Everybody knows how much I love vending machines, particularly for airports and hotels. They take up very little space, have little or no staff costs, can delivery huge entertainment value and very importantly can deal with the peaks & troughs in airport or hotel traffic.
So here are some new vending machine ideas I’ve seen floating around.
Rollasole was basically created for nightclubs. When women get sore feet from wearing those obscenely high heels, they can buy a cheap pair of flatties from a vending machine & still keep partying. Great idea for nightclubs but think 
outside the box a little about when women get sore feet – its not only when out partying. One of the problems when you’re flying is your feet swell up so what about Rollasole style vending machines in airports – or for that matter a small version in planes? Admittedly the idea would take some tweaking because I doubt metallic silver & gold ballet slippers would be much of a fashion statement inflight. But the concept is there.
Free Samples in Vending Machines
Everybody loves samples, well I do anyway, and there’s probably few better ways for an airport to negate that “tourist trap” image than by actually giving something free.
There are a few vending machines out there which dispense goods if you watch a 30 second commercial but there’s also a new model in Belgium which doesn’t even ask for that – the products are simply free.
The free sample dispensing vending machines, called the Boobox, is the brainchild of Fosfor, a Belgian marketing agency.
In a nutshell how they work is the customer sends an SMS to a number & they’re sent an activation code to get a product from the vending machine.
The machine has a built in cooler so samples can include chilled items.
Booboxes will apparently start appearing in train stations around Belgium this year.
Jeans
A Hamburg based jeans brand opened their first vending machine in Florence last year and now have plans to expand these to airports & train stations.
Shoes
I’ve posted before about Onitsuka Tiger’s Sneaker Vending Machine but it does deserve another mention. The concept is terrific for new product launches because of the attention it commands and the story value which goes with the purchase.
Print on Demand Books
There are already book vending machines out there but they are limited to the big bestsellers because they sell physical books. There are also audiobook & ebook download stations but they require a reader. The Espresso Book Machine beats both of these hands down – it prints whatever book you want & binds it in a couple of minutes.
Currently the machines have access to 500,000 different books and can print at a rate of over 100 pages per minute. For comparison sakes a copy of that monolithic Crime & Punishment would take 9 minutes to produce. Most best sellers would be done in a couple of minutes – printed, pressed, glued & cut into a pristine book to take on the plane or train.
The list of EBM’s can be found here and its interesting to note that they’ve already hit Australia.
