Disproportionately excited
My grinning reaction to this glowing blog review of Daily Grommet must be because it is in French. That language makes everything sound better. I’ll post the translation as soon as I have it.
(OK here is the translation, which is perhaps a little awkward, but my pal Richard and I did our best.)
E-commerce for girlfriends. –Laurent Javault
E-commerce just as I like it. At least, not exactly e-commmerce, since it involves two curators advocating products on which they seem to get a commission: Daily Grommet.
The site is brand new and the paint is still drying, but this approach seems innovative and disruptive, when compared to those old fashioned e-commerce websites, overloaded like pack horses and festooned with garlands of buttons and hard-sell slogans.
Another thing I love is the simple home page, which –I am guessing–will also behave like a moving stream, with a new product chasing the previous one to the archives.
Here, everything holds together in this screen capture…
There’s a video presentation, and below those two simplest- possible tabs: “story”, which contains a written description of the product, and “details”, which contains the product’s composition. On the right hand side, a command interface with a clever option “reserve for a friend”. Underneath, a traditional, but well worded blog [translators’ note, the author then apologizes for the upcoming direct quote of English from the site, or what she calls, her using a ‘barbarism’. Gotta love those French…even when they hate our language.] “What we like about it”.
The overall (appearance) is prettily laid out with white space, sober, elegant, well matched to the type of products presented.
Granted, one can argue that big brands are compelled to present the whole of their sacro-sanct product lineup on their e-commerce websites.
That being said, if we look from the side of efficiency, couldn’t we imagine tomorrow, or rather, sometime later, a “splintered” e-commerce website with multiple curators presenting, as on Daily Grommet, some of the products distributed by the company?
In the end, this is perhaps the next fight to come to commerce: choice vs. relevance. Do we prefer buying by freely choosing amongst hundreds of articles presented on today’s e-commerce sites? Or would we rather listen to the advice provided by someone who did the job (i.e. choosing) for you?
Back to Jules: Man oh man…this woman really understands the importance of simplicity, curating, and filtering. I’ll blog on this later but the biggest discipline I am imposing in this business is simplicity.
Jules Pieri 
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