Here you are.
- Small is the New Big
Small is the New Big is a book of blog posts by Seth Godin on marketing and keeping your story relevant (whether you’re a musician, an entrepreneur, a politician, etc.). Themes I noticed:
Blogging: Do it early and do it often (but not too often) and stay on top of the technology. Blogging is a conversation, he says, and can make or break a brand. It is also a great equalizer, leveling the playing field to the point that only ideas that are “remarkable”-that are worth talking about-get any air time or get spread. Godin has been blogging for a while, and has provocative tips on blogging. He distinguishes three types of blogs:
1) Cat blogs - where you talk about your boyfriend, your cat, etc.
2) Boss blogs - where your audience is clear and limited for a purpose (within an organization, for instance.
3) Viral blogs - blogs that are spreading ideas, linking to each other, and, according to Godin, “changing the face of marketing, journalism, and the spread of ideas.”Metaphoring: Godin doesn’t talk explicitly about metaphor, but most of his posts are themselves metaphors. It’s a great, simple tool for coming up with interesting things to write about. He’ll hear about something interesting or mundane, and then talk about how it or is not like (purple cows) (viral marketing) (authenticity) (marketing wants) (technology) (etc…). So simple. His background and his understanding of business and marketing are solid, but it’s how he tells a new story everyday to convey the same basic principles over and over that makes his blog remarkable. Each post looks at something he’s talked about before from a fresh new angle.
Storytelling: By using metaphors to expose new facets of his expertise, Godin is constantly telling stories. Each post is a story, and connects to the larger narrative of his work. By reading it for just a few days, you feel like you have a pretty good grasp of his voice, his punkish character, and yet you want to keep reading. And storytelling is key for companies in the new economy. Being authentic, being remarkable, and then telling your authentic story in a way that consumers find remarkable is the best way to compete.
Wanting: Over and over, Godin says things like “sell me what I want or I’m leaving.” Marketing is not about needs. It is about wants. It is about finding out what people want and giving it to them, nothing else. People want to be a part of a story. They will want to be a part of your story, if it’s a story worth telling.
- Provenance
I’ve been blogging a lot about “locally grown” clothing, the “100 mile closet“, and other ways the apparel industry can mimic what’s been happening with food systems for several years. The provenance of our clothes—where they came from, through what processes and systems—is just as important as the provenance of our food.
Monocle magazine makes a good business case for why provenance is something businesses should pay attention to (via PSFK):
Provenance became a big issue for brands low, medium and high in 2007. A spate of scares involving Chinese-made products saw the world’s largest toy maker, Mattel, recall 21 million toys due to concern over lead paint. Gap was stung when it was found that children in India were employed to make garments for their Western peers. In the showrooms of many luxury brands, buyers were starting to question if the clothes and accessories were really made in the UK, France and Italy.
In 2008, provenance is going to become more important at luxury goods companies as CEOs decide whether to downgrade their brands (they wouldn’t call it this, but we would) by shutting workshops and moving the work to Asia to improve margins, or take a long-term view and keep investing in craftsmanship, education and maintaining manufacturing facilities above the shop.
The decision should be a simple one. The fake handbag might be made in China, but if 90 per cent of the real thing is made there as well, where’s the point of difference other than price? Against this backdrop, a growing movement for authenticity, craftsmanship and heritage is creating greater opportunities for artisinal companies.
When we start paying attention to ‘provenance’—where stuff comes from—what changes will we demand from the fashion industry? How will we vote with our dollars?
- Couldn’t have said it (better) myself
“do something for mother nature cause the bitch has been good to you.”
- Turning producers into sellers, and connecting them to buyers, and turning buyers into producers
Before the internet, efficiency meant globalization. With the internet, efficiency means localizing globally.
Etsy.com, for example, allows us to efficiently find buyers for our goods, and sellers of what we want to buy in our neighborhoods. It serves as a practical response to Ryan Avent’s article in Grist on why we need to be cautious about buying locally (see my previous post on the subject). Treehugger recently posted an interview from Wallstrip with Etsy’s founder Robert Kalin.
For those who don’t know, Etsy’s incredible on-line interface allows anyone to shop or sell handmade crafts. The site features multiple ways to shop, my favorite is to look at what people are making and selling in my own neighborhood. If Locavore is the word of the year for 2007, is losumer word of the year for 2008? I certainly hope to get crafty this holiday season, and Etsy makes this a lot easier than knitting those socks myself.
Check out the geolocater. It’s a little functionally awkward right now (you should be able to search for “shirts” in “seattle” made from “Lyocel”), but the idea is fantastic. Many of my friends are using Etsy to hawk their handmade wares (Deviant Design), and I’m sure Adapt Apparel will as well.
