Fritinancy

Nau Is the New Then

Eco-sportswear "concept" Nau issues a going-out-of-business manifesto:

In the current highly risk-averse capital market, we simply could not raise the necessary funds to continue to move forward. We believe this is not so much a reflection of the viability of our business, but the result of an unfortunate confluence of events. Just as we could not have predicted the sudden groundswell of environmental consciousness that blossomed at the time we launched our business, we did not foresee the current crisis in the capital markets. At this time, investors are loath to invest in anything; especially, it appears, a company like Nau that has the audacity to challenge conventional paradigms of what a business could be.

And much, much more in this vein.

I never cared for Nau's clothing--too somber and space-agey--but I do regret the passing of a company that knew the correct spelling of loath (adjective).

Everything on the site is half-price.

(According to a Cool Hunting report from upbeat pre-launch days--about 20 months ago--"Nau" means "welcome" in Maori.)

Via Wardrobe 911.

No Title

Another reason to love Zappos:

Fred Mossler

No Title

Fred joined Zappos.com in 1999 and was recently promoted to the position of "No Title" from Senior VP of Merchandising because we couldn't think of a title for him. His "No Title" position enables him to oversee a variety of departments at Zappos, including merchandising, marketing, creative services, product presentation, Zappos University, help desk, and outlet operations.

Prior to Zappos, Fred spent over 8 years at Nordstrom.

Babette et Moi

I promised horn tooting, and here it is: a book I ghostwrote has just been privately published, and it's gorgeous and I'm thrilled. Babette: Designing a Vision celebrates the 40th anniversary of an extraordinary fashion brand; it will be sold in Babette retail stores in San Francisco, Scottsdale, Portland, Chicago, and New York beginning next month.

I was delighted when Steven Pinsky, designer Babette Pinsky's husband and business partner, contacted me last September about writing a book. Not only do I love ghostwriting books, but I've also been a huge fan--and customer--of the Babette brand since the day, more than a decade ago, when I chanced on the company's little outlet store-slash-factory on San Francisco's South Park Street. (The factory has since moved to Oakland, the retail store is now on Sutter Street, and the outlet store is no more.) The clothes were a revelation: clever raincoats--one, called the Taxi Coat, came with an orange whistle for summoning cabs--and pleated microfiber separates that flowed over the body like cool water. They were effortless yet utterly distinctive . They could be packed. They could be washed. They looked good on women of all sizes. And at outlet prices, they were a steal. I bought a couple of pieces that first visit and returned many times. In the process, I struck up an acquaintance with Babette and Steven that led to a small writing project--and now the book.

While researching the book I spent many hours in the Oakland design studio and factory, learning how fabric is sourced, how a collection is designed, and--especially--how those pleats are made. In hand pleating, two workers scrunch pieces of fabric and then tie them tightly. Pattern pleating involves huge paper patterns and wooden weights that haven't changed much since ancient Egypt; there are hieroglyphics depicting a process identical to the one I witnessed. (The only modern innovation is a huge autoclave that steam-sets the pleats.) Perhaps most remarkable in this outsourced era, all Babette clothing (with the exception of sweaters) is made in the company's own Oakland factory by workers earning a living wage and seeming to have a pretty good time at their jobs. That, and the sheer amount of labor involved in each garment--a single pleated garment may be touched by as many as twelve workers during its creation--makes the retail prices (about $200 to $500 per piece) seem, if anything, too low.

Surviving for 40 years as an independent fashion designer is a rare feat. It's even more challenging when you're ignored by local and national media, as Babette has been. (The designs don't follow trends, and Babette customers are a "forgotten" market: women in their 30s, 40s, and beyond.) Yet Babette Pinsky never considered merging or selling her business, and she never wavered in her creative vision. Here's how I quoted her in the book:

I always believed that function follows form: the guiding principle of the Bauhaus design movement. And I was always inspired by beautiful fabric. Then as now, I would begin each season's collection by looking at fabric and deciding what stories I wanted to tell with it. Color and texture allowed me to shape a narrative.

