Hipster Retail and its Role in the Creative Class Economy

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Hipster Retail and its Role in the Creative
Class Economy
TABIA/OBIAA Annual Conference Monday, March 30,
2009 Mike Berne MJB Consulting
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A Delicate Subject

• No one likes to be categorized
• I hear the conference planned to exhibit a pair
  of live hipsters in a cage but couldnt afford
  the feeding costs.
• Washington City Paper blog

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A Delicate Subject

• Especially not this psycho-graphic
• Value placed on creativity and uniqueness
• Not some psycho-graphic that can be marketed
  to!
• Their lifestyle and worldview is so often
  co-opted
• and then they are the ones displaced
• We, who preach revitalization, are not
  necessarily the good guys here

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A Delicate Subject

• Importance to what we do
• Role in setting trends
• Willingness to pioneer neighborhoods
• Centrality to the creative class economy

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Hipsters A Caricature

• Unwashed or unkempt hair
• Vintage/thrift-store clothing
• Horn-rimmed glasses
• Shoulder-strap messenger bags
• Chuck Taylor Converse All-Star sneakers

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Occupations

• Not synonymous with artist
• although most work in creative or tech
  professions
• Indie film-makers
• Graphic designers
• Architects
• Computer programmers
• College students (albeit in less mature form)

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Sensibilities

• United not so much by a common occupation
• but rather, a similar worldview and sensibility
• How urban business districts are able to define
  and differentiate themselves today
• Consumers and tenants gravitate to brands
• with which they want to be associated
• that express how they themselves want to be
  understood and seen
• Examples West Queen West (Toronto), Broadway
  (Saskatoon), Kensington (Calgary), Kitsilano
  (Vancouver)

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Sensibilities

• Authenticity
• Places that remain real and un-scrubbed
• Distrust of anything that feels overly polished
  or packaged
• where demand has been manufactured by the
  marketing and advertising clout of large
  corporations
• Age
• Love old things
• Excel at finding a pragmatic way of instilling a
  new meaning while still retaining original
  character

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Sensibilities

• Creativity and personal expression
• Disdain for homogenization and the mass market

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Sensibilities

• Irony
• A self-awareness of how incongruent something is
  with what is expected
• Isnt it ironic that someone as cool as me would
  wear such a cheesy T-shirt?
• Celebration of kitsch
• Once-popular things, products and ideas that are
  now widely mocked by mainstream culture as
  tasteless and tacky

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Sensibilities

• Kitsch
• Much as a sugary grape juice, given time and
  bacteria, can become a fine wine, a popular idea
  allowed to wallow in obscurity can become rich in
  ironic energy. Much as a trained pig can find
  truffles, a hipster can smell irony in an old
  thing and make it cool. For example, Thundercats
  was popular in 1983. By 1988, they were passé.
  By 1994 virtually unknown. By 2004 obscure
  enough that wearing a Thundercats printed tee is
  ironic and hence cool.
• Encyclopedia Drammatica entry of Hipster Irony

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Sensibilities

• Exclusivity
• A belief that one is culturally superior because
  he/she knows what is cool before others do
• Only they know or see

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Sensibilities

• Price
• Young, sometimes starving
• Spend on some things, not on others

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Neighborhoods

• Attracted to areas
• Where space is cheap
• Older industrial-loft buildings (with the size
  for a live/work arrangement, can be customized)
• Which feel raw, gritty and authentic
• Which only they know

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Neighborhoods

• Drawn, as a result, to environments that others
  tend to ignore or avoid
• The shock troops of revitalization
• Often serve (inadvertently) to create and build a
  positive brand for a much-maligned neighborhood

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Cultural Forms

• The embrace of indie
• Preference for small-scale, grass-roots
  enterprises, locally-owned businesses and
  new/emerging artists
• Antipathy towards the mass market, prevailing
  orthodoxy and corporate insidiousness
• Cult of exclusivity
• Examples
• Music (small live-music venues)
• Art (artist-run galleries)
• Film (art-house cinemas)

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Consumer Preferences

• Classic, old-school food and drink venues
• Examples dive bars, blue-collar diners
• Real and un-scrubbed, ironic, exclusive, cheap

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Consumer Preferences

• Vintage clothing and retro furniture
• Old and yet can be reinvented (in an outfit, a
  room) in a creative and uniquely personal way
• Ironic affection for kitsch
• Inexpensive prices

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Consumer Preferences

• American Apparel
• Started in 2003 (by a Canadian)
• Roughly 200 stores worldwide
• Best known for clothing basics (e.g. T-shirts,
  underwear)
• Wide-ranging appeal, but with a brand that is
  undeniably hipster

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Consumer Preferences

• American Apparel Why?
• Affordable
• Honest and real
• Models taken from the street, not air-brushed
• Not corporate
• No logos on clothing
• Retro 70s aesthetic in both fashion and
  advertising
• Street locations, the anti-mall store?

