I’m sitting in a train to Shanghai and finalizing a presentation about shoes. During the past few days I’ve been working for Smile & Shine company to develop shoe cleaning.
Smile & Shine is a company that rent out machines to the office buildings and hotels, where you stick in your shoe, press the button and it comes out nice and shiny. The idea is, that the company also takes care of the maintenance, so that the machines can actually be used without risk of shoes getting damaged.
In the spirit of Aalto, we gathered a multi-disciplinary team, lots of post-it’s to our beloved restaurant car and started to brainstorm new features and potential customer segments. One of the key questions was, what else people could do while spending a minute on polishing their shoes? Maybe a screen in the machine with advertisements?
The workshop was fruitful, as we had interesting discussions and drew some really awesome pictures of the shoe polishing machines from the future. Maybe someday those will turn into reality ?
Cheers,
Lauri