I'm happy to report that the media tide may be turning. On Sunday, the San Francisco Chronicle published a long article about Babette by fashion editor Sylvia Rubin. (Be sure to click through to the video, a fascinating document of the pleating process.) Oakland magazine is interested in a feature story for its August issue.

It was a pleasure to work with the Pinskys and to be inspired in my writing by four decades of extraordinary fashion photography by Larry Keenan, Michelle McCarron, Paul Cruz, David Perez, and others. Much credit goes to genius graphic designer Ryan X (he has a stealth website; contact me if you want to hire him) and to Carolyn Ricketts, our able proofreader.

And do check out the Babette website, where you can see photos of the clothing, Babette Pinsky's line drawings, and a store locator.

Top: Designer Babette Pinsky. Above: Model wearing Babette separates at a retrospective fashion show held earlier this month in Minneapolis. Both photos by Allen Brisson-Smith for the San Francisco Chronicle.

Fashion Week at Fritinancy!

Fierce! Hot! Directional! Yes, fashion is all that and a bag of zero-calorie TicTacs. And I get a huge kick out of it. So this week I'm introducing Fritinancy's first theme week. I'll be posting interesting items from the world of wearables and pausing ever so briefly to toot my own horn.

My interest in fashion (and this is not the horn-tooting part, believe it or not) goes way back. My first wage-earning job, as a high school senior, was on the sales floor of The Broadway Wilshire¹ in Los Angeles, which for a sixteen-year-old Seventeen-reading girl qualified as Died and Gone to Heaven. And I wasn't just some schlepper of a shopgirl--no, ma'am! I had been selected as L.A. High's representative on The Broadway's Hi-Deb Fashion Council--even then, the name was eye-rollingly corny--which meant I modeled in fashion shows, learned grooming and makeup tips from "the experts," toured clothing and shoe factories, and--pinch me!--received three free outfits to wear while I stood around waiting for customers. I even won a guest-modeling spot in Seventeen.

(There was a boys' counterpart to the Hi-Debs, which of course added to the appeal. I wish I could remember what the boys were called. It definitely didn't include the word deb. Or hi-.)

I'd been sewing my own clothes and gazing longingly into shop windows for quite a while, but those free Hi-Deb outfits accelerated my fashion savvy into warp speed, emphasis on the warp. The first outfit, as I recall, involved transparent plastic shoes and yellow fishnet stockings layered over shocking-pink opaque hose. This was definitely not accessorizing as I'd known it. Still, a deal was a deal: I had to wear the outfit (and did I mention it was free?) and so I did. I even came to love it, sort of.

Downhill from there? In a sense, yes. However, I did spend a couple of very happy years as copywriter and then editorial director at Banana Republic's San Francisco corporate offices, back when the chain was tiny and safari-themed. (We had eleven stores when I started working there, and about 111 when I left.) I invented names for items of clothing (the Amelia Earhart Jacket, the Poet's Sweater, the Port-au-Prince Pants), dreamed up stories about the places our clothes might find themselves, and asked simpático literary celebrities to write little reviews for the catalog. (I remember phoning James Fallows, who was then living in Kuala Lumpur, I think it was, and waking him up: I hadn't done the math, and it was 3 a.m. over there. He graciously wrote the review anyway.) Best of all, I got to work with a bunch of smart, funny, creative, irreverent people.

Later on, I was the long-term freelance catalog copywriter for Travelsmith: more product naming, more talespinning. In between and since, I've written about golf shorts and little girls' party dresses, Birkenstocks and Ferragamos, tummy-tuck jeans and hemp-silk wedding gowns.

On my own time, I've been known to pay full cover price for a copy of In Style or Vogue (it's research! honest!). And I've logged more hours with Stacy and Clinton of What Not to Wear than any nominally sane woman should admit to.

So welcome to this little corner of my world! Coming up this week: a theme-friendly Word of the Week, a special fashion linkfest, a post about fashionspeak, a post about fashion nomenclature, and the promised (fashion-related) horn tooting. And possibly more. To get started, here's a post from August 2006 on the derivations of many of our names for fabrics.

__

¹Eventually subsumed into The Federated's empire (Macy's, Bloomingdale's, etc.).

