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As a veteran
of the marketing business, Mike O'Neill figured that
some people would question the slogan he chose to
promote the first product he created himself. The
product is called the Jimi, and the slogan is "The
Wallet for People Who Hate Wallets." And in fact
a lot of people — even a guy at the factory where
Jimis are made — suggested to him that it was a bad
idea to associate a consumer good with, you know,
hatred. But O'Neill stuck with the slogan, because
while the Jimi looks like a chipper and cheery little
plastic box, it is actually a thing with an ideology
and a mission.
O'Neill, who lives in San
Francisco and worked for
several advertising agencies
in England and the United
States before starting his
Jimi project, professes to
have hated wallets for a
long time. He found them
ridiculous, and to avoid
them he would resort to strategies
like keeping his credit cards
in a little box meant for
a computer video card. "Every
third or fourth time I took
it out," he says, "people
were like, 'That's a great idea."' Although he had
no particular experience as an industrial designer,
he was a design fan (admiring the products of
Apple and the Japanese brand Muji, for instance)
and decided that perhaps there were others like
him looking for a wallet alternative.
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This is is where
the ideology and mission come into it: the Jimi
(which sells for about $16) does not hold as
much stuff as a traditional wallet, and that
is by intent. It's a bit slimmer than a regular
wallet and unfolds to reveal two compartments,
one with a money clip, the other to hold credit
cards. "Do Not Overload," the instruction sheet
warns, "Jimi holds five cards. . .plus three
folded bills." And since it's made of hard plastic,
you can't simply fatten it up by stuffing more
cards and receipts and other things into it,
as you can with a normal wallet. Basically, if
you want to use a Jimi, you will have to play
by Jimi's rules, and that probably means you
have to pare down. As O'Neill says, this is a
borderline anti-American notion. "It's funny
how many people write us and say, 'If I could
just get one more card in there.. .
He was also
influenced by "Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the
Way We Make Things," the book by the sustainability
advocates William McDonough and Michael Braungart,
and thus the Jimi is made of recycled plastic,
in a "sweatshop free" factory in Massachusetts,
and 1 percent of sales revenue is donated to
environmental organizations. The anti-wallet
wallet, available in a variety of colors, arrived
in 2005, quickly finding its way into boutiques
like Flight 001 in New York and the MoMA Design
Store and winning praise on blogs like Cool Hunting
and TreeHugger, which focuses on hip-looking,
ecofriendly products. There are now about 30,000
Jimis in circulation.
But an interesting thing
happened to the Jimi as it took its mission into
the marketplace. About a month after its debut,
O'Neill heard from Outside magazine, which included
the Jimi in a feature on handy outdoor gizmos.
Since it was designed to be durable and water-resistant
and could be attached to a lanyard, the Jimi
made sense as a sports wallet — useful while
cycling or skiing or other great-outdoors activities.
Suddenly, O'Neill remarks, Jimi was a "lightweight
tool." There's a certain logic to this: it's
hard to imagine masses of American consumers
willing to cut up enough credit cards to comply
with Jimi's demands as a full-on wallet replacement,
but it's easy to imagine lots of people deciding
that they can get by with only a few cards while
snowboarding. Jimi had met the consumer with
a message of paring down, and the consumer had
said, "Yeah, I'll take one of those."
This sounds
like an ideological defeat, but O'Neill says
that he regularly hears anecdotes about people
who started out using the Jimi as an extra wallet
and eventually became full converts — they have "crossed
over," as he puts it. Besides, even if the product
is selling to some people who don't actually
hate wallets, it is also selling better than
he expected it to. Which is, of course, another
part of the Jimi's mission.
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