Robin’s World Entertainment Company designs and executes large-scale strategic campaigns for a select group of sensitive, high-level clients in the public and private sectors. Our primary areas of expertise are tourism, hospitality, food and beverage, live music, and themed entertainment. We help our clients and partners take advantage of unique business opportunities whose success depends on sophisticated government relations, cross-border public relations expertise, and a scientific approach to branding, pricing, and positioning. We work directly with top government officials and the chief executives of large private corporations, primarily in mainland China.
What we do: Empiricism is our primary approach to designing product, pricing, positioning, and publicity strategies. We evaluate markets and test our ideas using proprietary economic forecasting models that are built around empirical evidence from peer-reviewed scientific journals. Our positioning and pricing predictions integrate empirical results from economics, statistics, marketing science, environmental science, psychology, sensory science, and cognitive neuroscience.
We apply creative economic and business ingenuity to design projects from beginning to end. Elements of projects typically include business plans, financial projections, strategic design, market positioning, pricing, marketing, sales, press releases and other public relations materials, and a digital SEO program designed by the top experts in the U.S. for online brand building and reputation management.
How we work: Robin’s World Entertainment typically adds three new projects per year and devotes the majority of its resources to their initial launches. The remaining company resources are devoted to maintaining existing projects. The average length of the launch phase of a project is three to four months. The company aims to add one new project each fall, one each winter, and one each spring. Some projects may be so large that they preclude adding others in the same year. The company bills a fixed per-project fee, which varies depending on the project. The fee is payable half in advance and half upon completion, plus out-of-pocket expenses. We also typically take a small to medium-sized equity stake in our for-profit projects.
Our own brands: We also invest some of our resources in a select group of wholly owned brands and product lines under the Robin’s World Entertainment umbrella that will be launched on the Chinese market, such as branded food and drink products, gifts, and travel accessories.
The first of these to launch will be the Kulangsu Academy brand, a line of musical products still under development that will be available for purchase only in Robin’s World Entertainment venues on the island, beginning in late 2017. The flagship product will be the Vio, designed by Jing: a novel instrument that combines the maneuverability of a violin with the deep resonance of a viola. Four-string and five-string instruments will be available. Each instrument will be custom-made to the musician’s body shape, musical style, and tone and color preferences.
Children’s instruments will also be available, as well as a light, virtually indestructible case that is custom-made to the exact size of the instrument in order to minimize weight. Custom pickups, headphones, performance clothing, musical equipment, and live music recordings will also be sold under the Kulangsu Academy label. Patent applications for various elements of Jing’s groundbreaking Vio and case technology are currently in the drafting stage. When Jing’s school launches, it will assume leadership of the Kulangsu Academy brand.
The launch of the Kulangsu Academy brand and retail space in the newly rebuilt Kulangsu Concert Hall will be the fall 2017 project of Robin’s World Entertainment. Jing’s string instrument school and an educational park themed around time travel are two of the winter 2017 projects currently under consideration.
Whom we serve: The company’s first project of 2017 was for the Administrative Committee of Kulangsu, China. Robin’s World Entertainment created the official government visitor’s guide to the UNESCO World Heritage Site, designed and edited by Robin Goldstein, and the company manages the promotion of island tourism and the government’s English-language public relations, tourist relations, social media, and digital identity.
Other clients include Xiamen Air, China’s fifth-largest airline and a SkyTeam partner, with a fleet of 150 aircraft serving 70 destinations worldwide from its hub in Xiamen; Jiangnan Plastic Mould, a multi-national public corporation based in Jiangsu province that manufactures the front ends of all BMW cars in China; and the American Football League of China (AFLC), China’s oldest and largest American football league, based in Shanghai.
In his work for the University of California, Robin Goldstein also created and launched the websites, digital identities, and SEO strategies for the University of California Agricultural Issues Center and the Robert Mondavi Institute Center for Wine Economics of the University of California, Davis.
