Marcel van Dijk from Oogenlust visited us this week. He joined us on our adventure with the building and, since its opening, he has always ensured that it contains the most spectacular displays of greenery. We thought it was about time we exchanged ideas about how it was all going. I told him that, slowly but surely, more people were coming in and he told me that he had visited a couple of times (in secret) and that sometimes there was no trace of any customers. Now I’m always quite quick at dealing with disappointments – if very few people come in after the design week and then more and more come afterwards, I can hold on to the idea that the numbers will only increase. A vicious remark of that sort, that there are still very few customers, forces you to face the facts in a healthy way.
The funny thing is: at no time did Marcel show any doubts about the project and the benefit of his contribution. A long run-up was also discussed and taken into the equation. In addition, we also noted that Oogenlust had clients who were much more interesting than ours from a commercial point of view. Our clients are progressive, with no money, whereas his are a little more conservative, with money. Fortunately, a man came round the next day. I do not know whether he was progressive or conservative, but he did simply buy a table and a cupboard, thus dispelling all those kinds of worries.
What do you do at Christmas time if you have a shop and you have to play shopkeeper? Create a Christmas atmosphere. Now it’s not very practical to be dragging Christmas trees and baubles about, the thought of it alone is not very appealing. Marcel agreed that we just needed to put up some very large trees, so large that they didn’t need any baubles in them. No sooner said than done, a lorry with a gripper delivered the trees to us. The driver was in quite a bad mood due to the road diversions. For over an hour, he had driven around the neighbouring district of Drents Dorp, built to house the Philips employees from Drenthe who found work in these buildings, among other things, before he could offload the trees just in front of our office. The trees are here now. Perhaps we will still hang some lamps made of poor man’s silver on them, which we made with the Glass Museum. After all, they look just like baubles.
And now, we just have to keep track of how many customers we can bring in with our combined efforts.
This post is also available in: NL
« Back to blog