Designers, More Upscale Stores Cutting Prices: Too Little, Too Late?

American consumers, designers, and retailers seem to be waking up with a very bad hangover. The twenty- year-plus spending binge is over. Here are Dolce & Gabbana speaking in the WWD article of the past week:

“The idea is to peel off the superfluous because there are too many clothes, too many seasons, too much advertising — too much of everything that is tacked onto the final price. We want to go back to how things were 20 years ago. It’s about drawing the line,” he said.

Gabbana doesn’t believe customers will feel betrayed or taken for a ride by having paid more in the past. “Our goal is the consumer and to keep the thousands of people that work for us,” he said.

Added Dolce: “This is the only way to save the market and our companies. It’s time to turn the page.”

What most interests me is WWD having asked the question “whether or not they feel their customers will feel betrayed.” Of course they will—in proportion to the amount of guilt they felt when the purchased the overpriced product in the first place. The “I’ve-just-gotta-have-it days, the “IT” bag, the name brand jeans, the whatever—none of this matters much in the New Wave of Retailing. What matters are quality and value, sustainability and responsibility.

D& G designer jeans will now cost $450 instead of $695. Did they get the message?
(Photo credit: www.freedigitalphotos.net).

Slow Food Movement: An Example to Designers and Retailers

Re-engineering our product development and production cycles toward sustainability is a long-term goal and will require patience, compromise, and time getting there. A quick look at what has happened to the slow food movement—both in food production and retailing—provides some interesting lessons for designers and retailers that this blog will look at over the next two days. As this movement has built momentum over the past 40 years, it has extended from the rise of an increased number of organic farms to the flourishing of a number of artisan bakeries and dairies. It has included the national growth health food stores and restaurants, the rise of gourmet restaurants featuring locally or regionally produced menus, and an awareness among certain segments of the public about the nutritional and gourmet value of fresh produce and small harvests.

Small local or what we used to call “truck” farms are now selling produce at Farmers’ Markets in many major cities. Philadelphia, for example, has several farmers’ markets spread throughout the city, some are open seasonally twice a week; others, like the one in Rittenhouse Square, are open all year round. Two other markets—Reading Terminal Market and the Italian Market—sell a mixture of large commercially produced fruits and vegetables as well as local produce year round (with a strong slant toward the larger commercial providers at the Italian Market).

What interests me most about these markets—and their parallels to retail—is not the product being sold, whether or not it is produced by a large or small commercial growers or whether or not the products are organic, although to be sure these are important issues. What is most important is how much transportation is involved in getting the product to me, how much I have to travel to get it, and how much transportation affects pricing. I am also interested in the housing and warehousing issues around the selling of the product because that is another area where our carbon footprint becomes quite large.

The local farmers—many of them in Philadelphia being Amish or Mennonite—have relatively low transportation costs. Besides the transportation costs in harvesting, which in the case of the Amish is often horse feed or, for Mennonites, gas for small tractors, transportation involves bringing the goods to market in the cities. The produce is generally priced competitively with local supermarkets, sometimes higher. Only during peak season, can you find any real deals at the Farmers’ Markets. People shop there because they want to support local farmers, buy fresher, often organic food, and enjoy the give-and-take of buying at an open air market. The Philadelphia Farmers’ Markets also sell meat, eggs, milk, cheese, jams and jellies, bread, and other home-processed foods.

Some local farmers sell at Reading Terminal Market, where there is, for example, a large stand of Amish-produced foods, clothing, and souvenirs. Other produce vendors at Reading and the Italian Market buy from the Philadelphia Regional Produce Market or other produce market wholesalers. Their produce is offered without extensive packaging or cleaning for that matter—packaging and repetitive cleaning being other larger consumers of carbon energy.

