Great Business Idea (TM)

Away in some near-future vaguely-Gibsonian alternative universe, there goes an industry like this: the personal shopping channel. Back here, ‘Personal shoppers’ are well-known amongst… well, basically, the rich. So maybe I wouldn’t know, but nevertheless the personal shopping channel is not something that’s attracted my attention.

The basic idea is this; the personal shopper heads out into the brave new world of… gosh, I don’t know, Regent Street, Soho, wherever such people go these days. Meanwhile, they’re videoed by the shopping channel people, who – moments later, in a nearby Starbucks – cut together and upload footage of the shopper’s selections. Uploaded solely for the individual paying for the personal shopper, of course.

Is anyone doing this? They should be. It feels so… frivolously, gloriously, pointlessly right.

5 thoughts on “Great Business Idea (TM)”

  1. Coming soon … “Personal Shopping Channel Live”. Personal shoppers with Wifi-enabled video cameras hit Regent Street, while their client sits in Alderley Edge giving real-time instructions. (“Not the green, the blue. And that Louis Vitton number that’s just gone out of shot”).

  2. Exactly. The only thing I was wondering was… if you’ve time to watch a live stream, just go and do the shopping yourself. So editing the stream into a little package made sense.
    I wonder if anyone’s doing this. If not, it’s the sort of thing people used to make up for Wired columns. Umm… ‘allegedly.’

  3. Since personal shopping is, I imagine, at least partly about avoiding dirty, messy, smelly reality and mediating it through the filter and comfortable aspect ratios afforded by one’s latest flat-plasma-super-projection-crystal-midnight-blacks-and-vibrant-super-surround-digital tellies rather than avoiding the pleasures of consumerism, then the live TV personal shopping would seem perfectly reasonable. You could also do international live personal shopping – haggle in that foreign bazaar without having to actually leave the comfort of your home country and having to deal with their exotic toilet fittings.. [actually if you used interactive facilities you could really genuinely run this because you’d have someone trailing behind buying the orders after the goods have been seen…]

  4. The point of a personal shopper is not just to save you time and shoe leather, but also to recommend clothing you might not normally think to wear. There’s a style advice aspect to it.

    And I’ve recently discovered that they’re usually free in department stores, which is just my idea of hell.

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