At Work
09.04.2009
T and A have been very busy during the last weeks in order to get the Garden Shuttle going and I can say, that I am quite impressed by their achievements.
With the pictures we made during the last visit to Siem Reap, a flyer (actually two, one in Khmer, one in English) has been produced, which is distributed to the more well doing households in Siem Reap in order to raise awareness of the service and to aquire customers.
An interesting story by the way: Initially, it was planned to put our creation of the Khmer-German flag at the right bottom corner of the flyer. The director of the pressroom, however, was very reluctant to do so. He was afraid, that cambodian officials would consider this to be an insult to the country and that they might impose sanctions. Now the Khmer flag is at the very top of the flyer and hopefully noone will object. But then again, this is not really to laugh about. If any official gets the impression, he could do the same business as the Garden Shuttle, he will most likely not hesitate to give us major problems. One of the threats, we still need to work on...
But for now it is good to see, that T is organizing the business processes very well. In the early morning, helpers show up to clean and pack the products and to put them into the baskets for transportation and delivery. This is no matter of course, since on the markets products are usually simply handed over more or less the way the are. Cleaning, packing, sorting by quality, and using special baskets for transportation are already pretty sophisticated marketing methods in this part of the world. But we thought that they were certainly helpful to underline the quality of the products and to give our customers a good impression of the service.
Also, the logistical problems of organizing the different activities are by far not trivial any more. Getting the right products from the farmers in time, finding customers, arranging the transportation of the products, and managing some kind of controlling (just to mention a few of the tasks involved) is already more, than some much better educated people in other countries could perform. As I said, I am quite impressed by the recent development, and I hope, that all these efforts will pay off adequately.
After the products are prepared for delivery, the drivers come and start the distribution on their bicycles. They drive to the customers, who have ordered products for the respective day and hand them over. Besides, they always keep an open eye for potentially new customers. T managed to get special jackets for them, to identify them as Garden Shuttle drivers to the customers (who are often afraid of strangers, that might only try to find good locations for burglery) and to make the service more visible to the public in Siem Reap.
Actually the jackets were supposed to be green like the baskets and according to the idea of a garden and its mostly green products. Luckily, T discovered in time, that green jackets are used by the local garbage collectors downtown Siem Reap. Since we definitely wanted to avoid any reputational connection to the waste disposal business, blue seemed to be a very nicely looking alternative.
T and A have been very busy during the last weeks in order to get the Garden Shuttle going and I can say, that I am quite impressed by their achievements.
With the pictures we made during the last visit to Siem Reap, a flyer (actually two, one in Khmer, one in English) has been produced, which is distributed to the more well doing households in Siem Reap in order to raise awareness of the service and to aquire customers.An interesting story by the way: Initially, it was planned to put our creation of the Khmer-German flag at the right bottom corner of the flyer. The director of the pressroom, however, was very reluctant to do so. He was afraid, that cambodian officials would consider this to be an insult to the country and that they might impose sanctions. Now the Khmer flag is at the very top of the flyer and hopefully noone will object. But then again, this is not really to laugh about. If any official gets the impression, he could do the same business as the Garden Shuttle, he will most likely not hesitate to give us major problems. One of the threats, we still need to work on...
But for now it is good to see, that T is organizing the business processes very well. In the early morning, helpers show up to clean and pack the products and to put them into the baskets for transportation and delivery. This is no matter of course, since on the markets products are usually simply handed over more or less the way the are. Cleaning, packing, sorting by quality, and using special baskets for transportation are already pretty sophisticated marketing methods in this part of the world. But we thought that they were certainly helpful to underline the quality of the products and to give our customers a good impression of the service.Also, the logistical problems of organizing the different activities are by far not trivial any more. Getting the right products from the farmers in time, finding customers, arranging the transportation of the products, and managing some kind of controlling (just to mention a few of the tasks involved) is already more, than some much better educated people in other countries could perform. As I said, I am quite impressed by the recent development, and I hope, that all these efforts will pay off adequately.
After the products are prepared for delivery, the drivers come and start the distribution on their bicycles. They drive to the customers, who have ordered products for the respective day and hand them over. Besides, they always keep an open eye for potentially new customers. T managed to get special jackets for them, to identify them as Garden Shuttle drivers to the customers (who are often afraid of strangers, that might only try to find good locations for burglery) and to make the service more visible to the public in Siem Reap.Actually the jackets were supposed to be green like the baskets and according to the idea of a garden and its mostly green products. Luckily, T discovered in time, that green jackets are used by the local garbage collectors downtown Siem Reap. Since we definitely wanted to avoid any reputational connection to the waste disposal business, blue seemed to be a very nicely looking alternative.
posted by Nihilissimus at 6:41 PM
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