The Discovery of Fascinating Objects

20 Apr 2013

The Flickr iPhone app is the most addictive app on my phone at the moment after Wanelo. The kind of app I’ll start using and then blissfully ignore text messages and the outside world until I get my fill.

It’s not because of the great photos my friends continue to upload there (Instagram owns that part of my brain now and isn’t giving it back), but because of all the things collectors of vintage design, furniture, calculators, magazines, advertising, architecture, artwork, matchbooks, postcards, book covers, product packaging, candy and toys are sharing there. I don’t use it to look at photos per se but objects. It’s like the difference between inspirational images and products you can buy. An “upload-only Tumblr for collectors” was how I first thought to describe it (there’s no reblogging). Now I’m realizing how similar the mobile experience is to Wanelo.

Because it’s all that content plus the intense scrollability of the app, which is so important on mobile and currently lacking on the Flickr website. You can see a lot of stuff quickly on the profile and favorites views, where I spend most of my energy, using it like I first used Etsy and now use Wanelo: tracing back the people behind the things I like and seeing what else they like, then continuing on into infinity.

Flickr faves of the moment

Posted in Effects, Wanelo | Comments (3)

More Richly Interpretable Information

17 Mar 2013

Wanelo gets a lot of press in high school and college newspapers, which appear to be thriving. I did an interview for one recently that’s print-only—The Arrowhead from Souderton Area High School in Souderton, Pennsylvania—and it seemed worth reposting the Q&A online because it’s so comprehensive. It also reminded me of the interviews my friend Dylan and I did in high school for our hardcore music fanzine. The piece is by Arianna Carlson.

How did you get started at Wanelo?

I joined Wanelo last year, and moved from New York City to San Francisco for the opportunity. Previously I was working at Etsy until Deena, Wanelo’s founder, successfully persuaded me to help build Wanelo. She can be pretty persuasive.

What kind of ideas do you come up with at Wanelo?

I come up with ideas for features for Wanelo, and try to nail down their initial details and designs so that they can be built effectively and quickly by our amazing engineers. Then we all iterate on them and tweak and refine them obsessively. An example of a feature idea would be: let members share products with one another via @-mentions in comments. Or: allow store owners to claim their store pages on Wanelo, and give them tools to manage them.

What is your position at Wanelo?

I lead the development and design of features on Wanelo, do a lot of product marketing, business development and community management, and help with whatever it takes for Wanelo to grow. My title is VP of Product Development. Product management is pretty interdisciplinary and can end up involving a bit of everything, particularly for a company at Wanelo’s stage: prioritizing, analyzing, designing, writing, guiding, testing, fixing, strategizing, marketing, partnering, managing and hiring, to start.

What is your favorite thing about Wanelo?

I love how lively and subversive Wanelo is, because it’s truly run by the users. We don’t tell anyone what products to post or what to buy, and our members post some of the most incredible (and occasionally hilarious) products.

What is your favorite thing about working at Wanelo?

I would say the team (a very special group of hardcore individuals and one of the most productive teams I’ve been a part of), and the community (we’re all addicted to reading what users have to say about Wanelo), and how quickly ideas become reality here.

'The manliest of engineering men at @wanelo watching Mean Girls' by @varshavskaya

What is the most interesting thing you’ve seen on Wanelo?

I find interesting things every single day, so it’s hard to say :) Today these “carpet skates” caught my eye, because they’re kind of thing I would have begged for when I was little. And this mat made of smooth river stones struck me as something that might be cool to have by the shower. These super-rare Apple Computer sneakers from the early ’90s are a standout as well.

What is Wanelo?

Wanelo is a global platform for shopping organized around people.

How do you feel about Wanelo?

I <333 Wanelo. It's amazing to watch it become a real force in the world, and I think it's a good, subversive, democratizing force.

Why do you think Wanelo is trending?

Wanelo is simple and fun, and filled with interesting things you can buy that aren’t being pushed on you by advertisers but simply shared by other people. I think the endless stream of product images on Wanelo is what one neuroscientist I’ve encountered would call “really richly interpretable information“—because there’s the possibility of owning all these eye-catching things you’ve never encountered before, and because they’re all being shared by other people just like you, Wanelo can draw you in in a unique way and become addictive. Many people just can’t believe Wanelo contains so much good stuff from so many different stores they’ve never heard of, and that it’s being presented with no ulterior motive.

