MURKETING

Vintage trend

In Consumed: Wine chains: Turning a purchase requiring specialized knowledge into something for Everyman — everywhere.

Consumer sophistication is on the rise. Just look at what we drink. Not coffee from a can or mass-market beer, but complex lattes and fine pinot noir. When there is a great enough thirst for sophistication (or anything else), something becomes inevitable: a chain of relevant franchises. Or in the case of wine, a couple of them: one recent list of fast-growing franchises included both Vino 100 (with about 60 locations open) and WineStyles (about 110 locations)….

Continue reading at the NYT site.

What’s up with Lladró?

A week ago I got an email blast from The Future Perfect about “An exclusive launch of Lladró Re-Deco by Jaime Hayon. Today, the Colette newsletter says:

Lladró presents the Re-Deco collection, inspired by the classic figurines such as girls, flowers and animals, but designer Jaime Hayon’s imbuing them with novel finishes and tones and intertwining the pure white of the porcelain with a platinum touch. … And don’t miss the world premiere of the new Lladró candle collection available on the colette eshop.

Back in January, I noted with some surprise the presence of Lladró figurines in Golden Globes goodie bags, and a comment on that post confirmed my own basic assumption: “I don’t know anyone under 65 who collects Lladro.”

So, is Lladró reinvigorating the brand for a hipper, younger, customer who takes cues from tastemaker retail like Future Perfect & Colette? Is it working? Is this a new version of a sort of forward-thinking camp? Can it all be traced back to something Andrew Andrew did in 2004 (see penultimate item here)?

I’m not sure. Interested in hearing more about the new new Lladró, I replied to the Future Perfect’s (unsolicited) blast, twice, but never heard back.

“Ex-soldiers & old tires”

Lots of people write to me to pitch their products, and often they claim to be regular readers of Consumed. Very few of them, however, say that they are writing from Addis Ababa. So I was at least a little curious to get a note from Kiru Alemu, who wrote to “introduce my firm, soleRebels. Based in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, soleRebels, produces the finest artisan-crafted footwear that use nothing but artisan-crafted & eco-sensible materials in their creation.”

It was a really long email, but that sounded interesting-ish, so I continued. When the note transitioned into the products’ background/creation story, and I hit the part about he company “using two things the country has plenty of that are otherwise going to waste: ex-soldiers & old tires,” I finally concluded that this was, in fact, something a little different. A few bits of the email:

In Africa (and in fact throughout the world) simple folks and rebel armies (like Ho Chi Minh’s guys) alike have worn a basic sandal made from discarded tires and rubber. Why? Because they’re comfortable, durable, economical, effective, resourceful — all qualities that are damn good, both for us and for the planet. (Plus they’re damn slip resistant, which, I suppose, is good when you’re climbing around the mountains trying to stage a successful rebel assault …. ) Here in Ethiopia, recycling things is a way of life; in fact we’ve been recycling for years without ever calling it recycling. When you have limited resources everything is valued and valuable, everything has a purpose. Even if it’s not the original purpose it was intended for….

So we re-imagined the traditional selate shoe (tire shoe) in a dynamic new fashion. Combining the expertise of several traditional Ethiopian artisan areas — from hand spinning and hand looming cotton, to footwear hand crafting — we married these with a unique modern sensibility…. We started looking around for some ex-soldiers who had been injured, were recovering, and wanted to work. Finding plenty of disabled ex-soldiers was NOT hard at all. (Sad to say, ex-soldiers, particularly in Africa, are often injured and/or otherwise what employers call un-employable). Once the word got out about what we were doing, we didn’t need to find them anymore. They found us. And it just rolled from there….

Today soleRebels provides work for over 50 men and women, many of whom are disabled or veterans of one or another conflict, or persons who otherwise have limited prospects for employment and yet who, as you can see from the products they make, are incredibly talented and skilled.

So far, the email said, the primary consumers have been American and European tourists traveling in Ethiopia. But: “In May, we will be shipping our first US retailer, Urban Outfitters…. This will be the first time any Ethiopian firm has shipped footwear to the United States, and the first time an Ethiopian firm has shipped DIRECT (no middleman) to a major US retailer.”

I would say that this is pretty much fascinating. The Consumed column, of course, is only concerned with things that are actually on the market and being, you know, consumed. So for now I can’t do anything with this in the column, but if they do well, who knows? Meanwhile, I thought this was different enough to pass along to you, the loyal Murketing reader. (Not as an endorsement, since I don’t endorse much of anything, but as something worth keeping an eye on. And of course if you have thoughts or comments on any of this, I’d love to hear it.) I look forward to seeing these shoes actually hit the market, and how they sell.

