A new Italian bicycle manufacturer, Legend, is dual-purposing their showroom to sell other brands related to their core market.
This looks to be a viable trend for premium brands, as also seen at The Stronghold in LA. They carry their own line, but support it with add-on sales of Filson, White’s boots, and other staple [...]
Over in the bicycle industry, we often refer to the bicycle shaped object or the BSO. You can usually find these hanging out in the big box stores, and often times, at the lower price points at Performance Bike.
After taking a stroll through retail stores this last weekend with my wife, I’ve noticed that [...]
A recent article on self-storage in the NY Times mentions that “we’ve spent more on furniture even as prices have dropped, thereby amassing more of it.” The same appears to be true in other markets, apparel, housewares, etc. As the prices drop, people spend the same, but amass more items of a poorer [...]
Right now, Made in USA and heritage/heritage-styled brands are cleaning up. From all the reports from Vegas this week, it looks like the trend is over the top, and it’s going to start the long slide down through consumer exhaustion.
The question is, how are we going to move forward without losing the focus on [...]
The question that’s been bothering me the most lately is why so many people want to buy so much cheap crap. It makes no sense to me, and the prices people want to pay are astronomically low.
Consumer price sensitivity is perfectly reasonable, but when that price sensitivity manifests as demanding specialty items such as [...]
The same inefficient food supply model proposed in this Grist article by Tom Philpott could very easily be extended towards the entire marketplace of goods and services. Just as it makes more sense for quality food to be produced this way, it makes sense for large swaths of consumer needs to be produced in the [...]
Style Savage has a good breakdown on creating a wardrobe to last, and the concepts behind building such a thing.
[A] man’s wardrobe was like a house – he bought pieces of clothing and he maintained them so they would last, shirts were mended and ultimately their character was enhanced.
There’s very little ambiguity about the [...]
The story about Tropicana’s failed redesign wouldn’t have caught my attention or ire if I hadn’t read the Brand Week article referenced in the New York Times.
The part that bothered me:
Here is the capper: Tropicana wanted a physical mnemonic for the brand. The design team at the Arnell Group took half of a mid-season orange [...]
Patagonia recently announced that most of their footwear can be resoled by Mountain Soles out of Portland.
Resoling is nothing new to footwear, up until maybe 25 years ago. Shoes now have enough externalized costs that it makes more financial sense to throw them out and buy a new pair whenever the old ones [...]