People also seem to appreciate the down-to-earth nature of Wanelo—we (the people building it) are all active users ourselves, and we don’t talk down to or advertise to users the way some traditional retail sites do.

What kind of demographics does Wanelo attract?

Wanelo attracts all kinds of people. Many of our members are young and female right now. We are not targeting any specific demographic however (we don’t even tolerate the use of that word at Wanelo :), and we’re busy building a platform for shopping that’s open-ended and powerful enough for anyone in the world to use.

How did Wanelo start?

Deena launched the first version of Wanelo in 2010. It originally started as an experiment and a reaction to traditional advertising—something neither of us think has much of a future in this century because it doesn’t provide value for most people or empower them. She also just wanted to be aware of what products her friends liked to buy, and there wasn’t a good natural way to do that. She was working as a designer and was obsessed with social networks and saw an opportunity to build an immersive social experience around shopping.

We redesigned and relaunched Wanelo last summer, had our first iPhone app out by September 2012, and added Android as a platform in December.

What new ideas are you coming up with at Wanelo?

Lots! At the moment I’m thinking about store owners and finding ways to bring them into the Wanelo community in a constructive way that creates value for everyone. Also always trying to find ways to better enable conversations around products. And we’re just beginning to dig into all the product data we have, experimenting with new ways to view the many different kinds of products people have posted.

What appeal do you think Wanelo has to teenagers?

Young people are the real arbiters of the future when it comes to the internet, and Wanelo definitely appeals immediately to a lot of teens right now. The Trending feed in its current form works right away for many people in this group, whereas other users like myself spend much more time in My Feed. I think the most popular products on Wanelo and the energy surrounding them (all the people posting and commenting on them) appeals to a lot of teens. It’s a form of entertainment, seeing what products people are talking about. Teens are often the ones posting these products and helping them become popular, and in some cases they’re the products’ makers and designers.

What is the most popular feature at Wanelo?

The most popular feature is saving products, followed closely by buying products. The most popular page or view on Wanelo is Trending, which we have big plans for.

What is the price range for items on Wanelo?

It really varies, as I’ve seen prices at the two extremes, but a lot of the most popular products are under $100 USD.

How has Wanelo grown since it started?

Wanelo’s growth has been tremendous since the relaunch last summer, and it really hit a new level when the iOS app started catching on in November. Now that app is often the #1 app in the App Store’s Lifestyle category, and we’ve managed to stay in the top 50 or so free apps overall lately. The Android app is also seeing solid growth. Meanwhile, store owners and retailers are beginning to help spread Wanelo even further.

Do you think Wanelo is a good opportunity for teens to find trendy items?

Wanelo can be a fun way to see what products people are talking about, for sure. We see some far-out things suddenly catch on and become popular. It’s also a good source of shopping inspiration, because you come across products you would have never thought to search for.

What age groups do you think Wanelo appeals to other than teens?

A lot of Wanelo users are in their 20s, 30s, 40s and beyond. Wanelo users definitely skew younger than users of other sites in this general category, but we at Wanelo are not doing anything to target a particular age group, and we’re seeing Wanelo appeal to a really wide range of people.

For real.

Posted in Wanelo | Comments (1)

Astronaut Ecstasy and the Overview Effect

19 Jan 2013

Current obsessions include astronauts’ descriptions of the earth from space, and things published or edited by Stewart Brand. The latter actually led me to the former, as this video about the origins of the Whole Earth Catalog breaks down.

The Overview Effect, a short film released on the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 8 mission, is the most intensive exploration of the cosmic perspective of astronauts that I’ve come across in a while. It gets a little sentimental toward the end, but there’s not nearly enough public discussion of this stuff and not nearly enough of us get to hang out with (or be) astronauts. Only about 500 of us have gone into space so far in fact, according to the Overview Institute, which collects astronaut quotes and talks about this perspective endlessly. 527 people to be exact, according to this list on Wikipedia, which will hopefully eventually become unmanageable.

