/digital

Will King, King of Shaves founder, recorded some contributions to this light-hearted Radio 4 show about shaving. Click here to listen to the show (you'll need Real Player if you don't already have it) and here's an MP3.

One of the peculiarities of the shave.com store is that almost all of the products we sell there are mostly water (there are some important exceptions, as Andy Hill points out in this interesting post over on his green blog). There's obviously something a bit perverse about packing any amount of water into a box and sending it in the post. Apart from the obvious green concerns (why ship water when it's already present almost everywhere on the planet's surface), water is dense. Really dense. I learn from this fascinating article in Fast Company that if you were to fill an ordinary cargo truck with water it would be too heavy to move!

So, our challenge here at shave.com is to sell and ship water (plus the King of Shaves 'secret sauce') with relatively low average order values and still make a profit. I remember reading a long time ago that Jeff Bezos settled on books for his fairly successful online store by spending some time in his kitchen weighing and measuring different products. Books were the closest to the optimal size and weight for shipping: decision made (I know there were some other factors in this decision!).

Looking for material on the tricky trade-off between product density, unit price and shipping costs, I came across this fascinating blog post from a couple of years ago about the mind-blowing economics of shipping bottled water from Fiji to the USA.

I've been twittering for six months or so. I love Twitter. It's so simple: 140-character bulletins, life updates, notes from now, scrapbook cuttings from the world at large. No pics, no sound, no nothing. Some people can't stand it: it's like the ultimate self-indulgent me-fest. I'm eating a sandwich, I'm shaving, I'm walking home... WTF?

But, trust me, it's a remarkable thing. If you ask me, it's closer to the Cyberspace originally described by William Gibson than anything else I've seen. Following (that's the operative word) a bunch of twittering friends is like pushing your head up into a cloud of what's happening now, it's like being in many places all at once, sharing dozens of experiences, learning how strangers live.

It's another world-flattening phenomenon and doubly powerful because it builds on a set of tools that already existed. Nothing new here. Just a powerful combination of web, IM and txt.

We're planning some Twitter activity here at KMI. We think it's a place that brands can be active if they promise no bullshit, no spam and nothing boring.

By the way, Gibson is speaking about his new book in London next week. I'll be there. Let me know if you're going.