Further email exchanges with the incredibly nice Kiru Alemu yieleded a catalog and a number of images of the shoes, which you see above. The company doesn’t have a web site, and I’m not in a position to fact check any of the above in any direct way. On the other hand, I don’t have any particular reason to doubt it. And it’s certainly the most intriguing bit of unsolicited product email that’s come over the transom in quite some time.

Some sort of update will follow in the summer months, when the shoes are on the market.

“Dressing Rooms:” A Flickr photographer Q&A

“Dressing Room: Anthropoligie @ 15th and 5th ave,”

Originally uploaded by gretchl2000

The other day I came across a pretty interesting photo set on Flickr. It’s called “Dressing Rooms,” by Gretchen Ludwig, who has been taking a series of retail dressing-room self portraits. Apparently, this series developed out of a project for a digital photography class. The explanation continued: “While politically, I hate the idea of being marketed to and I hate https://lakesidepethospitalfolsom.com/prednisone-over-the-counter/ the amount of consumption that goes on in the States, at the same time, I am a slave to it as well.”

That sounded pretty interesting, and a lot of the photographs were really striking. After spending a day or two wondering whether it was worth trying to ask the photographer a few questions, or if she’d just write me off as a weirdo who scours Flickr for pictures of women in dressing rooms, I decided to give it a shot. Happily, she either didn’t think I was a weirdo, or decided to answer my questions anyway. And the answers were interesting — even ranging into some of the unexpected effects the project has had on her shopping. The brief Q&A follows, and there are more of her images after the jump.

“Urban Outfitters@ 72nd and B’way,”

Originally uploaded by gretchl2000

How did you hit upon the idea of the dressing room as a site for exploring that love-hate situation that you describe in your explanation of this set?

I have an aversion to marketing, advertising, and any other ploy to get me to buy zolpidem products that are extranneous. This anti-advertising politic has developed even further to become anti-corporation. However, even though I am able to intellectualize all of this, at the same time, it’s so easy to fall prey to a good ad. Underneath it all, I have a weakness, and it’s for fashion. I try to attribute it to my visual arts upbringing and tell my friends it’s because I’m attracted to exciting visual stimuli (and there are some very exciting things going on in fashion, artistically) but the fact of the matter is, I just love clothes. It seemed so perfect to exploit this weakness in my own convictions, and to then turn my consumerism into something more, something that, once photographed, becomes anti-consumer. Read more

Merchant Memories

In Consumed: Mall of America Merch: At the massive retail destination, shopping for souvenirs … of shopping.

This summer, the Mall of America will observe its 15th anniversary. It remains the largest mall in the United States by total area, at 4.2 million square feet. (But not the world, by a long shot: several new malls in Asia are considerably larger, with the 9.6-million-square-foot South China Mall in Dongguan, China, being the current king.) The Mall of America’s Web site offers various facts about its overwhelming hugeness: it houses more than 500 stores and 20,000 parking spaces, and “258 Statues of Liberty could lie inside.”

Located five minutes from the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, the Mall of America bills itself as “one of the most visited tourist destinations in the world” and a “major U.S. brand” unto itself. One bit of evidence to support these contentions is the sale of merchandise that promotes the mall itself, including branded T-shirts, coffee mugs, key chains and plush toys. Read more

Flickr Interlude

Flickr photo by maproomsystems

“Abandoned shopping mall, outskirts of Saginaw, Michigan.” In a Flickr pool titled The Abandoned Pool.

Department of department-store fandom

This NYT article today looks at Chicago “superfans” of the department store Marshall Field’s, who are upset over its “demise” since its corporate parent was bought by Federated Department Stores (best known as the owner of Macy’s).

The most fervent, and the most vocal, of the believers are determined to send Macy’s and its little red stars packing. The arrival of Macy’s, they say, wiped out a landmark store founded by a retail giant who was also a benefactor to many of the city’s cultural and educational institutions.

Fueled by a mix of nostalgia and civic pride, 60,000 or so people signed an online petition last year urging executives at Federated — which in 2005 bought out Marshall Field’s parent, the May Company — to keep the name Marshall Field’s for all the stores.

Some Field’s loyalists have printed T-shirts, sweatshirts, lapel stickers and bumper stickers reading “Boycott Macy’s” and “Forever Marshall Field’s.”

