I love cross-domain ideas. This time, I’ve brought one from classic menswear. Yeah, really!
For the longest time, I’ve not cared much about clothing – I just bought what I needed. But fashion is a hugely inefficient & wasteful industry – with ~10% of global emissions.
It “clicked” for me once I head a menswear expert talk about the concept of “cost per wear”. Thinking about the cost of clothing not in terms of the cost for a piece, but the cost per wear, corrects my incentives. No longer will I look for the cheapest deal, but I will look for a long-lasting – potentially expensive – piece, because the cost per wear will be lower that for a cheap piece. And I realised, for example, that I own a couple of wool 🐑 sweaters for more than 10 years, but none of my cotton pieces have lasted that long.
This concept transfers quite well to other domains, I think. For sports or kitchen equipment, it might be “cost per use”. For entertainment, I experimented with comparing “cost per hour”.
But what about my work? What should my clients consider about my cost?
Here are some ideas:
- Cost per impact (e. g. ton of plastic recycled, ton of CO2e reduced)
- Cost per active user
- Cost per time/money saved (e. g. through more efficient processes)
- Cost per reduced risk
- Cost per reduced downtime
- Cost per improved NPS/CSAT score point
Isn’t that an interesting consideration? For those of us who want to provide real, lasting value to our clients & partners, I simply love this idea.