Downtown Wine and Spirits is having its big wine sale tomorrow, including about a hundred bottles open for tasting, and a 25% discount if you get 12 or more bottles. They don’t really have to do it, but you can tell they have that big a party because they like the product they sell and they want people to be able to explore it without penalty. (Cleverly, they make their distributors supply and staff the tastings: each wholesaler gets a table and runs a mini-tasting, and the store barely has to do anything but ring up sales and clean up afterwards).
Online font vendor MyFonts.com has a service called WTF, or What The Font? where you upload an image of some text, and it tells you what font it is. It probably doesn’t sell them many more fonts, and I’ll bet it was difficlt to develop, but it seems like it would be useful to their customers– and enhance loyalty.
In both cases, you can tell that these people like the line of work they’re in, and share that enthusiasm with their customers. MyFonts has little font histories, great mockup tools, and so forth: more than they’d need just to sell a few fonts. Downtown Wine and Spirits has a fun website that carries into the store as well: they write their own little reviews and blurbs, have employee recs, and stock a much wider selection of interesting beverages than most places their size, from locally-made soda to that obscure Japanese beer made with sake yeast and red rice.
Secretly Ironic 