See also: The Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth, the spacewalk footage from For All Mankind (1989), and spacecats on Wanelo.

Posted in Curiosities | Comments (1)

The Company Your Company Keeps

09 Jan 2013

If you have an app or web service out there with a rapidly increasing number of people using it, one of the most interesting things in the world for you is how people talk about it.

Wanelo has a lot of young users who like to post screenshots of their home screens, and these images of personal app arrangement are worth a thousand tweets.

In these shots, Wanelo is almost never grouped with existing shopping or commerce apps, though they’re doing a lot of shopping with it. I like to think that it’s because shopping as it’s existed online to date has been disconnected from people’s reality, which contains other people and involves a continual quest for entertainment and stimulation (not just a desire to search for a solution that meets a need).

#wanelo

Posted in Effects, Wanelo | Comment

Please Don’t Use the S-word

06 Dec 2012

I was interviewed by Sandi MacPherson the other day for Quibb, which is gradually growing into something really great. Here’s the post and here’s the repost:

WANELO WANELO WANELO

What are you working on? What does your role entail?

Wanelo is a catalog of products organized by people. Members post products that they think are worth sharing, and those products get bought, saved, collected, tagged and sent to friends by other members. It’s growing very fast and is addictive to both build and use, and to read what members have to say about it.

I joined in May of this year and we immediately set out to rewrite, redesign, rebuild, rebrand and relaunch the service. That relaunch happened in late June, and since then we’ve managed to grow the value of the product and all the key numbers, and launch an iOS app that’s been climbing the charts (#8 in Lifestyle and #66 overall at the moment, not that I’m checking constantly or anything) [Ed.: #3 and #49 now, and version 2.0 just launched, but anyways]. We’re about to launch a version for Android.

My role entails a lot of prioritizing, analyzing, designing, writing, making, refining, guiding, testing, editing, synthesizing, hiring (world-class product designers wanted!) and engaging in heated debates with Deena, the founder.

What are your favorite tech/startup news sites and blogs?

I still find Hacker News to be the best filter for what’s going on out there, though it’s not as good as it used to be. A VC is an old standby. Chris Dixon’s blog is always worth your time. Platformed is a recent entrant I’ve been giving a chance. And I’m getting sucked into Quibb!

What is the most innovative company right now in the social commerce space?

A lot of the notable commerce startups that come to mind are working on making selling incredibly easy, like Gumroad, Ribbon and ShopLocket. They’re built to allow people to use existing networks (like Facebook and Twitter) to sell, which is great for some sellers. I like the simplicity they’re aiming for.

There are actually a lot of people doing interesting things around commerce, but I honestly look more toward non-commerce services for guidance right now. At Wanelo, we’ve learned more from Instagram and Tumblr than any commerce site.

Many commerce sites set out to “add a social layer” and the result is inauthentic and ineffective. But that “social part” — enabling real discovery and growing the kind of community where transactions can flourish — is a lot more challenging than facilitating transactions in some ways. At the same time, non-commerce networks often have a hard time when it comes time to make money. Maybe the ideal scenario is a commerce-oriented network that focuses on the social aspect first?

You spent a few years at Etsy — what did you learn there that you’ve been able to apply at Wanelo? What hasn’t been applicable?

I learned a ton about product design and development at Etsy, as well as community management, as well as Greek, beer-brewing, dog breeds and craft techniques :) Many of the things we try and do at Wanelo — designing in code, iterating quickly, experimenting continuously, pushing to production frequently, making use of feature flags, questioning assumptions, being open and communicative with members — are things that became ingrained in me at Etsy.

The main difference between the two experiences is that Etsy is a much larger company than Wanelo, and with large companies quite a lot of energy becomes focused internally rather than externally. When a company is small enough for everyone to fit comfortably in the same room, and you’re all racing in the same direction and staring at the same numbers, different dynamics apply. You “do” more than talk. Some of the things I learned at Etsy about getting things done at a large company are not applicable at Wanelo (yet).

Social products are built on networks — friends (Facebook), close friends (Path), professional colleagues (LinkedIn), etc. Do networks exist for social commerce? How are they different and/or similar?