Who we are:
Robin Goldstein, Co-Founder and President, is the founder of Fearless Critic Media, America’s second-largest series of print restaurant guides, with 25 books in print covering 8 U.S. cities. Robin founded Fearless Critic in 2005. In 2008, he led the company to a successful $1.4 million acquisition deal with Workman Publishing in New York.
Robin is the author of several books, including The Wine Trials, the world’s bestselling guide to inexpensive wine. He is now the Principal Economic Counselor of the University of California Agricultural Issues Center, where he publishes technical academic work and produces economic analysis and projections for high-level clients including the California state government. He is also an Associate of the Robert Mondavi Institute Center for Wine Economics at the University of California, Davis. In 2017, in conjunction with his research for the University of California, Robin is giving a series of eight scientific lectures (in Berkeley, Antwerp, Copenhagen, Padova, Chicago, Davis, New Haven, and Bordeaux) about his experimental research on pricing and consumer behavior in the restaurant, wine, and beer industries.
Previously, Robin has been Associate in the Media Group of the international management consulting firm McKinsey & Company in New York, where he completed the Firm’s “MiniMBA” program; Summer Associate in the U.S. Capital Markets group of the “magic circle” London law firm Allen & Overy; Adjunct Professor of Law and Economics at the University of the Pacific in Sacramento, California; and Visiting Scholar in Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. While at Yale Law School, Robin was President of the Yale Law and Technology Society and an Editor of the Yale Journal of International Law.
He has earned a certificate in cooking from the French Culinary Institute in New York and a WSET level 3 sommelier certificate from the International Wine Center in New York. He was the winner of Yale University’s “Y50K” entrepreneurship competition in 2004, was voted one of the “Heeb Hundred” up-and-coming Jews in 2010, and became a Fellow of the American Association of Wine Economists in 2013. Also in 2013, Robin was selected by the National Committee on US-China Relations to the US-China Young Leaders’ Forum, where he remains an active participant every year.
Robin’s published writing includes six books about food, wine, and beer; scientific papers in a variety of journals, including the statistics journal Chance and Frontiers in Decision Neuroscience; and popular articles on many international mass media platforms, including China Daily, The Guardian, Men’s Health, Metro International, and Condé Nast’s Concierge.com. He has also published as a hotel, restaurant, and travel critic for more than 30 travel guidebooks in the Fodor’s, UpClose, and Let’s Go series. He was the weekly food critic for the New Haven Advocate, the monthly critic for PLAY magazine, and a regular contributor to the New York Times “Freakonomics” blog.
Robin’s training is in neuroscience, law, and economics. He has an A.B. magna cum laude from Harvard University (in neuroscience and philosophy) and a J.D. from Yale Law School (with a focus on law and economics, cross-registering for business courses at the Yale School of Management). His next book, The Bullshit Horizon, is a popular printing of his Ph.D. thesis in Economics from the University of Bordeaux, France, which he will publicly defend in Bordeaux in April 2018. U.S. and Chinese rights to the publishing and distribution of The Bullshit Horizon are now under the management of Robin’s World Entertainment.
Robin was born in New York City, grew up in Massachusetts, and now splits his time between his university office in California and the Robin’s World headquarters in Kulangsu.
Jing Yang, Co-Founder and Music Director, is one of China’s premier classical musicians. She is a graduate of the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, the Royal Academy of Music, and Mozarteum of Salzburg, all on full scholarship, and became the youngest member of the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra when she was named Associate Principal Violist at age 26. Jing has won prizes at the Bled International Viola Competition, the Bodensee International Viola Competition, and Lionel Tertis International Viola Competition.
When she moved back to China in 2012, Jing was named professor and chair of the viola department at Xiamen University. In 2014, she recorded her first CD, Kulangsu: Through the Strings of Time, which mixed the natural sounds of her home island with the classical and Chinese pop melodies of her childhood.
In 2016, she left her university post in order to start a music production company, Studio Vio, which produced 14 concerts over the course of a year, including the classical crossover concert “Love Songs From The World To Kulangsu” by her band, Jing & Friends (including recording artist Henry Chen and co-founder Robin Goldstein as a guest composer and singer), that filled the 600-seat Kulangsu Concert Hall to capacity four times.