See also:
- Paul Hawken on Re-imagining Civilization
Full video, well worth a watch, here. I used audio hijack to strip the audio of just the plenary (w/ intro), in case you wanna download it.
- “Vanity + Sanity”: Tracking the Locally-Grown Clothing Movement
A couple days ago, I asked the question, “In what ways could we ‘grow clothing locally’?… What does a ‘100-mile closet’ look like?”
Sarah Rich at Worldchanging was asking the same question a year ago:
All of this ranting has led me to the question: What would a “100-mile wardrobe” look like? Most likely the fashion analogue wouldn’t actually be confined to a 100-mile radius, but how small a circle could we draw and still get the goods that make us feel good? It might not be a circle, since an apple is wonderful due to proximity and freshness while a sweater is wonderful due to the vision and inspiration of the designer. But even if the equivalent system is a more globally-distributed one, how can it decrease impact in a more whole-systems sense?
This echos some good feedback I got from Graham over at Transpacifica on my first 100milecloset post:
Now that doesn’t mean it’s ideal or ecological for us to ship in all our clothes from thousands of miles a way, but just like a 100-mile food radius, this works better in bountiful agricultural zones—say, California.
If we were to imagine widespread adoption of the locally-grown clothing concept, there would need to be some changes in the global economy. For one thing, subsidies and/or consumer choice would have to make it cost-effective to pay locals to work in textile factories. Textile industries that are key to the employment of large numbers of people in a variety of Asian countries would need to be replaced by other business.
Looking at ways to make clothing more environmentally friendly is a valuable pursuit. Since we can pretty much guarantee no huge number of U.S. consumers is going to jump on the train right away, this effort will likely help raise awareness and serve as a model that could pressure other clothing manufacturers to reduce shipping-based emissions. All the same, if this is too successful, it could have vexing (and fascinating) global repercussions. ::link
In my googlings on “100-mile wardrobe” I came across another instance of fashion following food: “slow fashion” (paralleling the “slow food” movement):
Slow Fashion is to clothing and design what slow food is to cuisine – natural, organic, ethical, local (where possible) and one-off designs with an emphasis on quality, and of course – taste. Slow Fashion means you can look fantastic and feel 100% guilt free. ::link
Vanessa Richmond at the Tyee’s got some good stuff on local clothes:
While reading the 100-mile diet series, I got to thinking about my other material indulgences. If food typically travels between 2,500 and 4,000 miles before it ends up on our plate, clothes are even farther wanderers. Hong Kong, where many of BC’s clothes are made, is 6378 miles (10,265 km) from Vancouver, and that’s not even counting
the distance the fabric travels to get from the mill to the factory, or the distance the fibers travel from their source to the mill.
Richmond points us to Angela Murrills, who coined “Slow Clothes” in 2004 in this article:
Take the freshness issue. There’s no question that when you buy Vancouver-grown, you’re getting concepts and ideas hot off the drawing board, designed last night and stitched up this morning. The new crop of designers just emerging from the schools is not just in lockstep with what’s happening, it’s ahead. This is design still with the dew on it, and, as with those Okanagan peaches, you know where it comes from. Buying mass-produced labels means you have no way of being sure that that T-shirt or pair of jeans wasn’t made by preschoolers in a Third World country. I’m not saying that there isn’t sweatshop labour in Canada–there is–but seeking out locally produced fashion does up the odds that the person who stitched that lapel or pocket (often the designers themselves) wasn’t working for peanuts.
Lastly, it turns out that Fashion High, part of the B.C. chapter of BALLE (Business Alliance for Local Living Economies) just hosted a “dress local” event, and has come up with the “dress local report card”:
Participating stores have to answer positively to three of the following questions to qualify for the Dress Local Campaign.
- Is your business locally owned?
- Where is the local content manufactured (B.C., Canada, China, etc.)?
- Are at least 50% of your store’s products designed locally?
- Are at least 50% of your store’s products made in Canada?
- Are the products created from sustainable or organic fabrics?
The Stranger’s Line Out reminds us that Vancouver, Seattle and Portland (a.k.a. “the realm of the three kingdoms”) should “be experienced as one urban realm”…
…but I may have to host a “dress local” event here in Seattle (with BALLE Seattle, of course)…
- Ludovico Technique
Murketing’s Rob Walker is in the New York Times magazine today, on “Why imaginary brands can be even better than the real thing.” I was curious about what the possibly-redundant phrase “imaginary brands” referred to, and my imagination went wild with what I might encounter after clicking over to the full article…
Would it be Shepherd Fairey’s once-imaginary Giant brand? Or how about American Apparel and the “brand-free” brand, or the jaded - about - branding branding of Blackspot and Antipreneur? Or did this have to do with the MacLeod / Doctorow / Fawkes / Godin dialectic of whether branding is dead or not or is or not, kinda? No one disputes that “people who like using the word ‘Brand’ a lot are assholes,” but how could anyone refute Godin’s final say, in haiku form:
Big brands are dying.
