In September of 2008, after Jack and I had spent months working with different full-time and contract developers, ‘Glue’ (aka Flavors.me) had made zero progress.
To be kind, we had ‘explored’ a handful of proprietary and open-source frameworks. It was time to call in the heavy artillery. After failing to persuade him to accept a whacky deferred compensation offer to build Superkix earlier in the year, I asked John Wehr to step in and save the project. The idea behind Flavors.me is that simple systems can produce complex patterns (A New Kind of Science, Wolfram). After a couple weeks of blunt conversation, it was clear that only John could build the type of system we were still envisioning.
I have found that adhering to the operational frameworks provided by Jim Collins and Sun Tzu removes a good deal of confusion that arises during the company building process. And I have encountered few others as capable as John of filling the archetypal technical leadership role that Collins or Sun Tzu would surely require were they pursuing an Internet-related endeavor. So it is with great excitement that I announce HiiDef Inc. has hired John Wehr as its Chief Technology Officer!
John will be manning a booth at PyCon Atlanta in a couple weeks. We are actively looking for Python/Django experts to join the HiiDef team. So if you fit the bill, please find a way to introduce yourself either at PyCon in Atlanta, or digitally via the Internet.
Sometime in 2002 after 7’6 Yao Ming was drafted by the Houston Rockets, a couple of friends and I silk-screened about 1,000 t-shirts with funny riffs on Yao’s identity like Who’s Yao Mama?, Deez Nutz in Yao Mouth! and Who’s Yao Daddy?
I used a hosted e-commerce platform from Network Solutions to hack together a “Yaowear” site with only .jpg images; it was one of the more frustrating, semi-technical experiences of my life, and I swore to never do business with Network Solutions again.
Fast forward to 2008. Shortly after launching Superkix, we needed a very simple storefront to sell our wonderfully comfortable American Apparel 50/50 blend Superkix t-shirts. I had read about Shopify a couple years prior and was very eager to try out their service. My standards were exceptionally low; we needed only to sell one product with a couple different t-shirt colors. Sadly, I couldn’t even create a site that I was comfortable associating with the Superkix brand. So, I asked Jack the designer via IM if he would be interested in joining me on another HiiDef adventure, and Goodsie was born!
In February 2009, Kevin Sheurs from Vimeo agreed to sacrifice his nights and weekends to help bring our little retail project to life. Our plan was to launch before Jack’s wife Marissa was due to give birth to J3 aka: “BabyJ” in June; evidently we underestimated the project scope a touch. Based on our experience with the Flavors.me beta, we realized that in order to cross the goal line, we needed to add a full-time development heavy with some real horsepower, pronto.
Enter Eli White, who joined us on Monday to lead the development of Goodsie! Eli was among the first few developers at Digg, spent time at Hubble Space Telescope and TripAdvisor, and was most recently the Community Relations Manager for Zend. He wrote the book on PHP 5 and is a tour de force in the open source community. It’s only been about 72 hours, but Eli is already wearing full body armor around his house, and Goodsie is that much closer to becoming a reality.
So what is Goodsie? Goodsie allows anyone to create a unique web presence to sell physical or digital goods. Retailers of all kinds, from eBay power sellers to artisans in handmade marketplaces, or even musicians on MySpace, can have their own branded online store, without any of the traditional hassles of setting up shop online. We are building Goodsie to modernize selling online. Built on Amazon’s cloud, Goodsie integrates the Paypal, Google Checkout and Amazon gateways. It incorporates structured attributes in product categories such as Apparel, Media, Art, Pets, Furniture and Jewelry, leading to a consistent search and shopping experience. With native support for digital file preview and delivery, downloading purchased audio, video, stock photography and e-books is seamless.
The long awaited alpha testing should finally start in a month or two, perhaps during SXSW in March, which a handful of HiiDef team members will be attending.
In the meantime, Eli will be speaking at both ConFoo and tek-X. For those in attendance at either conference, please seek him out to say hello, buy him a beer and challenge him to a medieval-style joust!
“My favorite part about this site? The large type, the excellent use of colors and the tiled background, combined with an intuitive interface, of course.” — Styleboost
I’ve closed up shop and become what the Japanese like to call a ‘salary man’.
Well, not exactly. In early 2008 I started working with Jonathan and David Marcus on a ‘little shoe project’ which eventually turned into Superkix.com. Since then we’d been throwing round the idea of working together exclusively, and late last year we decided to go for it. After all, they were my favourite clients by a mile.
This is a big change. Even though the actual work is much the same, the situation of dealing with a dozen or so clients (essentially bosses) on a handful of simultaneous projects is very different from working on a single large project. As a product designer, I’m working alongside former Design Director at Vimeo, the one and only Jack Zerby. Jack’s an OCD designer with mad skills. He’s also the mastermind behind the interface on HiiDef’s other recently launched product, Flavors.me.
Jack Zerby gives some insight into customization on Flavors.me:
When Jonathan and I first discussed the design customization on Flavors, our first instinct was to offer various themes.
After giving it some thought, I realized that I didnt think themes were the best way to allow the user to create something unique.
The whole goal with Flavors is to give people a tool to create something personal, something special, something different.
That can’t be accomplished when you give people options like “Duckhunt”, “Steampunk”, or “OMG Jonas Brothers Theme”.
The argument for themes comes from the fact that most people aren’t designers, so if you give them the final product and allow them to slap their name on it, it becomes theirs.
My argument is that people may not be designers, but they are creative.