Commerce-oriented social networks exist — I helped build one at Etsy — but I think they have a long way to go. Many of the existing ones are populated largely by sellers. Unlike the examples you mention, there are usually two distinct roles in commerce-oriented networks: sellers and buyers. Sellers are often much more motivated and engaged, because they’re making money and have more of themselves invested in the system. The buyer perspective gets drowned out, which is one of the core deficiencies I find in a lot of marketplaces today.

A good, robust network populated by buyers that enables commerce and is untainted by spamminess is not easy to build. (But it’s a lot of fun to try :)

What do you see as the key benefits of social shopping, from the perspectives of both shoppers and merchants?

I think the act of shopping for the kind of unique or unusual products that people feel are worth sharing is so inherently social that qualifying it with “social” feels weird. It’s like saying talking is social. People are the best path to these products, because they aren’t things you search for specifically. When people discover these products, they share them with other people. And the internet is enabling this at a grand scale.

A platform for this kind of shopping gets out of the way of the users, and doesn’t talk down to them with heavy-handed merchandising or intricate product taxonomies. It’s about helping people help each other out (whether they’re conscious of it or not), and letting the good things happen.

From the shopper’s perspective, the benefit of this kind of platform is in the thrill of discovery, and the sharing of those discoveries, which is addictive and life-enhancing.

From the merchant’s perspective, the benefit is sales, and the opportunity to engage with customers as peers. Many of the merchants behind these products really don’t have the time, budget or expertise to fully figure out marketing on this conversational medium we use called the internet. Their energy goes into making the cool things that they sell.

Luckily for everyone, it’s easier than ever to discover and sell these things.

Some comments over on Quibb.

Posted in Business, Etsy, Wanelo | Comment

Small Stores, Big Ideas

11 Nov 2012

I discover a lot of small independent stores through Wanelo. These are relatively small operations, larger than your average Etsy shop or eBay business, but much smaller than your average corporation or retail operation with more than one address. You might call them boutiques, but they’re quite different from what that word conjures up on sites like FarFetch. They have a ton of personality, sell a wide variety of things, often have a physical address but primarily exist on their own domain online, and write copy about their products in a way that happens to be highly entertaining to read. Sometimes they make their products and sometimes they source them, and they always tell you the details of how they sourced them and from whom. They’re curators, to use a word I can barely stomach now.

Best Made Company is probably the canonical example of this type of store in my head. I discovered them before I started working on Wanelo, and now regularly open their emails and get excited about new offerings they come up with, like the Less Is Muir patch and the Shawl Neck Sweater Coat they created in collaboration with Dehen. They have a really strong brand with strong values, and as a consequence people pay attention to the things they choose to sell and why. I was pretty excited about the books they chose to sell when I first discovered them, as it seemed like a sort of cross-section of old DIY wilderness faves last featured in the Whole Earth Catalog.

Less Is Muir from Best Made Co

You can read about how Best Made came about here. They have ~24K followers at the moment on Wanelo.

Occulter is a new Wanelo discovery and the inspiration for this post. They’re based in New York and sell a lot of fascinating things.

Their Binchotan Toothbrush is blended with Binchotan charcoal powder, which is apparently “known to radiate negative ions, has a powerful deodorizing effect, removes plaque and attacks the causes of bad breath.” Occult dental products pretty much have my attention right away.

Binchotan toothbrush from Occulter

They also sell a sharp-looking Smith & Wesson pen, which is something I’m surprised I’ve never heard referenced before in rap lyrics.

Smith & Wesson pen from Occulter

And they sell these Woolly Mammoth ivory razors with quartz lenses featuring vintage micro-photography.

Mammoth straight razor from Occulter

Plus: very, very dark honey sourced from a beekeeper in Schenectady.

Occulter Black Honey

And, the perfect gift for any former philosophy major: Platonic solids!

Platonic Solids from Occulter

And these are just the things I’ve saved to my Wanelo.

ThinkGeek is another store of this dimension I’ve come into a lot more contact with since Wanelo, most recently with these rare earth magnets.