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Case Study

• Exchange District, Winnipeg
• 20-block district in Downtown
• Known for its stunning late-1800s/early 1900s
  commercial architecture (e.g. warehouses, former
  commodity exchanges)
• National Historic Site, with 150 Heritage
  buildings

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Case Study

• Exchange District, Winnipeg
• Heyday in the late 1800s, early 1900s
• Sat neglected for decades
• Became a red-light district, with prostitution,
  bath houses, etc.
• Rediscovered by artists in the 1970s

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Case Study

• Exchange District, Winnipeg
• Ragpickers Anti-Fashion Emporium
• Vintage and one-of-a-kind offerings
• Antiques Funk
• Kitschy pieces
• Into The Music
• Obscure vinyl
• Royal Albert Arms
• Up-and-coming bands
• Underground Café
• Hidden, secret lunch spot

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Market Depth

• Factors
• Educational institutions
• Liberal-arts colleges/research universities
• Art institutes
• Structure of the local economy
• Film studios

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Market Depth

• Factors (continued)
• Proximity to larger markets with rising costs
• Price, authenticity, irony, exclusivity
• Can Rust Belt cities like Hamilton and Winnipeg
  capitalize?
• Brand within the artistic and creative
  communities
• Many like-minded souls
• Public/non-profit support

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Attracting Hipsters

• Do not respond to conventional marketing tactics
• Guerilla marketing
• High-integrity media
• Alternative publications
• Respected hipster entrepreneurs
• Word-of-mouth/viral marketing
• Select blogs
• MySpace.com
• Price and support can go a long way
• See the value, dont dismiss!

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If You Still Dont Get It

• Robert Lanham
• Moved to Brooklyns Williamsburg neighborhood in
  1996
• Released The Hipster Handbook in 2003
• Inspired by The Official Preppy Handbook (1980)
• Meant to be playful and humorous
• My tongue was so far in my cheek that my face
  still hurts

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If You Still Dont Get It

• Go watch Reality Bites or High Fidelity

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yupsters

• David Brooks and his 2000 book, BoBos in
  Paradise
• Todays elites are Bourgeois Bohemians, or
  BoBos, a hybrid of
• 60s-era liberal activism and
• 80s-era corporate/consumer culture

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yupsters

• Mainstream young professionals who prefer to live
  in more established, comfortable and affluent
  areas but
• who have integrated creative and alternative
  sensibilities into their lifestyle and consumer
  preferences
• Combination of yuppie and hipster

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yupsters

• Gravitate to neighborhoods initially
  re-discovered and revitalized by artists, drawn
  to the creative vibe there because it
• Reflects their own aspirations, how they
  themselves want to see themselves and be seen by
  others

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yupsters

• Attracted to commercial spaces that celebrate the
  creative impulse
• Gallery atmosphere, with local art on the walls
• Industrial-chic décor, with high ceilings,
  exposed ductwork
• but with a finish and flourish that would seem
  overly polished to the hipster
• Target market for newly-built loft condominiums

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yupsters

• Drawn to retro, old-school and kitschy cultural
  forms
• but only after the warts have been removed, the
  sense of danger attenuated

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yupsters

• Patronize faux-retro restaurants and bars
• that have been developed from scratch to evoke
  an entirely different era

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yupsters

• Will willingly pay more for fashions and
  furnishings that appear old or old-school
• sometimes because they were deliberately made
  to look that way
• Shabby chic
• Designer denim
• Vintage-inspired apparel

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yupsters

• Will take basic, humdrum foods
• and elevate them to haute cuisine
• Examples gourmet burgers, tapas, ramen, barbeque

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yupsters

• Drawn to slickly-designed, expensively-priced
  yuppie nightspots
• but ones with hidden, impossible-to-find (often
  sign-less) locations far from the main drag

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yupsters

• Shop in boutiques with yuppie prices and décor
• but promise the newest styles, hard-to-find
  lines, limited collections and customized pieces

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yupsters .vs. Hipsters

• Seemingly minute distinctions, but they are
  critical
• yupsters able to pay more agents of
  displacement
• yupsters taking values and consumer icons which
  the hipster holds dear, and bastardizing them
• Typical bell-weathers
• Starbucks Coffee (versus independent
  coffeehouses)
• Displacement of iconic live-music venues

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The Progression of Hip

• Hip changes, by its very nature
• Becomes trendy, no longer embodies the same
  values
• No longer cheap, exclusive, authentic, etc.
• Hipsters move on, stay one step ahead
• Hip versus trendy versus mass

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The Cycle of Hip

• How many hipster districts are sustainable in a
  given region?
• Smaller markets one district for both the hip
  AND the trendy
• Not enough yupster demand to displace the hipster
• Attitudes among hipsters not as fierce?
• Larger cities a dynamic ecology of districts
• Hipster district transitioning to yupster
• Wasteland (or immigrant enclave) transitioning to
  hipster district

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Case Study

• Saskatoon, Saskatchewan
• Collective branding of three core business
  districts as the Cultural Crescent..
• Downtown
• Broadway
• Riversdale
• as a competitive response to new
  WalMart-anchored power centers on the citys
  outskirts

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Saskatoon, Saskatchewan

• Broadway pioneered by artists and galleries,
  filled with live-music venues, but
• Is becoming too expensive
• Surrounded by affluence
• Lack of retail inventory
• Conflict with close-in, high-value residential

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Saskatoon, Saskatchewan

• Riversdale diverse and low-income, emerging as
  hipster enclave
• Relatively inexpensive
• Gritty and real, still has an edge
• Underground appeal?

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Saskatoon, Saskatchewan

• Riversdale as hipster enclave aborted?
• Severe region-wide housing shortage
• New development (i.e. River Landing)
• will increase property values in the
  neighborhood?
• Less willingness in smaller markets to consider
  edgy neighborhoods?
• and the cycle begins again

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Contact Info

• With ANY comments or questions
• Michael J. Berne
• President, MJB Consulting
• 216 W 99th Street, Suite 19
• New York, New York 10025
• Office 212 794 0148
• E-Mail mikeberne_at_consultmjb.com /
  mikeberne_at_juno.com

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? 2008 MJB Consulting