Little brands are doing great.
Branding is a weird gig.I ventured over to the article, for something else entirely:
There is no shortage of logos in the world, no dearth of brands striving for consumer allegiance and no chance that the creation of new brands and logos will cease. In fact there’s an interesting subset of brands and logos that don’t bother with what seems like a crucial component: an actual product, service or company. Consider the Weyland-Yutani Corporation. It’s part of the fictional universe depicted in the 1979 film “Alien” and its sequels; Nostromo, the spaceship freighter in the first movie, is a Weyland-Yutani vessel. The company doesn’t do much in the way of branding in, you know, reality. But as it turns out, it’s possible to buy yourself a Weyland-Yutani T-shirt, or even a Nostromo T. It also turns out many people have. ::link
Oh. Cool, t-shirts. I want one.
It’s the weekend. Let’s all just sit back and listen to Orchestra Baobab (c/o Andres).
- carrot/rope
“Finally, fresh, organic and locally grown clothes!” says Alex Lau (sarcastically?).
Consumers demanded fresh food before they understood what organic food was. Then we wanted local and fair trade food, or better yet, direct trade. Now we’re starting to see that clothing can be organic. But “locally grown” clothing? Even when the Economist tackles the question of whether ’tis nobler to shop locally, it’s just talking about food.
If what we eat is good for us and also our community, shouldn’t what we wear also be?
Just because most of what we wear is grown and manufactured overseas doesn’t mean it has to be that way. American Apparel has branded itself as “brand-free, sweatshop-free,” “made in downtown L.A.” and “vertically integrated manufacturing,” and at least some of their organic cotton comes from California. As the largest textile manufacturer in the U.S., the impact would be huge if they supported California agriculture by sourcing local (think of all the green-collar jobs). But if they’re going public, will that be an option?University of Vermont associate professor of environmental studies Stephanie Kaza, in describing a project by then-student Stevia Morton, says:
“‘Buying local’ is now a common phrase among those concerned about sustainability, but usually we think of it as applied to food,” explains Morton’s advisor, Stephanie Kaza, associate professor of environmental studies. “Stevia’s project raises the possibility of buying local in clothing — something almost impossible in the United States. Her work is on the forefront of what I hope will be an emerging values movement in support of locally grown clothing. Offering this alternative is one way to voice concern for sweatshop labor, corporate control of production and fashion homogenization.” ::link
Playing on the “100-mile diet” (the idea of only eating foods grown within a hundred miles of your table), Obviously.ca gets credit for coining the phrase “100-mile closet.” And just as the 100-mile diet is an impossibility for most of us on the planet, but serves as a standard to measure against, the 100-mile closet (the idea of a wardrobe packed with locally sourced and manufactured clothes) gives us the mental framework on which to “hang up” all the clothes we’ve ever owned. It gives us something to look for when we shop that we’ve never looked for before.
I’d love to find out who is actually working on making it happen.
Over the next months, as part of marketing and entrepreneurship classes at BGI, I’ll be exploring these ideas. I’m going to use this blog (the 100milecloset category, to be specific) as a space to explore what it means to start a company focused on “fresh, organic and locally grown clothes.” Between the food system and the clothing system, between textiles and consumables, the line is blurrier than we should think.
Also, I bought 100milecloset.org… now what can I put there?
100-mile music: “By Night into Paradise” by Victoria B.C. band Chet.
- Logos for Adapt Apparel
Possibilities, works in progress.
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- L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E
Band names as art? The newest Magnetic Poetry set? “Exploration of the visual identity of language vs. the conceptual nature of language”? Or, possibly, something even better than all that… Whether he means to or not, Jay Jurisich is making something I like.
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Jurisich asks,
Can words and phrases issue spontaneously in a manner analogous to the Abstract Expressionist “action painting”? Can language be “used” in a way that is not primarily communication, poetry, or logical, yet inhabit a physical existence apart from a conceptual one?
The answer is something like the New York School + the Painted Word. But really, I just get a genuine, stylistic kick out of it. I wanna put it on a screen-printed hoody, album cover, or write it on a bathroom wall.
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You can even search his works for specific words. I searched for “Beast” and came up with this:
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“Can language be ‘used’ in a way that is not primarily communication, poetry, or logical, yet inhabit a physical existence apart from a conceptual one?” Maybe/maybe not, but I hope Jurisich keeps trying, because this is poetry to me.[singlepic=1,300,0,,]
Links:
• Blog post title taken from L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E
