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If you are a stylish woman with bohemian sensibilities, then you owe it to yourself to check out Unika Butika. This is a new source for hand-painted handbags, purses, hats, belts and more. Each item is unique- no 2 are alike! What a great way to attract attention with fashion that you’ll just never find at the mall.

Unika Butika offers a large gallery filled with detailed shots of each item so that you know exactly what you are buying. Take a step out of the ordinary and add a fresh new purse or tote to your collection right away.

Great holiday gift idea as well!

Jakob Nielsen has a great new article up called Bridging the Designer–User Gap. I highly recommend this for anyone involved in product design or web development. Consider these observations from the first paragraph:

Designers are not users. Vice-presidents are not users. Users are not designers.

In other words, designers (and v-p’s) should not assume they know anything about what the user needs. Simultaneously, don’t assume that the user knows how to solve his/her own problem, either. Nielsen goes off to explain varying levels of designer/user overlap, and how this can or should impact the design process. Really thought-provoking.

We know all about open souce software. Perhaps it’s inevitable for firms to attempt open source manufacturing as well. Check out OpenMoko, a company launching a completely open-source mobile phone. They unlocked the software which runs the phone, and now are unlocking the case design as well. I’m sure it will be interesting (at the least) to see what comes of this…

 And oh, pretty cool looking phone as well!

This is a bit off topic, but I had to pass it along. Check out some of the worst album covers ever. Actually, the tie-in with marketing is pretty good here— your package will define you in the eyes of the public even moreso than the product inside the package. So be sure that the package doesn’t make a fool of you!

Now this is thinking outside the box:

What a clever idea. Sure, it’s a cutesy design idea, but if you really think about it, it solves all kinds of problems for people who might have a need for portable, inexpensive and easy to set up furniture. For example, millions of college students.

Just to show that there is absolutely no truth to the rumor that ‘everything that can be invented has been invented’… the inventions just keep coming…

Meet Nudar, a plug-in for your GPS which allows you to find strip clubs wherever you are. Now, I’m not saying everyone should run off and use this, I’m just saying that the people who came up with this made a few astute observations which they then turned into a unique product:

• strip clubs are often frequented by business travelers
• business travelers often don’t know the local area
• business travelers increasingly use GPS to get around
• Mash-up time! Build a database of locales (which I’m sure incur charges to be listed), and create a plug-in for GPS devices, and then sell or give that away to the users.

Anyone could have thought of this, but they didn’t.

Here’s a fun post from podcastingnews.com (there really is a site for everything). Check out your 2007 Holiday Guide To iCr@p which hilariously documents some of the more dubious products out there in the iPod accessories universe. It seems to me you can find even more useless gadgets over in the ‘USB accessories’ world, but there sure is a lot of iPod stuff of dubious utility as well.

Socks for your iPod? Sure, you need those. Your iPod gets cold feet too, every time you ask it to play Barry Manilow’s greatest hits. I do have to say– cool packaging on the socks.

You would have thought the whole iPod thing would have jumped the shark by now, but the fact is iPod is still the best music player out there, with really no contenders in site at the moment. So the gravy train keeps rolling. Now we just need some cool new accessories.

Facebook’s recently launched and much-maligned ‘Beacon’ program really appears to be turning into a debacle. Beocon lets Facebook track and report on the actions of subscribers even when they leave the site. As originally launched, opting out of this reporting was rather cumbersome. Now, more bad privacy news: Facebook Admits Ad Service Tracks Logged-Off Users. The title pretty much says it all.

Facebook’s Zuckerberg has been the web 2.0 golden boy in recent months, but he has really put his foot in it with this one. Seems to have forgetten that trust is dearly earned and easily squandered. They should be all-hands-on-deck trying to kill this pr disaster before it kills them. And by kill the pr disaster I mean kill or severaly crimp the spying aspect of their program, not just try to BS their way out of trouble.

By now you may have heard of Chery Automobile, which is a Chinese car maker with global ambitions. They’ve been growing and improving quality rapidly, and sell within China and export to some third-world countries, but their sights are squarely set on the US market. Think for a moment of the implications of a) a major new competitor entering the US car market, and b) that competitor enters with the ‘China price’. Could really shake things up.

At this point, it seems that Chery is mostly settling for various clones of popular western cars. In fact, there has been controversy that the name (suspiciously) too closely resembles ‘Chevy’, and may eventually cause some confusion. It would be nice if they made an effort to bring more originality to their venture instead of just copying, but they will probably eventually get there. So what’s your opinion of driving a Chinese-made car?

The other day I mentioned a really thought-provoking article I had come across, but I couldn’t find the link at the time. Never fear, I found it. Check out: Stop Perfuming the Pig: Why “real” marketing is done before the product is created.

The overall theme is that marketers tend to overlook the Product part of the 4 P’s, focusing too often instead on Promotion. Consider this excerpt:

Peter Drucker makes it clear that marketing isn’t a product promotion strategy; it’s a product definition strategy, that “marketing” is creating a product that sells itself, creating a product that people want to buy; creating an environment that encourages people to buy.

Over the years however, industries and agencies and marketing experts have worn away the original meaning of marketing and cheapened it. Marketing now means many things to many people but apparently not what Drucker meant. For most people nowadays, marketing means t-shirts, coffee mugs, trinkets, trade show trash, and tchotchkes.

I attend many marketing conferences and invariably find that I’m the only one in attendance who seems to be talking about products; everyone else is talking about promotion. At one such marketing conference, an attendee in the front row asked every single speaker, “How does what you’ve talked about generate awareness and leads?” He didn’t know what to ask me because I hadn’t once used any of the marketing keywords: awareness, leads, campaigns, programs, spin, or buzz. Apparently to him I was a product guy and not a marketing guy. But promotion isn’t marketing.

Read the article, makes you think.