Cursory Googling indicates that this has been going on for a while, and I can’t quite tell whether it’s really a big deal or just a handful of noisy zealots. Either way, it’s always interesting to come across retail loyalty that extends quite this far. Clearly in this case, there’s a kind of regional issue going on, with Marshall Field apparently serving as an icon of Chicago. (And Macy’s representing the annoying New York City.) This site is pretty explicit about the landmarkiness of the store: “For over 150 years, Marshall Field’s defined Chicago as an international city.” That’s quite a claim! And remember they aren’t knocking down a building, so this isn’t about architecture. It’s about a retail brand. And about the “Chicago-style quality” the store had, according to this person, anyway.
Is there a more modern retail palace today that people will eventually feel that kind of attachment to? Will people in Minneapolis get emotional about the Mall of America some day?

The anti-democratization of luxury

Everybody’s heard about the democratization of luxury, etc. etc. An interesting counter-narrative to this conventional wisdom could be written by someone, on the subject of how luxury resists democratization, and it might include a section on Tiffany’s.

In an article on Tiffany’s yestersday, The Wall Street Journal told the story of a silver charm bracelet, priced at around $100, that was introduced in 1997, “to address the then-emerging trend toward affordable luxury.” The bracelet was “a sensation.” That was good news for Tiffany’s. For a while.

Within a few years, the company’s managers became “concerned about the crowds in Tiffany’s suburban stores.” Company research found that “Tiffany’s brand was becoming too closely associated with inexpensive silver jewelry.”

So they started raising prices on the bracelets, first to $175. People kept by buying them.

This in and of itself is pretty interesting. Tiffany’s seems to have enjoyed amazing pricing power — as far as I can tell, that boost amounted to pure profit, and there was no improvement to the product, but people were buying anyway.

By 2004 the price was up to $250, and sales finallly died off. (Interesting to speculate how much of that was actually price-related and how much had to do with a fad running its course.) That, it seems, was Tiffany’s real goal: getting rid of the affordable-luxury riffraff, to protect their not-so-affordable luxury image. The Journal‘s Ellen Byron writes:

At its flagship New York store, Tiffany began inviting its best customers to observe artisans creating one-of-a-kind jewelry in its storied seventh-floor workshop, which is closed to the public.

Now, Tiffany can boast that its biggest sales growth in the U.S. came from sales and transactions over $20,000 and over $50,000. In the most recent quarter, sales in stores open at least a year grew 4% over the year before, with the newly renovated New York flagship posting a gain of 13%.

Still, as the piece notes, Tiffany’s challenge isn’t over, as it continues to walk a line between expanding (it’s up to 64 stores in the U.S.) and still seeming exclusive. Here’s a link to the whole article, but you have to be a subscriber for it to work — and in that case you’ve probably already read it.

An assembly line of lifestyle brands

Pretty interesting article in WWD today about Ralph Lauren starting a venture called Global Brand Concepts that would develop proprietary fashion/lifestyle brands for specific retail clients — sort of like a private-label supplier in the grocery business, but for labels. Private label labels, I guess. One difference of course is that instead of being branded to the retailer, like Kroger brand coffee or whatever, the unique-to-store fashion/lifestyle brands would, in fact, have their own brand identities.

Hypothetically, a chain like Penney’s could contact Lauren about developing a new lifestyle collection. Global Brand Concepts would then enter a contract agreement with Penney’s, and Lauren and his team would develop the brand from scratch, a process that would include concept, design, sourcing the fabrics and contracting out production. Then the group would work on brand-building through advertising and marketing, all of which the retailer would finance.

It’s kind of an industrialization of branding; Global Brand Concepts would be an image factory as well as a product factory.

Also interesting:

If the lines proved successful enough to merit stand-alone stores, it would be up to the retailer to finance such an extension. Legally, however, Lauren would own the brand’s trademark since Polo Corp. would manufacture and ship the product as part of the arrangement.

Retail mayhem roundup

The New York Times reports:

Shortly after midnight yesterday, an estimated 15,000 shoppers pushed and shoved their way into the Fashion Place mall in Murray, Utah. Police soon joined them, responding to reports of nine skirmishes.

Once inside, shoppers ransacked stores, overturning piles of clothes as they looked for bargains. A retailer’s dream — too many customers! — quickly turned into a nightmare, forcing store clerks to shut their (clomid) doors, and only let people in after others left. The mall even briefly closed its outside doors to avoid a fire hazard.