The IKEA Naming System

Ex-Talking Head David Byrne blogged last month about his maiden voyage to IKEA:

Why does everything have weird names? Every container, shelf, cabinet or appliance had some odd name, as if people from Planet Sweden anthropomorphized these objects, naming each one they encountered as best they could:

BESTA
HEDDA
BJARNUM
LERBERG
INREDA
EKTORP
GRUNDTON
BERTA
KARNA

It turns out, Byrne writes, that the Wikipedians had already cracked the code:

Upholstered furniture, coffee tables, rattan furniture, bookshelves, media storage, doorknobs: Swedish placenames (for example: Klippan)

Beds, wardrobes, hall furniture: Norwegian place names

Dining tables and chairs: Finnish place names

Bookcase ranges: Occupations

Bathroom articles: Scandinavian lakes, rivers and bays

Kitchens: grammatical terms, sometimes also other names

Chairs, desks: men's names

Materials, curtains: women's names

Garden furniture: Swedish islands

Carpets: Danish place names

Lighting: terms from music, chemistry, meteorology, measures, weights, seasons, months, days, boats, nautical terms

Bedlinen, bed covers, pillows/cushions: flowers, plants, precious stones; words related to sleep, comfort, and cuddling [cuddling?]

Children's items: mammals, birds, adjectives

Curtain accessories: mathematical and geometrical terms

Kitchen utensils: foreign words, spices, herbs, fish, mushrooms, fruits or berries, functional descriptions

Boxes, wall decoration, pictures and frames, clocks: colloquial expressions, also Swedish placenames

I love discovering a nomenclature's inner structure; it's so satisfying to know that someone has taken the time and care to think creatively about the work that names do.

Still, the IKEA taxonomy is no less enigmatic for having been described. I'm sure there are several PhD theses waiting to be written about it. Music, chemistry, and nautical terms for lighting? Feminine names for curtains, masculine names for chairs and desks? And what subtle intra-Scandinavian tensions or harmonies are revealed by the assignment of Danish, Norwegian, and Finnish words to certain categories but not others? Is there some national stereotype about the Finns (for example) setting an especially attractive table? Or, more perversely, not?

The Wikipedia article continues:

Because IKEA is a world-wide company working in several countries with several different languages, sometimes the Nordic naming leads to problems where the word means something completely different to the product. A well known example was the bed frame GUTVIK. As the word can be pronounced Gootfick it invites German-speaking people to understand it like gut fick which is somewhat close to "good fuck" in German.

Then there's this tidbit:

Company founder Ingvar Kamprad, who is dyslexic, found that naming the furniture with proper names and words, rather than a product code, made the names easier to remember.

Take heed, O ye makers of automobiles and techno gizmos!

The name IKEA, by the way, is an acronym. IK stands for Ingvar Kamprad; the E stands for Elmtaryd, the farm where Kamprad grew up, and the A is for Agunnaryd, Kamprad's home village.

(Hat tip to Andy Sernowitz.)

Store Names That Say "Don't Shop Here"

It's prime shopping season, and my fair city is in a world of hurt. The weekend before last I attended a town meeting convened by my city councilwoman at which a consultant delivered the depressing news that Oakland is losing $1 billion a year in potential retail sales to neighboring cities. (In the trade, that's known as "leakage.")

Once upon a time, downtown Oakland was home to four major department stores, a big furniture store, and several swanky boutiques. The tide began turning in the 1980s, thanks to lackluster leadership, rising crime, and general cluelessness. The Loma Prieta earthquake, in 1989, delivered the coup de grâce. Some downtown structures were never repaired and remain vacant. Today Oakland, a city of about 400,000, has only one department store: Sears. To shop at Banana Republic, Ann Taylor, Home Depot, Target, or Pottery Barn, Oaklanders must travel to Emeryville (pop.: 6,882), Albany (pop.: 16,444), Walnut Creek (pop.: 64,583), or, of course, San Francisco.

What to do, what to do? Well, this holiday season the Oakland Merchants Leadership Forum has issued a "savings passport" to encourage residents to "celebrate what makes Oakland unique" ("Who wants to live in Generica?") and to "shop Oakland." I'm all for that, but when I picked up my passport today I was not inspired to go on a spending spree, or even a spreelet.

