They’re Beautiful!™ is a lovingly detailed virtual flower delivery service. As with online greeting card services, users are encouraged to send greetings to their loved ones. However, instead of sending a card, the person sends a one-of-a-kind bouquet of flowers that the recipient can keep “alive” through attentive care.
What people are saying about They’re Beautiful!
“Whatever magic is behind this wonderful application/service, it’s working. There’s definitely the Jenny Lam touch on the graphics here – everything is pixel perfect and drop dead gorgeous.” — Long Zheng, I Started Something
“I love that Jackson Fish’s home page banner is filling in with the “shops” they’re building — a neighborhood block with a fish monger and now, a flower market. Makes me want to visit.” — Marc Hedlund, O’Reilly Radar
“The coolest feature is the ability to embed the virtual gifts in another website, as I’ve done above. The “products” are visually stunning… …I’m going to refrain from watering my flowers. I’m hoping the wilting process is as visually interesting as the flowers themselves. Can’t wait to see if they actually show dead flowers in the widget.” — Michael Arrington, TechCrunch
“…the flowers are awfully pretty and the execution is flawlessly light of touch. Perhaps that’s where They’re Beautiful (and Jackson Fish Market) part company with the old school – they collect just enough data to make it work and they’re tapping into a very contemporary meme – virtual gifts. And the idea that these virtual objects will simply wilt away and die is quite a poignant comment on the ephemeral nature of the Web – live, 2.0, semantic or otherwise.” — Michael Clarke, Green Tea Ice Cream
“If you receive a postcard with an IP address link to click, hit the delete key instead. However, a bouquet of virtual flowers from They’re Beautiful is another story entirely.” — Security Garden
and…
“The idea may seem a little odd.” — John Cook, Venture Blog, Seattle Post-Intelligencer
They’re Beautiful!™ was created by Jackson Fish Market. It is the first in a series of Branded Software Experiences (whitepaper here, index of branded software experiences here) from Jackson Fish.
Sponsorship
We’d like to thank Vosges Haut Chocolat for becoming the inaugural sponsor of They’re Beautiful! If you are interested in becoming a sponsor of They’re Beautiful! or in working with the team at Jackson Fish Market to build a new branded interactive consumer experience please check out our sponsorship page or contact: sponsor [at] jacksonfish [dot] com. We’ll be happy to answer any questions you may have.
Colophon
Many things went into the construction of They’re Beautiful! Here’s a few:
- They’re Beautiful! is built using Ruby on Rails, MySQL, and Apache.
- Walter had never built anything in Rails when we started this project.
- The site is hosted by the folks at SliceHost
- Each of the flowers that make up the bouquets was made by hand out of Bazzill Basics scrapbooking paper except for the sunflower petals which were made out of tissue paper. All the flowers were scanned to create the bouquets you see on the site.
- We had fun spending $68.79 at the PaperZone on raw materials and tools.
- We ate a lot of Vietnamese food during the development of the site.
- Music at JFM Headquarters was provided by Rhapsody, Napster, iTunes, and KCRW-FM.
- One day Jenny played “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers” and laughter ensued.
- Nisha Kelem the fabulous talent behind Fleurish, a fantastic Seattle florist, was a big help giving us one of her mornings so we could try and steal a little of her magical flower arranging talent.
- Hillel increased his flower identification abilities by 300%.
- Firebug is THE indispensable CSS debugging tool.
- Our friends and family provided excellent feedback in the days preceding the launch.
- Over the course of development we were distracted by Wii Tennis (and lately Wii Golf), the Lego Corner Café, and uncov.com.