And:

At the Wal-Mart outside Columbus, customers dashing toward 5 a.m. deals pinned employees against stacks of merchandise.

“Oh, my god, stop pushing me, oh, my god,” screamed Linda Tuttle, a 47-year-old employee at the store.

A TV newscast in Virginia reports:

The rush at Roanoke’s Best Buy turned violent, just seconds after the doors opened at 5 a.m. NewsChannel 10 caught a man on video hitting someone over and over. Watching in slow motion you can see him hit someone at least 5 times.

A Scranton newspaper reports:

The scene at many stores was part Woodstock, part Lord of the Flies, as hundreds hunkered for hours bundled in clothes, wrapped in blankets and holding coffee cups and crumbled newspaper inserts.

As the 5 a.m. opening at Best Buy approached, latecomers crashed the line marked by yellow tape, jockeying for pole position with people who stood in the cold for hours.

Attempting to quell the crowd, a store manager jumped on a garbage can and threatened to call police. Store employees handed out tickets, entitling the bearer to one of the limited number of so-called “doorbuster” items.

Many of those in the line circling the building had no idea that the front of the store was on the brink of chaos, or that items they waited for were already claimed.

In Torrance, California, the Mercury News reports:

An elderly woman and nine other bargain hunters were injured Friday in a rush for gift certificates dropped from the ceiling of a local mall.

Some 2,000 shoppers rushed for 500 falling prize-filled balloons at the Del Amo Fashion Center, leaving nine with minor wounds and sending an elderly woman to the hospital.

Flickr Interlude

Flickr photo by by salehbaba

This is from an interesting set, described by the photographer as having been taken on Kish Island, which is off the coast of Iran. The photographer, who I gather lives in Iran, writes that “The island is called ‘the cosumers’ paradise,’ due to its status as a free trade zone, with numerous malls, shopping centres, tourist attractions, and resort hotels.” (Not being familiar with Kish Island, I did a cursory web search; this site describes it as “the closest thing to a posh beach resort Iran has to offer.”)

The set, then, is entirely shots of mannequins in the island’s malls. “As an unwritten rule,” the photographer points out, “all the mannequins’ heads had to be covered.”

Something to do (November 11)

Sources say:

On November 11, fine artist/street artist Steve Powers, a/k/a ESPO, “will places forty pieces of fine art on the sidewalk of West Broadway in SoHo and sell them himself, first come, first served. …By putting his work on the open market on West Broadway, he is stepping all over the lines between high and low and insider and outsider. The vending law in New York states that vendors must be 20 feet from a place of business. Powers will circumvent this by renting out an unoccupied storefront, which will allow him to operate within the law and accomodate a few hundred guests.”

West Broadway and Prince Streets on Saturday, November 11th. Preview work at www.firstandfifteenth.net on Wednesday, November 8th. Sale starts at 11am. “Cash and all major credit cards accepted.”

Something to do: Barking Irons live screenprinting

The Barking Irons guys, who you may recall from the Brand Underground article, have something interesting going on: In-store screenprinting at several NYC venues over the next week or so. They’ve built a traveling screen-printing box — that’s it above, pretty cool — and will printing up shirts on the spot. They’ll be making available some of their more popular designs “plus additional accents like bats and ‘the collect’ designs to overlay on top,” Daniel Casarella explains.

They’ll be at Atrium from 12-9 today, Friday November 3. At Saks on the Saturday November 11 from 11-9. And at Barneys Coop (the one in Chelsea) on Saturday November 18 from 11-9. The plan is for the custom shirts to be priced at $75 for a single print and $85 for a double, but those details may vary by store.

Here’s the “menu” they’ll have at each appearance.

“Hartz-IV Fashion”

An identity-protected reader sent along a link to an article (apparently traslated from German) about a “Berlin cut-price label” called Picaldi. It’s easy to think the European consumer as always being a refined, couture-wearing type, “not saving up their welfare money to buy the knockoff jeans that some tier 3 rapper wore on an album cover,” this reader observes.

But the latter scenario is pretty much what Picaldi is all about. One of its signature products is described in the story as jeans “that are more or less a direct Diesel rip-off,” and apparently quite popular with euro-mooks. So check it out, and get conversant with rappers Bushido and Eko Fresh, and what exactly “Hartz-IV fashion” means. Hartz-IV, I’ll just go ahead and tell you, is “German welfare money,” according to the article.

Flickr Interlude

Flickr photo by Mamish.