The answer was collecting dust on a shelf the whole time.
Hello fellow traveller,
One season at Urban Outfitters, we hung cheap plastic chandeliers everywhere.
Brightly coloured, in clusters of thirty or so. In the windows, by the front door, above the till points. They started life as part of the display.
Personally I couldn’t wait to get rid of them! People bought them in volume anyway.
It took me a while to work out why. Customers were taking a piece of the season home with them. Into bedrooms, student rooms, wherever they lived. They wanted their own space to feel the way the store felt.
The box on the shelf
Eventually the chandeliers had run their course and it was time to move on. I didn’t want to lose what they’d taught us, though. We’d seen the same thing happen with other products.
I remember sitting in our Monday morning meeting and saying to the team: we don’t need to go looking for the next chandelier. There’s probably something in our offer already that we can turn into a monster.
So I went looking. And I found the Photo Mobile.
A simple hanging frame with clips for eight to ten photos or postcards. It had been in the business for a while, flat-packed in a box on a shelf, selling somewhere between two and five a week across the whole chain.
Doing nothing, really.
Ready-made communities
We made clusters of them and hung them where the chandeliers had been. The windows, the entrance, and above the tills, where people stand still long enough to look up.
Then we filled them with photos of our own staff at festivals.
I said that if we did it with confidence, we’d sell 250 a week. Nobody really believed me.
Every Monday morning, the first thing I looked at was that one line, store by store. The numbers told me which stores had put the clusters up properly and which hadn’t, so we knew exactly where to go and have a conversation.
Before long we were selling over 250 a week.
Then something I hadn’t seen coming. Some customers asked to buy them with the staff photos still in.
They were buying ready-made communities.
Reinventing the wheel
Nothing new was designed. Nothing was invented. The answer had been on the shelf the whole time. Someone just had to notice it. We repeated that multiple times.
I see the same pattern now, in a very different room.
The founders and CEOs I work with are brilliant at creating. Give them a problem and they’ll have a new plan, a new venture or a new version of themselves by Friday. It’s the reflex that got them where they are.
And so often, what they’re looking for is already in their life. A strength they stopped using. A relationship that’s been waiting for them. Something they loved at twenty-five and packed away in a box.
Reinventing takes enormous energy. And we’re conditioned to chase the shiny new thing. To reinvent the wheel to prove our creativity.
Noticing and understanding take very little. You just have to slow down long enough to see what’s in front of you.
Think about recycling. The materials are already here. Most of the possibilities we spend our lives searching for already exist too.
Maybe it’s not about creation. Maybe it’s about awareness.
What’s sitting flat-packed in your life, waiting for you to notice it?
Best,
Hugh
You’ve lived many versions of yourself in this lifetime. And there are many more still to come.
If you’d like help removing the blinkers, that’s exactly the kind of conversation we’d have together. Let’s talk.
P.S. Of everything in that store, what some customers most wanted to take home was a photo of a handful of strangers at a festival. That insight still makes me smile.