Why? Because the stores participating in the promotion give a depressingly small-time, washed-up impression of Oakland. Nail shops. A Christian bookstore. A karate school. Jewelry stores with identical cheesy "diamond" logos. Chiropractors. Lots of taquerias. In other words: Generica.

As for the names of thoses businesses ... oh dear. Here are a few that would have made me laugh if they hadn't made me gnash my teeth:

Love Stop Florist 

What is this -- a flower shop that kills the love? Does it specialize in "I Want a Divorce" bouquets?

Casketorium

Just what you want in your hour of pre-need: a peppy-sounding funeral-supply business. (I do wish I'd known about it when I wrote about necro-branding.)

Cuisine Restaurant

Here's a branding tip: translating a generic word like "food" into French does not make it non-generic.

My all-time so-bad-it's-good Oakland business name isn't in the booklet. It is, however, right in my neighborhood:

Talk about generic! Admittedly, there's something crazily pure about the unbrandedness of it all, not to mention the modesty of that indefinite article. I sometimes wonder whether there used to be a whole alphabet of laundromats, A through Z, and this is the sole survivor. Something seems to be working: it's been there the entire 20 years I've lived here. Maybe longer. Maybe forever. Maybe it is, in fact, the ur-laundromat, the one the anthropologists will be studying.

Read an earlier lament about Oakland business names.

Or look on the bright side at Oakland Goods, which shares the news about all the positive retail developments here (and there are a few).

Well Played, Goodwill Industries

When you think of shopping at a Goodwill store, you probably don't think of one-of-a-kind designer clothing. That's going to change starting today, thanks to Nick Graham, founder of men's-underwear company Joe Boxer and of the brand-development firm 100 Minute Company. Graham has teamed up with Goodwill to create William Good, a new fashion line made entirely from the stuff in the stores' discard bins.

Here's the deal: after 30 days on the selling floor, clothes that haven't sold get discarded. That's where Graham's team of five designers step in, cutting, sewing, patching, and altering to create trendy "refashioned" clothing. (And yes, the clothes are cleaned first.)

I've seen only a small sampling of the clothes (including an amusing Björk-like swan dress), but my feelings about the name are unequivocal: I love it. It's brilliant in its simplicity--an inversion of "Goodwill" with an upgrade of "Will" to "William"--and the perfect Goodwill brand extension. Graham told a San Francisco Chronicle reporter that he came up with the name "within a block" of driving past the Goodwill store in San Rafael.

William Good fits nicely into the Nick Graham portfolio, too. Like Joe Boxer, which Graham sold in 2005 to Iconix Brand Group, the name sounds human, unpretentious, and classic ... with a wink.

And in a brilliant stroke of timing, William Good makes its debut less than 24 hours after the return to the airwaves of Project Runway, in which fledgling fashion designers turn random items from dumps, supermarkets, and recycling centers into haute couture.

William Good clothes go on sale today in the San Francisco Goodwill shop on Fillmore and Post, at prices between $15 and $300--steep for Goodwill, but "a steal," says Graham, for one-of-a-kind designs. The William Good store-in-a-store features recycled decor: the floor is covered in old vinyl records, the racks are made of books. The goal is to go nationwide, then worldwide--and redeem 75 percent of the items that would otherwise end up in a landfill. (Goodwill receives 23 million pounds of clothing each year.)

If you're not in the Bay Area, you can shop William Good online (with links to an eBay store).

Names in the Wild: Farmers' Market

On Sunday I went to the Temescal Farmers' Market for the first time in a couple of months and discovered some interesting names amid the quince and persimmons.

The first stalls I encountered belonged to T-shirt vendors whose wares were anything but standard issue. Naturally, I had to ask about Juror2:

Owner/artist Jenifer Kirsch didn't disappoint. She told me she'd played "Juror No. 2" in a high school mock trial based on John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men. It became her nickname, and she when she started making T-shirts it was a natural choice for her business name.

The Girl and Rhino also came from a childhood experience, owner Adam told me:

"When I was a kid my parents had a statue of a girl sitting on a rhinoceros," he said. "It made a pretty big impression on me." He added the umbrella and wrote a poem to the mysterious girl. (Click the About section of his website to read it.)

