Let's Not Talk About It

There’s a cartoon circulating, it’s in syndication, and it perfectly captures this moment in time: Two women are walking down the street past shop windows where there are all these percentage-off signs prominently hung. They’re stopped in front of a dress shop where there’s a big graphic that says, “Everything 80% to 90% off.” The bubble over the one woman’s head says to the other woman, “I don’t know, I think I’ll wait till it goes down some more.”

Stock is being reduced everywhere, granted, at times so low that it’s an incentive for even the stingiest of us to reach into our pockets...but rest assured, the market has pretty much bottomed out. Consumers, like trained chimps, have quickly learned that paying full price for anything is ridiculous. Maybe Macy’s will start offering bananas with purchase to lure us back in.

Retailers don’t want to talk about the economy. We know you are bleeding. Yet, they invariably send out these rosy statement letters that indicate everything is okay, or will be, from your mouth to God's ear. Retailers are trying their best. I’m certain they are, but at times, it seems like retailers are talking about everything except the problem. They talk about eco-consciousness, reducing the carbon footprint, transparency, branding, pandering, bloggers slandering, importance of design, being kind, being green, being lean, and catering to teens, smart design, store design, and even de-signing the signs, the country of origin, their margins, affordable luxury, customer service, shopping as an experience, shopping as a destination, visual merchandising, catering to demographics, social awareness, social consciousness, Internet presence, the global market, giving back to the community, relevance of product, regionalization of product, establishing a unique voice, and can I ask you your zip code for our records? It’s all smoke and mirrors. It belies that the economy has changed us, changed our behavior and altered the way we shop and what our expectations are--but let’s not talk about it.

Retailers are running around like Iccarus with his wings on fire. Calm down and take a deep breath. We applaud you for your valiant efforts. Give yourself a big pat on the back. We’re still shopping, just not so much. Our closest are full from years of wreckless spending. Our credits cards are maxed out. While the national economy is perilous, there are no breadlines; (yet he says cautiously) by the way, Macy’s did very well during the Great Depression, as did many of the great American department stores, but let's not talk about that.

America is getting by on less. The pendulum has swung the other way. Internet sales on shopping sites appear not to have dropped dramatically. eBay is selling second-hand clothes as “gently worn” and “recently loved.” Sales are re-sellers (vintage and second hand) are doing very well. The home sewing community is gathering steam; people are learning how to make things for themselves. In fact, I’m one of those people. I made a winter overcoat out of an old ivory colored Pendleton blanket. It’s a dream. Those who are not “crafty” are buying small run items on sites like www.etsy.com.

Some retailers like Martin + Osa encourage customers to bring in their old clothes for donation to the Good Will and Salvation Army. Other retailers are willing to buy back clothing for a store credit, so that discount shoppers can buy last season’s jeans and tops at a fraction of their original price.

So let’s talk about it, let’s look at the economy. Let’s be real. Let’s be candid.

--Ron Knoth, Guest Blogger

Call Yourself a Creative?

 It was with much interest that I delved into this month’s latest list of lists in Fast Company Magazine. Billed as a round up of the 100 Most Creative People in Business, I was looking forward to our retail community being healthily represented.

Alas…not so much.

As I began scrolling down the list I went into a cold sweat. Nobody from this wonderful, wide world of retail on the list? Say it ain’t so!

Sure there were people who create the products that sit in the stores. Jonathan Ive for example, perhaps (OK completely) predictably topping the list. There was even someone who helps select the products that grace the floor among the luminaries; although Trish Adams’ legacy at Target goes so very far beyond her title of Senior VP of merchandising. Thanks to her vision, we now have a constantly rotating parade of designer endorsements flooding our high streets and I for one think the world is one heck of a lot more fun because of it.

But still no one you’d say was primarily involved in the design of the store. There were a few architects on the list and I’m not one to knock architects--after all I married one and I work with more than a few--darn fine, brilliant folks one and all. But the architects on the FC list are a breed apart. Described as everything from gurus to gods and not living in the real world that most of us ply our trade in. When these guys design stores, we know the product is not exactly going to end up king, or queen, or even an illegitimate heir for that matter. Stores designed by big name architects are about one thing: big name architects. Of this bunch, Thom Mayne was highest on the list at No. 15. I went into a store he did once, not only was the product playing second fiddle, the architecture actually seemed to be conspiring to keep me from buying anything. Lord Foster followed a few places further back, but he’s another case in point.  I recall shopping in a “store” he did for Joseph in London in the '90s ,and it was like browsing for clothes in a freshly scrubbed submarine--cramped, badly lit and depressingly antiseptic.

