Q: What do these stores have in common? A: “Vertically integrated manufacturing”

Imagine you’re in a boutique trying on some jeans that almost fit. What if they actually offered to make a pair tailored your measurements at their factory at India, in two weeks? That’s the case at JF & SON, which works with hand-weavers throughout India to develop custom fabrics–for clients and their own clothes–that are sent to the vertically integrated JF & SON studio in New Delhi. This system of production allows them to make constantly make unique products, in small quantities that are responsive to what their customers want.

Pushing this notion to its extreme is a new line of denim, Prison Blues, made by prisoners in Pendleton, Oregon out of a 47,000 square foot facility devoted to making jeans. Each pair features a tag resembling a license plate saying that each pair is “made on the Inside to be worn on the Outside.”

The idea that a company controls every step of its production process–vertical integration–has started to take on greater appeal as consumers demand ever greater quality control and customization options. It has long been front and center in all of American Apparel’s advertising and even on their storefronts, and allows them to showcase new products in development and respond to feedback regarding new colors, fit, and fabrics quickly. LVMH also claims to be vertically integrated in that they control every step of the supply chain–from sunglasses to clothing to watches–produced in their own specialized workshops.

Part of the appeal of vertical integration—across all levels of retail, from everyday basics, boutiques, to luxury stores—is that consumers are responding to brands that stand for a particular way of making and using, that produces a system of meaning or validation. There seems to be an affinity for brands to operate more as ateliers or workshops than as mass production companies where materials are outsourced, costs are mercilessly pared down, and production is standardized. By acknowledging, exposing and controlling their manufacturing process, these brands make consumers feel a deeper connection to them by creating a new mythology around how their products are made.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, as the years sandwiched between the dot-com boom and the late 00’s ushered in an unprecedented ballooning and democratization of luxury. The base price for  “It” handbags (and now shoes) rose to over a grand, fashion houses long past were resurrected with new talent (a low point being Lindsay Lohan’s short-lived appointment at Ungaro), and brands expanded into ever far-flung categories.

Meanwhile, a backlash to this state of affairs was emerging. “Slow fashion,” a cousin to its more well known kin slow food, embraced like-minded principles such as locally sourced materials and manufacturing, ethical production practices, and environmentally responsible choices. Think Anya Hindmarch’s iconic and endlessly knocked off “I’m not a plastic bag” dating from 2007, or Ali Hewson and Bono’s ’organically sourced clothing line Edun. Cue 2008 and the luxury market that had overperformed since the early 2000’s took a nosedive. The age of ubiquitous luxury and overvaluation had ended.

At Columbia’s GSB’s Retail and Luxury Goods Club’s conference a few months ago, it became clear that fashion houses and luxury conglomerates had begun to tout slow fashion principles to justify their relevance in the “new normal” and search for a more substantial notion of authenticity.

As Daniel Lalonde, CEO of Louis Vuitton NA put it, “The new luxury value equation has shifted, how do consumers construct the ‘value’ of a luxury item and rationalize its purchase? I’ve found that customers respond to creativity, craftsmanship, and value.” Some brands are starting to communicate this “value,” as tied to authenticity, by establishing provenance and, on the flip side, promoting transparency in manufacturing.

One of the cornerstones of this “luxury value equation” is the nature of heritage and craftsmanship. A marquee name is no longer enough, it has to be demonstrated by a tradition of craftsmanship, sourcing, and provenance. Nowadays, status items might be designed in the United States, sewn in China, and then finished in Italy, creating tension for brands in how they portray their production processes. As clothing production has shifted to computerized systems, artisanal and basic technical skills are being shifted to other countries, mainly China. These pressures have led brands such as Louis Vuitton and Gucci with a built-in heritage story to rediscover their legacy and make it the centerpiece of their 2010 campaigns.

It should be pointed out that the groundwork for luxury’s current fixation on provenance has been accelerated by social media, such as tastemaker fashion bloggers and their readership, resulting in increasingly savvy consumers. We’ve entered an era where bespoke details are becoming more mainstream, which was not the case even five years ago. By popularizing the notion that it’s cool to know how clothes are made and finished, social media has effectively shifted the needle towards slow fashion.

LVMH recently joined forces with Parsons to launch a new initiative, “The Art of Craftsmanship Revisited: New York” in which designers are paired with local master artisans to create original fashion ensembles and short documentary films. Their commitment to heritage spans not just years but generations into the future—a wise investment at a time, as NYT fashion critic Cathy Horyn put it, when “many aspects of contemporary life feel unreliable, [so] heritage brands offer a degree of security.”