Jing decided to re-focus her time on large-scale concert performance and recording in 2017. She closed Studio Vio and joined Robin’s World Entertainment, which now manages her live appearances and music productions. This year, Jing has appeared in venues as large as the 18,000-seat Taipei Arena. She now performs primarily on her Vio, which is a custom-made German five-string viola that adds a violin’s high E string to the four traditional viola strings.
On August 25, 2017, Jing will have the honor of representing China as a soloist with the Xiamen Philharmonic as part of the Chinese government’s international concert series in honor of the BRICS Summit. In this concert, she will premiere several new works for five-string viola composed especially for Jing’s instrument by the legendary Chinese composer Li Zili. Jing will also return to the studio later in 2017 to record a CD of Li’s five-string viola works.
With Robin’s World taking on management responsibility for Jing’s solo concerts, Jing will spend most of her time on creative artistic production. First, she will create the large-scale indoor and outdoor concert and musical theater productions of her dreams in venues launched by Robin’s World and its partners. Second, backed by the financial structure of Robin’s World Entertainment, she will open a new school, the Kulangsu Academy of Music, that will help bring back the beautiful centuries-old classical music culture of her home island.
Ethan Huang, Business Manager and Chinese administrative contact, is a Xiamen native fluent in English, Mandarin Chinese, and Minnan dialect. He has sales and marketing experience in Canada and China at companies including Spark Production House, Monsoon Communications, Inc., Maple Diversity Communications, Inc., and San’an Optoelectronics Co., Ltd.
Ethan lives in Xiamen and works full-time out of the company headquarters on Kulangsu Island. He has also lived in Kingston, Ontario, and is a graduate of Laurentian University in Canada.
Associates and partners on certain projects include:
Benjamin Rosenblum, Architecture, Interior, and Environmental Design Director, has more than 15 years’ experience in the building and design industries. Ben is a LEED-accredited professional and has a background in sustainable design and energy-efficiency. Ben studied visual arts, political science, and environmental studies at Oberlin College and then received a Master of Architecture from the Yale School of Architecture. After Yale, he was a Senior Designer at TEN Arquitectos in New York and Mexico City and worked on mixed-use, residential, and hospitality projects including the Hotel Americano on the west side of Manhattan and 580 Carroll Street in Brooklyn. More recently, he received a Master of Science in Architecture concentrating in Building Science and Sustainability from UC Berkeley and worked as a Research Associate in the Building Technology and Urban Systems Department of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. In addition to leading the firm, Ben currently teaches interior design at Pratt Institute and sustainable design and building technology at NYIT. Ben Rosenblum Studio is Ben’s design firm, based in New York City, which provides innovative sustainable solutions in response to each project’s unique conditions. The firm carries out residential, commercial, and hospitality design, sustainability and LEED consulting, research in energy-efficient building operations, and print and interactive design.
Morgan Friedman, SEO consultant, is Founder and CEO of The Marketing Scientist. Morgan is one of the world’s leading digital marketing, brand management, and SEO authorities, and he lectures widely around the world on these topics. His clients include top public and private leaders in industry and government. He managed the digital marketing strategy for the winning campaign for the President of Guatemala. Morgan is based in Buenos Aires and New York.
Barnaby Dorfman, SEO consultant, is Founder and CEO of Foodista, former executive at Amazon.com, and founder of Internet Movie Database Pro (IMDB Pro). Barnaby lectures worldwide on SEO strategy. He is also the holder of 17 U.S. patents for location-based digital technology for online directory listing services. Barnaby is based in Seattle.
Giuliano Stiglitz, digital media partner, is a top business executive with broad experience in digital marketing and advertising technology. Giuliano has been CEO of Primia Digital (Orange Advertising Americas) and Founder and CEO of Latam Digital Ventures. Giuliano is based in Miami, Nicaragua, and Italy.
Robin’s World Entertainment of Xiamen Ltd.
25 Tianwei Road, Suite 301
Kulangsu (Gulangyu), Siming District, Xiamen, Fujian, China
A Mainland China Limited Company