This got me to No. 38 and the panic was starting to set in. Surely someone would make the cut? Someone should call the editor. Doesn’t Simon Doonan know about this list? Still no luck as I rounded 50, no one who actually designs stores, or even designs bits of stores, or even knows someone who designs stores, made the cut. It seemed the editors of Fast Company were about to give this unbelievably vibrant business we all work in a slap in the face.

And maybe it’s our own fault. For the longest time, I’ve marveled at how much our discipline dwells in the shadows of its own humility. Ours is an industry bigger than Hollywood serving an engine which by everyone’s admission essentially IS the economy these days. Consumer spending is the oxygen by which Wall Street survives, and if you don’t believe me just look at the past few months.

Yet we, the people who craft the environments wherein the very sales take place, have no Oscars, no true red carpet, no real public presence. We don’t even have a reality show. That Kate what’s-her-face can get a show just by having eight kids. How come there isn’t something taking a peek behind the scenes of this fascinating, drama-ridden insane world of retail?

And even worse than all of this, we couldn’t even make it to the FC list…

Imagine then, my relief, surprise and delight to finally see our sole entry there at No. 54. Masamichi Katayama, principle at Wonderwall and designer of--among other things--Uniqlo’s New York Store from last year! I’m not one to gush, but I believe a small “yay!” did make it past my lips.

Sure its only one entry, and it didn’t make the top 50. But the light hasn’t completely gone out. Any thoughts on who might be that next designer out there already sharpening their pencils for next year’s list? And more to the point, who’s planning their reality show?

--Christian Davies, Guest Blogger

Photo: Masamichi Katayama

Gone, But Not Forgotten

The other day, I was la-de-dolling on Fifth Avenue, and just happened to stroll into Henri Bendel, the famed fashion retailer. To what did my wandering eyes appear… (no, not a miniature sleigh and eight tiny reindeer), but a heavy preponderance of cosmetics and accessories. For a moment I thought I had accidentally walked into Ulta. Someone, I don’t know who, must have stolen all the retailer’s clothing the night before. It had mysteriously been removed…or not.

Like a detective in some old Dr. Thorndike’s mystery novels, I began to collect the forensic evidence of the crime scene.

Henri Bendel, which was founded in 1895, and has long been long a Manhattan icon and anchor, housed in the drop dead gorgeous old Rene Lalique showrooms, is planning to stop selling clothes this summer, and focusing instead on accessories and beauty products.

For more than a century, Bendel’s has distinguished itself for its “store of shops” concept, and has set the standard for the image of high fashion, but now, it appears that its current owner, The Limited Brands, wants to branch out to malls, and limit Bendel’s breadth of inventory. Great, another retailer who for over a century has been know for fashion, is rethinking its core constituency to become a Sephora hybrid? Where will the “Gossip Girls” shop, Loehmann’s? 

Abigail Wexner, wife of Limited Brands CEO, Les Wexner, can I coerce you to intervene? Please!!!

In a news release, the company positioned the changes as an effort to expand the Henri Bendel brand, with six accessories only stores to open in shopping centers nationwide. The New York Times reports that Bendel’s flagship store at 712 Fifth Avenue will stay open, but give up one of its three floors. It’s already history like the reservoir on Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street.

As for convoluted thinking, several employees briefed on the plans said that they were told that Bendel had decided to eliminate the fashion departments because there was no sign of a turnaround in the sale of high-ticket items, but that beauty and gift products were selling well, and typically with much higher margins. If that is true, then why not just sell hot dogs--the mark on them is high too?

About 8 percent of the employees will be laid off, including sales clerks and executives in its buying office. They will be replaced with vile perfume spritzers, the lowest form of retail humanity. In the “Planet of The Fashion Apes” world, they would be the gorillas.

Oh, my darlin’ Clementines everywhere, fashion is no longer reliant on high-ticket items, if you are using that old paradigm, then you will assuredly make asinine choices for your business. Show some backbone, there are great designers who are affordable and can reinforce and reinvigorate your brand, until times turn around. If Bendel's becomes one big glamorous Duane Reade, I’m packing it in. I want to see overpriced dresses, extravagant frocks and ludicrous price tags.

--Ron Knoth, Guest Blogger

Do You Want to Know a Secret?

The CIA and FBI are not the only game in town that understands the allure of a secret for the American public. Covert activities aside, McDonald's Big Mac has long boasted about its “special sauce” (which takes suspiciously like mayonnaise and ketchup), whereas KFC has promoted its “secret recipe of herbs and spices,” and now, after years or speculation, we know the origins of the secret formula for Dr. Pepper. It’s true!