Finding a standout name for a small business, especially in a creative field, can seem like a big challenge. Jenifer and Adam solved the problem by mining their childhood memories and experiences; as a result, their business names are both authentic and distinctive. Their quirkiness, edginess, and air of mystery is completely legitimate (even expected) in the world of artwear. And it can't hurt their trademarkability.

I don't recommend this approach for companies of every size and category, but if you're launching an artistic or service business, it's definitely worth exploring.

Good Names: A Trademark Lawyer Speaks

Trademark lawyers are a tough crowd. They tend to blanch at descriptive brand names like Yellow Pages or Raisin-Bran because those names are much harder to protect, legally, than suggestive, arbitrary, or fanciful names. Yet many business owners gravitate toward those descriptive names because they're easy to understand. As a naming consultant, I'm frequently caught in the middle.

So it was a charming surprise to read this post in Beauty Marks, a new blog by Jessica Stone Levy, a trademark lawyer in Mercer Island, Washington, who sounds like she's a lot of fun to hang out with. On a recent vacation in my general neighborhood--Northern California wine country--she spotted several names with what she calls "good stuff." Her hands-down favorites? A pair of stores in Santa Rosa called The Place That Sells Vacuum Cleaners and The Place That Sells Sewing Machines. "Succinct, no?" writes Ms. Levy. "I like it when a business just says 'we don’t care about a protectable name, we just want people to know what we do.'"

She also approves of Nalle and Jarvis, two wineries named for their owners. "Perhaps there’s something to be said for less focus on branding sometimes," she muses.

Whoa--did I read that right? From a trademark lawyer?

She adds in a footnote: "Honestly, sometimes I wonder if I’m really trying to earn a living here. That is not to say that I don’t think winemakers should select distinctive marks; all I’m saying is that sometimes it appears that the owner’s name can be a powerful trademark. Plus, you’ve still got to have good stuff in the bottle – a catchy name won’t help bad juice."

Ms. Levy's traveling eye also caught what she calls a good example of a suggestive mark: Any Mountain, an outdoor-equipment store in Berkeley that I've known for many years. I'm looking at that name with fresh eyes now.

And I'm looking forward to more of Ms. Levy's refreshing candor.

New Name Beat: Martin + Osa

I'm going back to my retail/fashion roots with this edition of New Name Beat, which examines a new "store concept" (no one simply opens a shop nowadays) with an enigmatic name.

What It Is: Martin + Osa sells casual clothing in nice fabrics (cashmere, cotton-cashmere blend, tissueweight merino wool) to men and women age 25-40 who've graduated from the torn jeans and faded T-shirts of their college years but don't want to give up comfortable, familiar styles. The first store opened last September in Tysons Corner, a mall near Washington, DC; today there are five stores nationwide, including the one I visited in San Francisco's new Westfield Shopping Center on Market Street. Prices are generally comparable to Banana Republic, although the selection is much smaller--"more tightly edited," as they say in retail.

Where It Comes From: The parent company of Martin + Osa is American Eagle Outfitters, an 850-store chain that sells casual clothing to 15- to 25-year-olds when they aren't shopping at Abercrombie & Fitch or Old Navy. Most shoppers no longer remember American Eagle's history: the company was founded in 1904 as an outdoor-gear company similar to Eddie Bauer or Pendleton. Hence the "outfitters." And hence a slim but significant link to Martin + Osa. Read on.

What They're Saying: "The number of Americans ages 25 to 34 is expected to rise by 5.2 percent by 2010, according to the Census Bureau," the New York Times reported last September in an article about Martin + Osa. "By contrast, those ages 12 to 18 are to fall by 3.3 percent. 'Retailers are salivating over that 30-year-old demographic,' said John D. Morris, an analyst at Wachovia Securities." About the store itself, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported, "Wood-walled dressing rooms offer room for strollers while the strategic use of mirrors and wall murals is meant to give the feel of trying on clothes in the great outdoors. In the Refresh zone near the dressing rooms, staff offers bottled water, apples and the use of two restrooms. [Ed. note: No apples when I shopped in S.F. I'm miffed.] Stone walls throughout the store intersperse with warm wood beams shaped rather like a pergola, while lighting subtly shifts and ebbs to mimic the effect of clouds passing overhead." But the most distinctive aspect of the store design is the façade, which is all light-colored wood and blue-tinted glass, with nary a merchandise display to be seen. From the outside, it looks more like a trendy club than a store.

