Nouveau Monde, the Origins 🎶

Welcome to "nouveau monde", sort of a "nouveau genre" newsletter to better understand how to make the world better through the lens of retail. This is #21 and this is a special edition !

This week is a special edition where we have a little pause in our curation and go back to the origins of this newsletter !

Things move fast in retail and sustainability, we’re really happy to help you get the right tips and be inspired!

Read, like, share, subscribe :-)

Today's newsletter is xxxx words, a 4-minute read.

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Why nouveau monde ?

Anthony’s point of view

As you may have noticed, I like music and I’m greatly influenced by it. Yes, I’m the one that puts on a song at the bottom of each edition of nouveau monde (you can find THE playlist here :-) )

I got an awareness shock at the end of 2019 about the climate and sustainability emergency. Well, I’ve worked for a long time in that area but in the last years, I've mostly worked on other stuff…

Then, in 2020, the lockdown gave me a lot of time to think about what I wanted to do and where I wanted to find a sense of utility…

And, as always with music, in April 2020, in the middle of the lockdown, one of my favorite electronic music producer, Rone, released a new track called nouveau monde.

And I heard this sentence from the French Fantasy author Alain Damasio :

Si tes modes de perception et d'attention au monde n'ont pas été modifiés

Et ils sont souvent modifiés par l'art

Alors ton comportement ne va pas changer

C'est pas le fait de savoir ou d'être informé qui te fait changer

C'est le fait que tout à coup ta perception a ... tourné

If your ways of perceiving and paying attention to the world have not been changed

And they are often modified by art

So your behavior won't change

It's not the fact of knowing or being informed that makes you change

It's the fact that all of a sudden your perception has ... turned

I then felt that I needed to do something to help people shift. In this song, Alain Damsio talks about the need for people to feel deeply in their body and soul the need of change and that he thinks that art can help to do so.

Well, I’m not good at art (apart from listening to some music) so I got the idea to launch a newsletter to help people understand that things are moving, and moving fast indeed in the sustainability and climate space.

I’m really proud and thankful to be able to do so with my old teammate Phil, as I consider he’s the most visionary guy about what’s happening in the retail industry.

And I really believe that companies and especially the ones in retail that have a direct contact with customers may have a great impact and change the world for the better, if they are shown the way to do it.

That’s also why I recently founded my Company, Mestawet, whose goal is to help companies develop positive impact projects.

This is also in a way our mission in this newsletter and we thought it was important to make a little pause in our weekly watching and reporting to let you understand our ambition with nouveau monde.

Read, share, LISTEN, subscribe and cheers :-)

yes, we got the opportunity to do a newsroom meeting for the first time since the launch of the newsletter :-)

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Phil’s catch

I’m thankful to the people who gave me a chance to work with Anthony. It’s been a perfect match in order to accomplish the missions we were in charge of together, going through a lot of learnings (by doings), lots of good stress and fun.

We’ve discovered the Retail industry in many ways: locations, locations (we’ve been in quite a number of cities and countries), various verticals, new business models.

We both like to think that the Retail, at the front of the terrible period we were forced to live, have the keys of making a new better world. A ‘nouveau monde’ as he said. We’re happy to have the opportunity to keep observing together what we think is interesting, discuss it, and share it with you, dear audience.

Without enthusiasm, this world seems so sad. We hope you’ll catch our energy here and appreciate what we try to accomplish here.

Anthony said we’d make a pause but I wanted to share something anyways (you should have some homework until next week, right?!). “Connecting the dots”. 2020 was a terrible year and we’re still trying to figure out if 2021 will close the case of what we’ve seen happening. GWI, a London based market research company founded in 2009, made a consumer trends I think you’d like to read and compare with actuals. You can download it here. Let us know what you see: we welcome comments in here.

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Bonus track by Anthony

I couldn’t leave you without this masterpiece by the same Rone and the same voice of Alain Damasio, so profound and true. “Evastez-vous !” says my friend Béatrice :-)