Dr. Pepper, like olives and oysters, is an acquired taste. (Think Tony Curtis and Laurence Olivier bathing in Quo Vadis.) Well, the next best thing, a local Oklahoma man has just discovered a book in an old antique store from the very Waco, Texas, drugstore where Dr. Pepper was invented, which includes a recipe entitled "D. Peppers Pepsin Bitters." The book where the formula was found is filled with everything from piano polish formula to a hair-restorer, to a cough syrup. The original "D. Peppers Pepsin Bitters" formula includes mandrake root, sweet flag root and syrup. It is most likely an early recipe for Dr. Pepper, but not the current formulation. Still pundits may note that piano polish tastes eerily like Dr. Pepper; alas, it does not restore hair. I am the living proof.

Dr Pepper was first served in 1885 and is said to have been invented at the W.B. Morrison & Co. Old Corner Drug Store in Waco, Texas, by a pharmacist named Charles Alderton. “It isn't a recipe for a soft drink,” says Greg Artkop, a representative for the Plano, Texas-based Dr. Pepper/Snapple Group. He insists, “It’s likely instead a recipe for a bitter digestive that bears the Dr. Pepper name.” He further reports the recipe bears no resemblance to the modern day Dr. Pepper recipe, as the drink's 23-flavor blend is a closely guarded secret, only known by three Dr. Pepper employees.

So, Mr. Alderton since it is such a closely guarded secret, how do I know for certain that the modern day formula doesn't include mandrake root, sweet flag root and syrup?

--Ron Knoth, Guest Blogger

The Lost Arts of Just About Everything

A strange thing happened the other day, and it’s a signifier I think in some ways of this world we find ourselves in.

As a part of my job, I am a documenter and cataloger of the concept of change. It’s a big part of the work of anyone who claims to be a watcher of trends and in many ways represents the essence of such things. And when you do this day in and day out, you develop this sort of heightened sense of it--a kind of change radar --which leads to you spotting shifts in paradigms in all manner of things.

Case in point, just the other day, I came to do something which a few years ago would have been so very pedestrian of a task, but which today gave pause for thought.

I had to handwrite a letter.

Not an e-mail, not an article, not even a piece for a blog. A letter. And I realized I had completely forgotten how to do it.

It was a long(ish) letter to a client. A business correspondence sure and so laced with a certain convention, with certain rules to follow. And yet so very different from the electronic means of communicating we have all fallen into.

A few things immediately came to mind. For one, it’s very different to begin a written conversation without a subject line. Not to mention how out of place typical e-mail salutations seem on headed paper.  The word “yo” followed by an exclamation point, for example, is simply not going to cut it. And perhaps most of all I was struck by how the simultaneously informal and impersonal tone we strike on the screens of our laptops leave a written sheet of paper feeling odd and lost.

I had to buy a new pen (from Manufactum of course) as the fiber-tip plastic pencils we now call pens are clearly engineered for scrawling meaningless drivel onto post-it notes rather than crafting something that takes time and contains nuance and inflection. And then I had to read a book on how to write letters.Vanderbilt’s Complete Book of Etiquette is the perfect place to start. (And you can find it here.)

All of this made me think--if we are evolving past this most basic human form of interaction, is that partly the reason why it's hard to establish those connections elsewhere in our daily lives? Why I never seem to be able to check in to a hotel without the person at the front desk simultaneously being on the phone. Why that venerable institution known as the American bar (the drinking kind, not the legal kind), once the beating heart of a community and a place filled with conversation between strangers, has morphed into a shoulder-to-shoulder row of slack-jawed patrons, staring up at an all too ubiquitous TV.

Of course this has also found its way into retail. It's why an associate in a store the other day saw satisfying my desire for the perfect shirt as nothing more than a time filler while he waited for a reply to his latest text. And why our annual Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa et al gift buying has moved from frenzied days walking snowy streets arms laden with presents, to a thoroughly sanitized couple of evenings tapping at a keyboard. Where maintaining the sense of the season’s spirit is now defined as hastily ripping the senders information off UPS boxes on the front porch and deleting order confirmations from the family mailbox.

It's not all bad. E-mail, voicemail, SMS and next-day shipping means our world hums along with an efficiency and expediency our near ancestors couldn’t even fathom. And perhaps you don’t miss the old days as much as I do? Feel free to respond and let me know if I’m being overly sentimental, or if there are others out there feeling this Brave New World might be missing something?

--Christian Davie, Guest Blogger

Photo: © Luckyrobj | Dreamstime.com