nightgarden.org

Why you need all this……is quite simple to explain. As a creator of wearable clothes without stores of your own, you need the channels to actually sell your stuff. The marketing professor tells me that online sales don’t pick up, as long as your brand is not established. What will you do other than try to get into one of these shows, to grab attention of buyers, press and who else?
To me this sounds all a bit too much of a push approach. What if your creations don’t focus on the consumer, who should be responsible for the demand? In all the fancy European capitals I have been so far, I was fascinated by the local craftsmanship, small studio-shop combinations that have no money and therefore no choice as to grab attention in other ways. Good initiatives try to establish collective events for seed-retailers. They can be seen as street fashion festivals, including some presentations, concerts and small runway shows in places that are not predominantly assigned to this purpose. Others occur as fairs for design craftsmanship, to sell and grab attention at least once a year. Yet again the direct involvement of the consumer at an earlier stage of product development is playing hide and seek.
What it takes to do it underground. It is hard to answer that question, I admit. There is no recipe on the one hand and too many common ways on the other. What you will have to do is to grab attention, establish new channels and use existing ones efficiently – in theory. In practice you should try to find out what those people actually want to wear, before you create it. Is that so hard to understand? I should say it is not, but it’s difficult to forecast trends the way they will occur. And it is close to heaven to be right in the middle of it, when it happens.  We can all be sure of only one thing. Once there is a recipe for it, everyone will do it the same way. This again creates opportunity for new approaches and the cycle goes on. Long live the business of artificial needs!

People, what is going on out there? I look down this table, all I see are white flags. Our numbers are down all across the board. Teen smoking, our bread and butter, is falling like a shit from heaven! We don’t sell Tic Tacs for Christ’s sake. We sell cigarettes. And they’re cool and available and *addictive*. The job is almost done for us!

First you enter the stage of abuse. You are drinking fabulous coffee, are having a love affair with the smell, the taste and the experience. You want more, but after the test-box of capsules that comes with the machine is empty you have to go and buy some. Damn. Do you really need them? Well since you have the machine already and there is no other way to use it except with those capsules, damn. But you kind of like that coffee. So you go and get some, buy them online; steal them from your employer or the bloody friend of yours who gave you the machine as a present. Someone is going to pay for them, in any case.
It’s done, you are now at tolerance. Congratulations! You are successfully playing the game for the 150th time, and you are about to become a hero. All that they have promised, all the childhood dreams are about to become true right now, at this moment. Go and get the trophy! Isn’t that all you ever wanted?
Withdrawal. Let’s just not talk about that. Come on, it’s just a habit. You can easily live without it, for quite some time. Besides, you pay for it, because you like it, and not for any other reason.

*From the movie ‘Thank you for smoking’.