Last Sunday I ended up in the Orange flagship store in the heart of Rotterdam. Orange claims you can ‘experience’ their brand in this huge shop and guess what: you can!

At first sight it looks like any other telecom shop - lots of mobile phones in a crisp décor.

However, proceed and you’ll find a coffee shop called ‘Orange café’ in the back of the store. Take your macchiato upstairs where Orange has created a couple of lounge areas - they call them ‘living rooms’ -  full of sponsored gadgets. A free wifi connection is available, so you can even get some work done while you’re there. Did you forget your laptop at home? No problem - Orange also provides workstations.

‘Living room’ in Orange flagship store (Picture by Alper)

Not for free, but just as interesting are the meeting rooms. Together with Samsung and Motorola, Orange set up two slick meeting rooms crammed with high tech. I’d say it’s a sweet spot to present your brilliant web 2.0 concept to investors. Prices start at €350,- for half a day.

While reclining in one of the lounge areas I realised that flagship stores are indeed a very powerful way to express a brand’s identity. This is particularly interesting for companies whose products are intangible, like Orange.

Products of web business are intangible as well, so why don’t they open flagship stores? Take Google for example, they already provide me with tools to get my work done, so why don’t they also provide me with a space to work in? There’s a couple of benefits to this:

1. It lowers the bar for people to get to know new tools.
   In general people are not very keen on changes. Working with new and unfamiliar tools (Google Docs, Google Talk etc.) scares them. That’s why most of these tools are only popular amongst a small group of people. Opening up recognisable stores can help overcome this fear.
2. It gives shape to a company’s identity.
   Companies have an identity, that is, what they’d like to be. They also have an image, that is, how they’re seen by customers. Obviously, the gap between a company’s identity and its image should not be too large. Flagship stores can bridge this gap.
3. People are probably willing to pay for it.
   Flagship stores are expensive but they don’t have to be unprofitable. I believe people are willing to pay for both coffee and a working space.

Clearly, opening flagship stores is far too expensive and risky for small companies. But, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, what are you waiting for?

You might have noticed that we are getting started slowly. I thought an update might be in order.

We have finished our about pages and also added OpenId login for comments. I have written a couple of posts, and the others are busy writing their first posts (or so they tell me…).

This is stilll quite ?eta. What remains to be done?

Design

We have a truly kickass design in store designed by our very own Martijn. Of course none of us have any prior experience in creating Wordpress themes, but we’re confident that it can’t be very difficult.

Launch Event

When we are well and ready, we are going to host a launch event to inaugurate this blog. Suggestions for venues and support are welcome. Announcements will be posted here and on Upcoming.

Welcome to the Four Starters weblog. You can expect some get your feet wet posts here in the coming days while we get stuff in order.

Watch this space. Definitely.