Thought & Theory

The whole Thought & Theory crew will be in Boston for the next couple of days for a big kick-off meeting. Be sure to give us a ring if you’re in the area and want to meet-up and chat.

I will be the first person to admit that I am not an interior decorator. I am a minimalist at heart, I like very clean things and I don’t like a lot of frills or extra junk. I do, however, get bored with most things in my life very quickly and like to change it up. You can imagine it is a little unrealistic to “change-up” my couches, until LoveSac.

If you don’t know anything about LoveSac or haven’t heard about them, hop over to their website. There are some great videos about their products, photos of customer setups and you will definitely get a kick out of Shawny D, the founder of LoveSac.

The premise is simple, customize your own couches (Sactionals), along with a ton of other furniture (Sacs, Chairs, etc etc). The Sactionals are so versatile you will never get stuck with the same boring couch ever again. Here is a snippet about Sactionals from the website:

How do G2 Sactionals work? Don’t worry, it’s easy. A Sactional Base and a Sactional Side clamp together like Lego’s, basically. You can arrange any number of Bases and Sides, clamp them all together and poof! You have a full G2 Sactional arrangment. For instance, if you combine 3 bases and 5 sides you get a G2 Sactional Full Sofa Configuration.

Here are some photos to help illustrate the ease of constructing your couch configuration using sides, bases, clamps and pillows. You can check out configurations with same pieces here (navigate to the right in the gallery).

It is such an interesting concept and would be so easy to configure your living room in tons of different ways. Not to mention you can change out the covers for everything and have a completely different look/feel at any time. This makes me think I wish they had some sort of rental system for parties, as it would perfect for my upcoming 24-Hour Movie Marathon! Can you imagine watching movies like this?

Joey from YGG did an interview with Shawny D (Founder of LoveSac), you can read it here.

I’ve stumbled across this scenario on a few websites I frequent, most prominent of these being Google Calendar. Google Calendar has been in Beta for at least a year and that seems odd to me. Google obviously does not need any press regarding it’s growth from Beta to a full-launch, but your site might.

We are working on a few projects which will be in Beta, but we have never been a fan of labeling things as such. Yes it gives you a crutch to stand on when something breaks, but you can easily explain to your users that you are just getting started and bugs are bound to appear. Beta is a fun way of getting some light press and that is perfectly fine, but work your way out of Beta and get a second round of press when you are in full-launch. You may as well make a point of moving out of Beta since you made the point of starting in Beta!

Speaking of using “Beta” to your advantage: instead of throwing the word “Beta” in your logo, use Beta Codes or a Beta Login to show a limited group of people what you have going on. This gives people a sense of value when they have a code and are one of the privileged who can access your website. This also serves as a kick in the butt to open your website to the masses and move out of Beta when you are ready.

I know “Scratch” is an old movie but I just watched it again and came across this great quote by DJ Shadow.

“The (Invisibl Skratch Piklz) Picklz were the first to take out the secrecy of dj’ing. Because a lot of hip hop dj’ing was based on covering the labels so that no one knew what you had. Not revealing your tricks…and I think the Picklz were the first people to be like ‘hey, here’s exactly how to do what we do. we want you to go out and do it better so that we can learn from you.’ That to me, that took us a giant step forward.”

- DJ Shadow

Wikipedia on Invisibl Skratch Piklz
The Last 4 Minutes of the Invisibl Skratch Piklz together
Scratch Trailer

First off, I really liked the downtown area of Grand Rapids. Nice growing scene was lots of cool spots to hang out. Thanks to Ben for showing us around. We’ll be posting a couple more pics tomorrow on another post.

On Thursday we got to tour their new Art Museum (GRAM) and I was just blown away by the building. The art was amazing too but the space was just incredible. Loved the way they used natural light and moved it throughout the building with carefully planned glass.

Only weird thing was the ridiculously long staircases which Jason enjoyed, but for shorter people like me, made for awkward stair ascending.

Check out the Video Tour
Pics of the Museum (.pdf)