To be continued next week…

Born out of a homesickness for the yogurt of his native Iceland, Siggi Hilmarsson started to make his own batches at home, founding Siggi’s in 2005. After many, many batches, he was able to create a nonfat skyr with three times the amount of protein compared to standard yogurts.

It has the cleanest taste (and thickest texture!) of any dairy product I’ve ever tasted, and quickly developed a cult following among foodies and healthy eaters. Now distributed nationally by Whole Foods, I sat down with Siggi to discuss his perspectives on American tastebuds and approach to eating.

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What was the inspiration for you behind founding your own yogurt company?
I missed skyr the yogurt of Iceland, which is much thicker than regular yogurt from being strained– you strain about 75% of the whey weight out so you have a much more concentrated mass of milk solids. Skyr is traditionally made from skim milk, because it’s a byproduct of butter. So back in Iceland in the old days, you would start by skimming off the cream to make butter, then take the skim and make the skyr, after straining the whey from the skyr you would use the whey to drink or pickle various sheep’s parts usually or other food items to store over the winter.

Although I missed skyr the reason why I founded Siggi’s as a particular brand of skyr in the US has more to do with food here than with yogurt per se—I’m pretty averse to eating a lot of sweet stuff and I wanted to make the product not very sweet. I wanted to make a yogurt that was not excessively sweet and didn’t have this explosive sweet flavor.

I don’t like eating a lot of sugar. And when I came to the States, I was shocked by not just candy, but whole wheat bread (with high fructose corn syrup) and everything in between has sugar.  In particular even natural yogurt had 25 to 30 grams of sugar a cup. And then you see some that use aspartame, or artificial sweeteners, which I absolutely abhor. I don’t think they are good for you, they taste terrible, and they are part of this engineered food that I’m not really into.

How did you educate yourself in the process of making skyr?
I started just reading about it. My mom went to a couple local libraries back home in Iceland and got me some really old articles. I read some books, I read online, learned about yogurt in general. And then I started experimenting. All in all, from the time I made my first batch to when I started selling it, it was probably a year and a half. I went through many batches that failed first.

As a company, what are your guiding principles?
We don’t want any of our foods to be overly or excessively sweet, so we use a low amount of any sort of sugar substance. And the sugar we do put in there, we decided to use agave, which is a low glycemic carbohydrate, it takes the body longer to break down so basically you don’t get as much of a rush as you would if you just pump yourself up with sugar.

The other principles are general subtlety—we don’t use flavorings or try to avoid them, we use real fruit, don’t use any colorings, no artificial ingredients, try to keep ingredient style clear and short.

Even things that are unnecessary we just don’t include—for example people will often add beet juice for color, which is still natural and it’s pretty tasteless in small amounts, but we’ve skipped that. We don’t try to exaggerate the colors of things. Also with our sourcing we try to be transparent and traceable. We have certain criteria for the farms that they give their cows access to pasture, grass feed them, don’t use any hormones, we are against tail docking which is a rather unpleasant practice in some industrial dairies. We endorse sustainability–for the lack of a better word -and humane animal treatment, no factory farming. .                     .

This weekend I walked past the John Fluevog store in Soho, and was struck by their “Buy Better, Buy Less” promotion. In a time when shopping has ground to a halt and 70% sales are the new 30% sales, retailers are looking for new ways to connect with skittish consumers, an especially tricky thing for the luxury industry. One beacon of hope in high-end retail is the concept of buying higher quality, more durable goods, but fewer of them. While not an original thought (just ask your depression-era grandparents about the wastefulness of the past decades), durability has hardly been the backbone of the retail sector, or of pop culture as we know it. In fact, planned obsolescence is key to most business’ long-term strategies.

The “Buy Better, Buy More” wave of green products and free-trade-everything, has been followed by the harsh realities of the economic collapse. So while counter-intuitive from a traditional business perspective, I wonder if culturally, the time has come for companies to redefine their relationship with consumers on fundamental level: asking people to consume less. One viable way to do this would be to offering a more durable product, but augmenting revenue with service/maintenance add-ons. Fluevog for example, could offer re-soling services by cobblers who are experts at working with their designs, thus adding another year to your shoes. Skeptics will balk at this idea, pointing to the direct decrease in replacement shoe sales. But it’s a new era, and perhaps customer loyalty, the knowledge that resources are being maximized, and fresh revenue streams will become necessary differentiators. In most cases, keeping your customers may better than losing them all.

