More on design and merchandising

In mid ‘80’s, when I was editor of Catalog Age magazine (now Multichannel Merchant), I published an account of talk given by Susan Love Edmondson on “me-too merchandising” at the Chicago Association of Direct Marketing annual meeting.
At the time Susie Love was General Manager, Avon Direct Marketing, although she had gained fame for co-founding and merchandising the highly successful, yet ultimately ill-fated Kaleidoscope catalog.

Kaleidoscope, along with Roger Horchow’s The Horchow Collection, broke new grounds in cataloging by developing specialty home catalogs geared to upscale women. These catalogs were fresh, beautifully designed and photographed, and offered expensive, hard-to-find luxurious products—quite a change from the L.L. Bean, the old Spiegel, Montgomery Ward and Sears catalogs that had, at the time, dominated the marketplace. Hard to imagine that time since specialty catalogs now rule the mailboxes.

The Horchow Collection is still around. Kaleidoscope, in one of the first big-media hypes in direct marketing, went into Chapter 11 and eventually out of business. Kaleidoscope scored a remarkable string of firsts—including selling hot air balloons on the cover (all sales had to be nullified because of government regulations) and introducing the Galileo clock which still finds itself on the pages of many catalogs.

In her remarks, Susie—now Dr. Love, a specialist in adoption issues in the Bay Area—observed:

Merchandising is the whole package, not just the selection of items. It’s identifying a target consumer group and providing the most highly edited, best value products to serve the needs and desires of that population. And it’s packaging your sales offer in such a way that it’s easily identifiable as you.

Choice, she went on to explain, “must always be made in terms of identity.” By choice, she meant product choice and catalog presentation, but she could well have applied it to design, product development, visual display, and store design.
From the late ‘80’s until the present, we have seen nothing but “me-too” retailing, in spite of the volumes of books, articles, and presentations made about branding. It’s been difficult for quite some time to tell which catalog you saw that item in because so many catalogs offer nearly the same items. Stores with white walls, blonde wood and metal/glass fixtures are so commonplace that you can’t tell a J.Crew from a Banana Republic (remember the original from Pat and Mel Ziegler?) or a Gap from a Benetton.

All of this brings me to Cathy Horyn’s recent remarks in the New York Times about the opening of Topshop—London’s recent import to the US:

The Topshop folks get almost everything right. The atmosphere is fun and exciting (it makes minimalist Uniqlo up the street look anemic). Although the range of merchandise is quite broad, from adorable blouses and cool fleece pants to Kate Moss’s very cute line, you feel there’s a reason for everything—that the Topshop designers and merchandisers said no more than they said yes. And the prices are great, from high to low. I saw at least a dozen things I wanted to buy, most of them for under $150. What’s more, I liked being in the store—and when has anyone said that lately?

Merchandising & Design: New vs. Old

It might be said that truly great merchandisers—maybe even designers—buy or create for themselves. Whether or not that is true, all great merchandisers and designers I have met have a very concrete idea of their customers. Mostly, in the past, they have derived this concept of their ideal customer from their very rich imaginations, acute observation of society, intuitive understanding about art and culture, and a general feel for the Zeitgeist. When all of this comes together, they express their creativity by discovering the next got-to-have-it handbag or knowing that lime green is this season’s accent color or putting their design sensibility to work creating the newest, perfect little black cocktail dress.

Regardless of how much data is now being poured into the design and buying process, how much neuroscience is playing a part in probing the brains of consumers, the simple fact remains that merchandising and design remain more art than science. But how this creativity is applied makes all the difference: Do you as a designer seek to impart your vision to your customers? Or do you seek to meet your customers’ needs and wants in an attempt to fuse your design sensibility with your customers’? The former attitude involves a creative projection onto the world; the latter point of view suggests collaboration or, perhaps more cynically, meeting the market demands of your customer demography.

Having spent a large part of my career writing about and consulting in multichannel marketing, I have observed some of the country’s most savvy and successful merchandisers. To a person, every merchandiser has a highly developed sense of the customer they buy or design for. She has a name, a look, a family. They know what car she drives, what she does for a living. Where she lives, the colors she loves, the schools she went to. They know her hobbies, her frailties. How much money she’s likely to spend on clothing, on her home, on her children. She has become a video clip embedded into the merchandiser’s brain. In the catalog world, some of the best known merchandisers out of this school are Roger Horchow, Lillian Vernon, and Chuck Williams, to name a very few.

Merchandisers in the catalog world, unlike in-store retail, had the opportunity to develop well-defined points of view, find the products that expressed them, and, then, seek out the customers who wanted to share that vision through trial-and-error mailings. In-store retailers, although they might have had an equally well-articulated aesthetic, needed to advertise to find enough local customers who found their merchandise assortment appealing to drive them into the store. As a result, their vision needed to be broader to hit the numbers that would result in enough traffic to make sales.

The internet has changed the game. At its best, the internet brings one to many, many to one—your voice, vision or products can be heard, viewed or bought by the world, whether you reside in Kansas City or Katmandu. The internet allows merchandisers to find highly specific niche markets or to provide more mass appeal products—the former resulting in the SEM game; the latter a battle for customers through discounting.

For designers, in the new world of instant verbal and visual communications via internet and digital photography, the prospect of creating new products and getting them to market before a competitor has become daunting. Even couturiers can hardly keep a collection together during a season. Just hours after a collection debuts on the runway, manufacturers have already copied the best, which, in some cases, might even appear in a store in just over a week. The result: the consumer gets the “look” at a fraction of the price, but the “look” is already passé. It’s far worse than the decline in price of a new car when it’s driven off the lot.

With an increasing number of outlets for product—also due to the internet, which has a comparatively low barrier to entry—companies can quickly react to new products and, in the case of low-cost copiers or rip-off artists, can undercut and under price new, hoped-for best sellers. Of course, copying best sellers is nothing new, but the speed with which it’s occurring is startling.

Designers now are producing far more than Fall/Winter and Spring/Summer Collections. Pre-Resort, Resort, Spring, Autumn—whatever—Collections abound, and most designers can hardly afford to design and turn around a full new line in these short time frames—let alone create an inspired, compelling line that women want to have.

Rather than simply imparting your vision or catering to a particular demographic, there is a new approach to design and merchandising, let’s call it the wiki approach—one that works collaboratively not just with the Design Team but with the customer herself.

A new dress doesn’t get you anywhere

“I mean, a new dress doesn’t get you anywhere. It’s the life you’re living in the dress, and the sort of life you had lived before, and what you will do in it later.” D.V, pp. 147-8.

That observation—provided by the indisputable maven of fashion—Diana Vreeland (1903-1989)—in her chatty, wonderfully rambling book D.V., first published in 1984, has provided a kind of touchstone for SA VA. Sarah Van Aken, founder, head designer and chief community organizer, believes that fashion design for her provides a platform for communicating and promoting ideas about the world community, particularly as they relate to early childhood.

We at SA VA have used this dictum to validate our sensibility about fashion—that fashion is more about the women wearing it than about the designer or the dress. That means, we “want to fuse our design sensibility with [our customers’] sense of style,” as well as provide a platform for developing shared ideas. In other words, we are more interested in engaging in an on-going dialog with our customers about what matters to them most, as well as about their fashion sense, than we are seeking to impose our sense of style.

To be sure, SA VA has a decided pointed view and a wonderfully quirky and irresistible design sensibility. But our customers also know what they are looking for and how they want to express their individuality.

How we’ve used this point of view to create SA VA will be the subject of forthcoming blogs.