Rare Earth Magnets

You could even consider making your own. How? It’s very simple! You just find yourself a nice chunk of some Misch metal from the Earth’s substrate, then carefully extract any Neodymium, purify it, mold it, coat it in a small amount of nickel, and then wrap some plastic around it in the shape of a thumbtack.

They have ~118K followers at the moment on Wanelo.

Opulent Items is another store of this type. Operated out of Miami, I would probably never have come into contact with the astounding products they sell if it weren’t for Wanelo, where they have over 100K followers.

And there’s many more, like Fred Flare, straight out of Greenpoint, Brooklyn, with ~118K followers on Wanelo. And MoMAStore, RISDworks, Selekkt, Photojojo, Buy Olympia, House 8810, Moon Marble, Hammacher, Uncommon Goods, Poketo, Present and Correct, Street Market, FriendsWithYou, MollaSpace, Little Paper Planes, The Future Perfect, Totokaelo, Solitary Arts, Matter and others.

The point is that there’s a fast-growing audience for products worth sharing, and a rapidly expanding definition of what that entails.

Posted in Business, Ideas, Wanelo | Comment

My Wanelo Feed Erupted with Goodness Last Night

11 Aug 2012

Feeding on Wanelo

This natural event occurred because we began surfacing the individual shops behind the hundreds of thousands of products from Etsy that have been posted to Wanelo by members. Members who had been following the etsy.com “store” on Wanelo and had saved Etsy products are now following the shops behind those products. If you happen to be following people like TouMou or anastridendeavor on Wanelo (or me, or Deena), your feed just erupted with goodness as well.

Store pages on Wanelo are created when members post products from a store. You can follow stores and get updates in your feed when new products from those stores are posted by members. (Did I mention that the new Wanelo feed is simple, lickable and alive?)

This is something I happen to have wanted for a long time: the ability to follow Etsy shops. I’ve favorited hundreds of excellent Etsy shops but when you favorite a shop today you don’t get updates from them, and you forget about them.

Another thing I’ve long wanted that now exists is attribution and ownership for products I’ve saved. When I save a product on Wanelo with a comment, I create a page with that context. If I tweet that save and someone resaves it from me or comments on my save, I get notified. It’s not unlike how reblogging works on Tumblr, and check-ins work on Foursquare.

A Wanelo save page

It’s a step toward helping every active member of Wanelo create content and get feedback on their activity.

Because shopping, since the Industrial Revolution anyway, has been about passive consumption. “Consumption” from “consumer”: a word with a telling etymology that didn’t take off until the late 19th century, after factories had begun manufacturing uniform products en masse and needed to advertise to generate demand:

early 15c., “one who squanders or wastes,” agent noun from consume. In economic sense, “one who uses up goods or articles” (opposite of producer) from 1745. Consumer goods is attested from 1890.

The internet was not designed for passive consumption (that’s what TV was for, and I like to think that the internet began with the creation of the Whole Earth Catalog). And I don’t think consuming in the traditional sense has much of a future. Buying things can be a lot more creative, meaningful and fun. Payment is a form of communication, as Jack Dorsey likes to say, and people prefer to communicate with other people. Left to their own devices, people also tend to seek out unique products and customize things for themselves.

Wanelo is reorganizing shopping around people. That can sound vague if you haven’t picked up Paul Adams’ book Grouped for example, but it’s simple and powerful, and I think soon to be obvious and inevitable: people first. People organize the content and help it get discovered. A typical content-driven ecommerce site will have lots of categories to drill down into, carefully organized by the retailer and created by the retailer. Social context around the products is usually minimal or plastered on, and the experience is often one-dimensional, with the retailer talking at you. On Wanelo you discover products through people, and through the entities that people create while using the site (stores, collections, saves and *more*, coming soon). People look to other people for clues and guidance, just like in real life. And we don’t tell them who to listen to or what to buy.

Tons and tons to do (I’m making commits and writing tickets in another window as I type), but OMG it’s fun. And my Wanelo feed keeps getting better.

Posted in Effects, Ideas, Wanelo | Comment

The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces

29 Jul 2012

Narrated by William H. Whyte in 1980.

Classic, and strangely familiar if you work in product, or skateboard.

Posted in Analysis, Curiosities | Comment