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Erik: What do you enjoy so much about pushing others and yourself to make mistakes and try
new things?
Richard: It's all about making mistakes, and I've made a lot of them and they've been embarrassing
and hard, hard to deal with. But you've got to keep doing it. If you're not doing -- if
you're not making mistakes, you're probably not trying anything new so it's a real, if
you want a barometer on whether you're trying to be innovative or pushing the boundaries
then mistakes is the barometer and if you get it wrong -- as long as you don't get it
wrong too often or the same thing wrong more than once, it's a great indicator of the fact
that you're trying things. I think big companies don't like to make mistakes and that's probably
a real problem... but I like some of the things that Facebook are doing, they just roll out
something, they try it, people hate it, they deal with it. You're not making progress if
you're not making mistakes, Alistair Dyson says 'always make new mistakes' and it's completely
right. You have to deal with it as well, you do need to be confident and you do need to
be resilient to criticism, but yeah it's hella important. I remember, one of the biggest
public mistakes that Moo made was the code that we rolled out at some point, it was probably
2007, 2008, made all the sticker book orders that were placed in a period of a week blue,
made the covers -- normally they can come in six different colors or something, pink,
blue, green whatever and it defaulted all the covers to blue and we didn't spot it in
the warehouse and no one saw it. I don't know how many thousand orders all had these blue
covers and people get to choose, so they are essentially paying for a blue one or a green
one or whatever and... so terrible mistake. You know, it wasn't the end of the world,
customers probably would've been a bit pissed, but it wouldn't have been -- they wouldn't
have said 'we're never going to shop with you'. But anyway we were all really worried
about it internally because it said something about our internal practices, that we could
make this kind of mistake and it would physically affect orders. Anyway we sat down and had
a meeting and I remember speaking to our creative director Denise about the email that we were
going to write, so we wrote an email from Little Moo who is our printing software that
personally writes to all of our customers and he made -- he's just a, he's made up,
right? He's not really real, he's just a piece of software and he wrote this kind of very
sweet apology in a sort of a child's voice, he wrote this apology and we got hundred of
emails -- to all these people, we got hundred of emails back, people saying 'Aw, Little
Moo, you know... it doesn't matter, it's okay, I love my sticker book anyway'... it was obviously,
it was so obvious that we'd -- Little Moo is not real, obviously, he's not a robot,
he's written by us, he's an invention of mine, figment of our imaginations and people wrote
back as if this was a real robot mistake, the way that it has been described is - you
can't hear Little Moo because he obviously writes in text only, but the way that it has
being described in the past was his voice was like Japanese Robot Nanny was the way,
kind of this sort of sweet childish view of the world and people reacted in this really
human way and it became a big deal and I think people had an affection with us for this mistake
that we'd made. So, great to make mistakes, even better to make mistakes and apologize
and reconnect with people. It makes you seem human, it allows you to show that you're human
and humans make mistakes, that's what makes us human, right? Otherwise we'd be machines,
so I think... as long as you apologize and you fix things, because we're constantly fixing
things if we make mistakes, it's really important. Do right by our customers.