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Gamechangers: An Introduction

About 20 km north of Brugge lies a small, Belgian beach town named Knokke-Heist. Like many beach towns in the summer, the area swells with people for a few warm months in the summer, when families from all over Europe descend upon the beaches of the North Sea. It’s important to note that while everyone has decided to congregate on a beach, swimming is only an activity for the daring, (the North Sea averages 63 °F in the Summer) which means the kids have to find other, creative ways to spend their time. Beach soccer and sandcastles are common activities, but the hidden gem of the Belgian beach is the paper flower market.

For over 50 years, children from the ages of seven to thirteen have been learning the foundations of entrepreneurship in the form of paper flowers. Upon arriving to the beach, families will spend a few Euros investing in pipe cleaners and tissue paper to assemble the initial inventory of their beach shop. From then on, it’s up to the kids to run a successful operation. (Except for a little start-up currency, but we’ll get to that.) Every day, families arrive at the beach between eight and ten in the morning, and immediately, the children begin building their store for the day, which normally consists of a seat, flower display, and a few water bottles to keep your shells. Ah yes, the shells. The currency of choice is a very particular type of angel-wing shell that once belonged to a small crustacean. Not too wide and not too long. In the time it takes for the children to build their shop, its not uncommon for mothers to stroll along the shoreline collecting a handful of these special shells. And from there, the game is on.

Flowers range in price from 30 shells to 50 shells. It’s near impossible to sell anything for 55, so while any investment in a 50-shell flower means you won’t be making any profit, it could mean attracting the right clientele. Miniature florists spend about half of the day managing their store and the other half exploring the other stores on the beach for flowers they may be able to flip for about ten more shells. In a few weeks, 100 shells can become 1000 or more with the right negotiating, which can prove challenging with a language barrier. At the conclusion of the vacation, children will spend the last day dispersing their profits and extra inventory to their favorite trading partners, only to return home a little older and a little wiser.

In the summer of 2001, I spent two weeks in Knokke-Heist running a small flower shop with my 8-year-old brother. We caught on to the market trends quickly, and developed a few good partnerships with both Dutch and Belgian children. During our stint as beach florists, my brother and I had one afternoon that sparked an idea. A product attribute that could differentiate our shop from the monotony of other shops. A gamechanger. One night we brought the flowers back to our room, held them in a tight bouquet, and scented them with two sprays of our mother’s perfume. In a marketplace where the value of a flower was completely dependent on its construction and colors, we introduced a groundbreaking offering: scent. We began showing our cohorts the development and in very little time, we were selling many more flowers than before. In addition, we began noticing other small shops beginning to do the same with their own unique fragrances.

Like the children’s paper flower market, any market or industry can be radically changed with the introduction of the right product offering or technological development. Those changes can even be massive enough to change consumer’s behaviors and the way we, well, consume. The printing press. Vertical integration. Automotive brake lights. The radio. Ecommerce. Some big and some small, but all of these inventions had a major impact on how we behave and how industries interact with their consumers.

Over the course of this blog, I will be introducing my own Gamechangers: Ideas for different industries and clients I think could have a big impact on the way they offer products and the way we consume them. Some are ideas I’ve had for years and some will be spur of the moment, but in either case, I’m excited to share and excited to get started.

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