2008 was an unforgettable year for us at People Are Amazing. Aside from Kat getting married, and me getting typhus, we launched this very blog and (despite our best efforts), it is still up and running! Since then, we’ve been privileged to interview a number of amazing people from Kalliopi Kohas, owner of Greek pine sap purveyor Mastiha to Tony Dusko, 5th grade teacher by day, whimsical web animator by night. A personal highpoint was hearing the wise words of 90 year-old Dave Crawford on growing up during the Great Depression and how best to navigate a crumby economy.

But the recession didn’t keep us from visiting some intriguing places. John took a trip to Brooklyn’s own Fine and Raw for a taste of artisanal, dairy/sugar/preservative-free chocolate. He brought back some perishable, refrigerated samples and we made sure they never reached room temperature! Kat found herself in the Mid-West wandering the aisles of Cincinatti’s own supermarket/amusement park Jungle Jim’s. Food, it seems, is a minor obsession at P.A.A.. Kat’s post about local panini-makers S’Wich found its way onto foodie blog Eater in May. I wrote about an awful new bottled tap water I came across at a bodega; in turn, that company curiously linked to our post, “Tap’NY Must Think You’re Stupid,” in their press section.

Surprisingly, our most popular post ended up being about a miscolored canine. In early May, I was experimenting with ways to boost traffic and I noticed that the search term “green puppy” was “volcanic” in popularity on Google Trends. Apparently, a Labrador with a pea-colored coat had been born in New Orleans and really people wanted to see the pictures. I posted the two images available at the time, unaware that moments later the popular site Buzzfeed would link to our post. Within a matter of minutes, we had thousands of viewers visiting our humble little blog. Thus, the “Green Puppy Effect” was born.

Obviously, you never quite know where a year will take you. This time last year, People Are Amazing didn’t even exist. But between blogging about diabetic rappers and Colorado grease thieves, we were thrilled to ride the ups and downs of 2008. Luckily for us, amazing things are always on the horizon and 2009 is sure to provide hearty fodder for the blog. Happy New Year and thanks for reading!

Ever inclined to hide its most interesting articles in random sections, the NYT ran a fascinating article last week about how book publishers, authors and new-media-types are looking to drive youth interest in books by expanding the concept of a ‘book’ to include video games and interactive elements. According to the article:

“You can’t just make a book anymore,” said Mr. Haarsma, a former advertising consultant. Pairing a video game with a novel for young readers, he added, “brings the book into their world, as opposed to going the other way around.”

Mr. Haarsma is not the only one using video games to spark an interest in books. Increasingly, authors, teachers, librarians and publishers are embracing this fast-paced, image-laden world in the hope that the games will draw children to reading.

Spurred by arguments that video games also may teach a kind of digital literacy that is becoming as important as proficiency in print, libraries are hosting gaming tournaments, while schools are exploring how to incorporate video games in the classroom. In New York, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation is supporting efforts to create a proposed public school that will use principles of game design like instant feedback and graphic imagery to promote learning.

Publishers, meanwhile, are rushing to get in on the action. Scholastic, the American publisher of the Harry Potter series, recently released “The Maze of Bones,” the first installment in a 10-book mystery series that is tied to a Web-based game.

What follows is a good synopsis of the ongoing educational debate: video games promote learning vs. video games damage learning. Not surprisingly, no consensus is reached, but a number of interesting voices offer their take on the ways in which reading is evolving.

There is, however, a significant distinction that that article touches on but doesn’t fully explore. The book publishing industry, in its struggle to stay relevant amongst digital competitors, is confusing a new desire for interactivity for a shift in what people want from reading. .                     .

A long time ago, in the 90s, some savvy entrepreneurs figured out that big companies like Coca-Cola and Nike wanted desperately to know what was cool with the kids in order to stay one step ahead of a culture increasingly at odds with mainstream marketing. Thus the trendspotting revolution launched to prominence companies like Look Look, the Zandl Group, Trendcentral, and many others all dedicated to acting as middlemen between street culture and the marketing departments of corporate America.

In the interest of parity, most trend consultancies invited the youth and cultural niches they ‘represented’ to speak on their own behalves, addressing the movements of culture in their own words. For example, Look Look’s eponymous magazine promised aspiring young photographers and artists an opportunity to publish their work— ostensibly for their peers—which could then be repackaged as a value-added consulting offering for Look Look’s clients. Or the Intelligence Group’s Trend School showcased young early-adopters speaking on panels about their hyper-connected lives. In essence, trendspotters offered a clever bargain; a platform for youth expression in exchange for youth’s bloodhound sense for the next big thing.

But fast forward a decade and a funny thing has happened: in offering such a bargain, trendspotters have largely made themselves obsolete. .                     .