have shot photos of this all night, but here are nine that I feel turned out s’alright.

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Brian, my bagman

L1010711Originally uploaded by let5ch

So, what can I say? This was quite the customer experience. If you MOO cards to hand out in addition to my business cards. I wanted to have something with a bit of my social networking contacts to go beyond my mobile and my email.

Anyway, as I sat in my first session on Saturday morning, my phone vibrated (did I say I wanted different points of contact yet?) with a call from Brian Murphy, VP of operations at MOO. I met him after my session as well as MOO’s founder, Richard Moross and MOO’s VP of Sales and Mktg, Lisa Rodwell; extremely great people all around. We traded MOO cards, chatted a bit and then went on our ways only to meet up again at the People Powered Party of which MOO was a co-sponsor. At the party, I got a nifty MOO card holder as did Karen and Pete.

Talking with Brian at the party, we got into customer experience and he referenced Seth Godin quite a bit and how it’s helped shape their company philosophy. A key directive is to always make the customer feel smarter than they are. Not that the customer is dumb, but there’s a boost of empowerment you feel when using the MOO site.

All in all, a customer experience worth talking about. I think they’ve earned a customer for life.

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A word about MOO and customer service

Yeah, yeah, the customer is always right. The customer is king. But who really goes to lengths to walk that talk? Well, so far, MOO, that’s who.

I ordered a set of MOO cards to take with me down to the SXSWi festival. I’m thinking of them as my secondary “social” card to accompany the Hamilton Partners business card. It’s going to include my Pownce account, Twitter account as well as 2 IM accounts.

The order was placed on the 23rd of February and according to an email I received, it “dispatched” on the 26th. When I never received an email with a DHL tracking code, I contacted MOO to ask about my cards. After the requisite auto-email back to me, the next day I get a personal email from a customer service rep. He explained that unfortunately the cards were sent standard shipping but I could get another set expressed to me at no charge.

All well and good but the problem was I’d be in Austin by the time of arrival. No worries, they could instead send them to my hotel. BUT even better, MOO’s Operations Manager just so happens to be attending SXSW so I’ll be getting my cards personally delivered. Now that’s service. Assuming the quality is up to snuff, MOO has a lifelong advocate.

I’ll try to save some cards to show’em off when I return.

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