I came to a solution when I broke down elements of my own design process.
I obviously dont do any of this in any particular order, but every time I sit down to design I have to manipulate these elements to achieve my desired result.
Using this guide I created 4 sections of design options in Flavors.
This allows the user to arrange these various elements in millions of different combinations, yet still staying within specific design contraints.
There are many different approaches to design controllers.
1. Top drawer (via Tumblr)
2. Bottom drawer (via Squarespace)
3. Sidebar (via Soup.io)
4. Draggable (via Flavors.me)
I tried a ton of different approaches and finally settled on a draggable design controller.
Colors: A better way to show a user which color affects which area of the page. I tried highlighting the area affected when mousing over the color swatch, but that was really distracting.
The Flavors brand started as a tree.
That’s because at the time, I didn’t really care about the brand, I just wanted to start working on the product.
What does a tree have to do with the word Flavors? Nothing…but it looked cool.
Jonathan and I work well together because he knows when I’m half-assing it. So after he called me on it, I ditched the tree and started at square one. (no pun intended)
Baskin Robbins has a lot to do with flavors. All 31 of them.
Everyone knows the colorfully delicious grid of ice cream behind the counter of a Baskin Robbins.
I started with circles.
That looked way to girly, as my wife Marisa told me from the other couch.
I tried squares, starting with a single square at 150px x 150px.
After that I realized I was on to something. We created this site to allow people create something unique. Every flavor at Baskin Robbins is unique, BUT it’s still ice cream. Every page on Flavors.me is unique, BUT it’s still within boundaries. (My sister Kayla just said she likes that line)
So I colored up these bad boys…
Now I had a grid to work with. Every page was born from this grid. I usually don’t use really strict grids (I forget most of the time), but this time it became such a part of the brand, I had to use one.
First the homepage…
Then finally the settings page…
I wanted a personal homepage that was better than my friends, and figured it would be more fun to think up something that could automatically assemble sites for everyone, rather than just me. During the first Facebook application craze, when every single company in the web ecosystem put life on hold to develop clunky widgets for closed, proprietary platforms, it dawned on me that API-level integration was key. I was eager to prove that the open web was infinitely more powerful than AOL, redux.
Q: What is your design/service philosophy?
The idea behind Flavors.me is that simple systems can produce complex patterns (A New Kind of Science, Wolfram); simple in that layout (wireframe), color palette, background and typography are common variables, and yet each site can look and feel uniquely custom. We employ a very layered approach, like a designer would in Photoshop or Fireworks.
Q: Where do you see the project heading in the next six months? The next two years?
In the next 6 months we need to add support for almost every 3rd-party service such as - LinkedIn, YouTube, Foursquare, Wordpress, etc., fetch data in real-time (we are about 10 minutes delayed for beta), and solidify our infrastructure. In two years we hope to establish Flavors.me and its sister property, Goodsie.com, which is similar to Flavors but for retailers, as the ultimate resource for creating an online presence, whether for informational, vanity or commercial purposes.
Q: What is the greatest challenge to your success?
Ensuring the service works like magic. Before starting the project, I said that if after 15 minutes a user couldn’t create something that felt magical, we were toast. Fortunately, I think we managed to build a system that can do it in 5 - 10 minutes. Aside from communication services like Skype or Facebook, very few services offer the immediate satisfaction and instant gratification that Flavors does. We struggled with the immediate wow factor at Vimeo (where I was VP / GM). Flavors is unique in its ability to add instant, real value to your entire online experience.
Q: What is the one thing you need to get to the next phase of the project?
There are simply no obstacles in our immediate 3 - 9 months plans. We are well capitalized and our development process is only getting more fine tuned as we go.
I’ve had an affinity for sneakers ever since I can remember. When I was really little, my father owned a Stride Rite store in a strip mall.
I was always so proud of his ability to size up someone correctly. Ill never forget the time when my brother, dad and I were almost held up at gun point for trying to return a defective pair of high-tops to the hottest sneaker joint in downtown San Diego, back when there were no gas lamps and those streets werent quiet as friendly. In high school, I was amongst the first to brave the newest patent leather Jordan’s in a real basketball game. I met my roommate and one of my closest friends one summer in New York because of a shared love for the tragically squeaky Air Max ’95s. And while Corporate America had a strong preference for straight laces, spreadsheets and Ferragamo’s, I eventually settled back into a vanilla pair of Nike dunks from 8th Street.
Sometime last April, awestruck by my brother’s gaudy and garrish ode to sneakers in his closet, we decided it would be cool to try and build the world’s greatest sneaker expo. We envisioned assembling one pair of every sneaker in a MOMA-inspired web setting. After picking up the recently expired Superkix domain for $7.99, we were off to the races, building the start-up dream. Along the way, Rob Morris (my hero in so many ways) graciously agreed to bring our idea to life, and John Bresnik tirelessly built the whole kit and kaboodle.
And so, after months of hard work, we are excited to present Superkix, the only search engine for authentic sneakers. Superkix makes it easy to find sneakers currently for sale at retail and get a sneak peak into what is coming next from Nike, Reebok, Adidas and other popular brands. Users can search sneaker inventory by size, updated continuously from 35+ leading online retailers and discover new styles set to debut using a consolidated and ranked feed from the 20+ most authoritative sneaker bloggers.
If you dont like sneakers, someone you know likely does, and would certainly appreciate knowing about our fantastic new site:www.superkix.com - search & discovery for sneaker lovers.
