Great deals or hidden scam?

February 19, 2010 - 11:27 AM by · 2 Comments
Filed under: Technology 

The courts have ruled that the service is legal, but it still leaves a muddled taste in my mouth. I’m talking about Free.co.il, a popular Israeli auction site that works more like the Lotto than eBay.

You can’t help but be drawn in by Free.co.il’s home page which promises a Sony Playstation for NIS 99, a MacBook Air for NIS 299, and even a brand new Mazda 3 for a steal at only NIS 899. Who wouldn’t want to play with deals like these?

At first, it would be hard to distinguish Free.co.il from a traditional eBay-style auction site: you place your bids on items for sale and the highest bidder within the auction’s time frame wins. Unlike eBay, though, you have to pay for your bids. The cost of each bid varies; for the MacBook, it’s NIS 20 (about $5). It’s higher for bigger ticket items.

So, let’s say you bid 20 times to win that MacBook. You’ll pay NIS 20 x 20 or NIS 400 ($105). Then you pay the price of the unit (NIS 299 or $80), plus shipping of NIS 75 ($20) written in tiny letters on a separate page you have to click to see). Your total cost: NIS 774 ($206). That’s still way less than the retail price of NIS 8,899 ($2,400) at Apple’s Tel Aviv outlet, but it’s not the NIS 299 that was initially advertised.

And what if you don’t win? Then you lose the NIS 400 entirely. That’s how Free.co.il can offer such low prices.

Still, if you place your bids right (and there is a whole section on “bidding strategies” on the site), and you’re willing to stick with it and spend hours aggressively placing last minute bets, you will win eventually (hopefully for an item you actually want). So, even if you wind up spending NIS 2,000 bidding on several items before winning one that’s valued at NIS 10,000, you’re still getting the product at an 80% discount.

There’s one other trick Free.co.il has up its digital sleeve. If two people bid the same amount, both bids are canceled. That means that the highest “unique” bid wins. You can see who’s placing what bids, their initials and even where they live, but not the amount they’re spending. So you never really know if your bid is being burned or not.

Free.co.il is entirely in Hebrew, but there’s a thriving market of overseas competitors. Is this a good business? Investors seem to think so. One of Free.co.il’s rivals, Swoopo, has raised an astonishing $14 million.

It’s certainly compelling – who wouldn’t want an iPhone at a tenth of the retail price – though I don’t think I’d have the stomach for it (I usually chicken out and click the “Buy it Now” button on eBay). And it peeves me that Free.co.il buries those hefty shipping fees in hard-to-find small print – it makes me wonder what else are they hiding.

But if you’re willing to play by the rules, and you enjoy the thrill of the game, Free.co.il could the 21st century version of “The Price is Right.” All we need now is our own Israeli version of Bob Barker.

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Fashion in a global world

April 23, 2009 - 2:06 PM by · 1 Comment
Filed under: Art, Business, design, Pop Culture 

I imagine for Israeli fashion designer Mirit Weinstock it must be a blast. In a new project on her internet site, she invited her customers worldwide to send in photographs of themselves wearing her clothes.

Fashion becomes real - Mirit Weinstock as worn by New Zealander Daryia Bing.

Fashion becomes real - Mirit Weinstock as worn by New Zealander Daryia Bing.

It’s probably the ultimate accolade for a designer. Rather like a journalist feels when they see some stranger out on the street not only reading one of their articles, but actually commenting on it.

It also actually makes for pretty compulsive viewing to anyone with a vague interest in fashion. Since the website was launched at the end of January, women from over 30 countries have sent in self-portraits of themselves wearing items from Mirit’s collections.

The nice thing about seeing the same clothes on different people from around the world is that they look SO different. In our global world, people often complain that we all wear the same clothes from the same chains, and that we are losing our individuality.

But as Weinstock’s site, Miss Mi, proves, when someone in Italy puts on a Mirit Weinstock jacket, they don’t look the same as the woman from Sweden, or Israel.

It’s a fact that hasn’t gone unnoticed. In a recent interview, Weinstock said: “What interests me is the girl’s fantasy, or the way she views herself. Their interpretation of my fashion is fascinating to me. I take pleasure in seeing how each one is taking it to a place of her own. They often wear the garments in ways that I had not imagined when designing them, which is inspiring!”

Thirty-two-year-old year old Weinstock has been in the fashion business seven years. A Shenkar graduate, she interned at the Alexander McQueen fashion house in London and later joined Maison Lanvin, one of the leading fashion houses in Paris.

She returned to Israel in 2004 and set up her own label of ready to wear fashion, designing out a studio located in Jaffa’s flea market. She launched her first US collection in 2006 and now sells in stores across the US and Europe.

Weinstock came up with the idea for Miss Mi, when she was browsing Flickr one evening. She saw the pictures there and decided to find five women from all over the world to take pictures of themselves in her new spring collection.

She found the participants on Flickr and Facebook, sent them a package of five of her garments and asked them to do self-portraits, expressing their own personal take on the garments. She then used the pictures for her spring catalogue.

Since then, the idea has grown into Miss Mi. Weinstock says the project isn’t just about clothes, it’s about creating a community of women from all over the world, who share their pictures, thoughts, favorite web sites. Etc. etc.

It’ll be interesting to see if other fashion designers pick up on this new marketing tool.

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