What It Means: Martin + Osa takes its name from two real people, a married couple from Kansas named Martin and Osa Johnson who between 1917 and 1936 traveled and photographed in Africa, the South Pacific, and Borneo. According to M + O company president Ken Pilot, "Our store environment and merchandise assortments will embody Martin and Osa's classically American spirit of sport, outdoor and adventure for today's generation in constant motion." There are links between the Martin + Osa web site and the Martin + Osa Johnson Safari Museum in Chanute ("ranked the #1 museum in Kansas"); I haven't found a direct statement about financial ties, but I'm guessing that AE is contributing something to the (nonprofit) museum.

What I Like: Using linked male and female names as your brand says you sell both men's and women's clothing--although I wonder how many North Americans will recognize "Osa" as any kind of name at all. (It's the Anglicized spelling of a common Scandinavian name.) On the other hand, the unfamiliarity of "Osa" may work in this brand's favor, signaling the adventure and exoticism that the stores and the web site work hard to conjure. (Check out the eclectic reading and listening lists: from the home page, select "Goodstuff [sic].")

Then there's that plus sign, fast becoming the punctuation symbol of choice (replacing "@") to signify hip/cool/modern. A plus sign rejects the ampersand's baroque curlicues in favor of minimalist straight lines and right angles; it turns a partnership into a mathematical equation. Global and borderless, the plus sign--which also suggests an international dialing code--is turning up wherever the market is youthful and plugged in: Adam + Eve clothing for men and women, Tevrow + Chase women's clothing, M + J Savitt jewelry, Crispin Porter + Bogusky ad agency (creators of those Orville Redenbacher-as-zombie ads). Whereas the ampersand is a ligature of the Latin word "et," meaning and, the plus sign transcends Western culture and dead languages. It's positive yet neutral. (Like Switzerland. And what's on the Swiss flag? A plus-shaped cross.)

What bothers me: The first five or six times I heard or read about Martin + Osa I was sure it was an offshoot of Abercrombie & Fitch, not American Eagle. Why? Because the brand story is such a good fit with A&F--not today's slutty-preppy-slacker A&F but the historical company, which was established in 1892 and until the 1960s was known as an elite safari outfitter, the kind of store Martin and Osa Johnson might actually have visited before one of their excursions. (For its part, A&F is also targeting the 25-and-up market with Ruehl No. 925, an even more enigmatic and contrived name than Martin + Osa.) Okay, I'm a retail geek; most customers won't know or care who's behind the concept. I do think, however, that Martin + Osa is going to have to work hard to get customers to go beyond the stores' mysterious exteriors. (So far, you can't buy the merchandise online.) A strange name can help with positioning and generating buzz, but it doesn't always translate into traffic. On the other other hand (consultants have three hands, you know), who today remembers the origins of "Banana Republic?" (The original store sold surplus goods bought from failed dictatorships in tropical zones, disparagingly known as "banana republics.") And who knows what "Old Navy" means? (I for one don't have a clue.)

The decision: I'm all for great name stories, but with Martin + Osa the story isn't enough. Parent company AE will have to make a determined branding and marketing effort to overcome the name's liabilities and get customers to progress beyond those affectless store exteriors. On an ascending scale from 1 to 5, I'll give "Martin + Osa" a 3.7.

But: I'm fine with the plus sign in the name, but the full stops in Martin + Osa's trademarked tagline--"Everyday. Life. Adventures."--set my teeth on edge. Used this way, periods are the new italics; they're inserted after single words to create an annoying staccato rhythm and self-conscious emphasis where none would normally be perceived. (See also Pioneer's "Sound. Vision. Soul." and Sony's "Like. No. Other."--and many others.) Enough. Already.