The recent soccer world championships prematurely left us Italians without a flag to wave.
Moving beyond our individual disappointment, it was interesting to see that each of us turned our soccer sympathies to one or another of the teams still in play, until we were all divided between the Dutch camp and the Spanish camp. It’s worth asking what the values were that drew us to one team instead of the other and if these values, even outside the world of soccer, are therefore the real new “geographies” that need to be taken into account.
Does it still make sense to think in terms of user pools based on geopolitical boundaries, often designed with a pencil and a ruler by post-war bureaucrats? Or, rather, in the age of global real-time information and low-cost mobility, is it outdated to think of the Alps or the Mediterranean as boundaries?
To regain ground in a world of unstable equilibriums and mutable identities, a store must know how to renew itself, to expand its horizons to the global client (or better, glocal), to play with him, to understand his tastes and globalized dreams. It could be a dinner at the store, a workshop for university students, a photography exhibition or the presentation of a trip that seeks to engender a sustainable impulse in the world of tomorrow.
Well wishes to the world’s new Lago flag bearers.
Isabelle at ID DECO in Toulouse (France)
And Kees of STUPENDO in Amsterdam and Leiderdorp (Netherlands).