Reading and the Italian Markets have no or low warehousing costs. The Reading Terminal merchants share space under the roof of the old Reading Railway Terminal building so that they do not require separate buildings, with separate heating and electricity. Many of the Italian market vendors started out selling their products from outside stands. Although most of them still sell from stands, many have built simple concrete block storefronts where they sell more delicate merchandise and maintain back inventory. Packaging is reduced. Many customers bring their own bags or buy from local deliverers like John (pictured above), who sells paper shopping bags at fifty cents apiece or will deliver your products on foot for an agreed upon price.

All of the markets above cater primarily to inner city residents who walk, bike ride or bus to the markets, further reducing the transportation impact of the food consumption process. Any way you assess buying from these vendors, the reduced amount of transportation, either getting the product to you or you to the product, less packaging, and reduced warehousing and selling costs make these products attractive from a social and environmental point of view. Customers understand that and are seeking them out in greater numbers.

I have looked at the Farmers’ Markets in some length because it helps break down the real costs involved in the organic and slow movements. Because much of the real cost of buying goods in the United States is externalized—that is, we do not necessarily pay for the true social and environmental impact of production—we do not have a full understanding of the true price of products, be they grown or manufactured. As consumers become more conscious of consuming, they will begin to start making inquiries both about the costs of production, manufacturing, selling, and disposal. And we’d better be prepared for them. More importantly, we should start opening up about our practices now so that we do not lose our valued customers we worked so hard to get in the first place. More to follow.

Personally, I'm against big things. I think the world is going to be saved by millions of small things. Too many things can go wrong when they get big

Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! devoted her hour long show yesterday to Pete Seeger’s 90th birthday, which was celebrated in grand style in Madison Square Garden on Sunday. Seeger whose life has been dedicated to social activism through music is an unusual celebrity. He purposefully avoided the limelight, but it consistently found him.

As she and guests chronicled Seeger’s many achievements—his pivotal, though often understated roles in the labor movement, civil rights, the environment—what struck me was how he slowly and with great determination tackled big issues in very small ways. A case in point: His singing of “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy” on the Smothers Brothers show in January 1968.

Controversial at the time, this unassuming appearance now seems to have accelerated the changing mood in the country. In March, Lyndon B. Johnson announced that he would not seek another term as president, and, on October 31, he announced that the US would cease “all air, naval and artillery bombardment of North Vietnam.” Such a view substantially rewrites history—Seeger’s act was just another drop in the bucket that, when filled to the brim, eventually changed US policy.

“Too many things can go wrong when they get big,” as Pete Seeger stated. Like banks and other institutions that are “too big to fail?” while smaller banks are allowed to go under. By concentrating on institutions that have acquired disproportionate influence over the country, we have allowed smaller organizations—banks, businesses, entrepreneurial start-ups—to fail. This policy is not only unwise; it also counterproductive in that it strains against the counter-intuitive cultural Zeitgeist of early 21st century America.

This Zeitgeist is counter-intuitive only because most of the ways we have conducted business since the ‘50’s at least are being inverted, subverted, or changed in radically new ways. A few examples: Google and its wiki adherents that offer core products for free and make money through the back or side door. A global economy where local and regional products have found greater favor. Millions of online writers, journalists or hacks with their own blogs, videologs, or websites supplanting large daily newspapers, magazines, and television. More later.

Change is afoot in every aspect of our lives, and it will arrive in the aggregate actions of individuals and small organizations that can now wield enormous power helped in part by new technologies. Small is the new big.

To quote Frances Moore Lappe, who wrote Diet for a Small Planet (cited earlier) and her daughter Anna Lappe’s definition of their Small Planet Institute:

We believe that ideas have enormous power and that humans are capable of changing failing ideas in order to turn our planet toward life. At the Small Planet Institute, we seek to identify the core, often unspoken, assumptions and forces — economic, political, and psychological — now taking our planet in a direction that as individuals none of us would choose. We disseminate this deeper understanding of root causes. With a grasp of root causes, citizens no longer disparage their actions as “mere drops in the bucket.” Once we’re able to see the “bucket,” we realize our drops are quite spectacular; the bucket is actually filling up.