FLEX COMMERCE 2020-2025
Taste, time, aesthetic innovation, niches, membership, and anything worth waiting for
Welcome to the Sociology of Business. In my last analysis, Case Study: Skims, I looked into Skims growth scenarios. For sponsorship options, send me an email, and make sure to take advantage of 25% group subscriptions. If you are on the Substack, join the chat and I’m happy to respond to any questions in the chat or comments here.
Order my new book Hitmakers: How Brands Influence Culture, and find me on Instagram, Twitter, and Threads. With one of the paid subscription options, join Paid Membership Chat, and with the free subscription, join The General Chat on The Sociology of Business WhatsApp group.
In 2003, Slavoj Žižek, a famous postmodernist philosopher and Marxist cultural theorist, wrote copy for Abercrombie & Fitch’s Back to School Catalog. Shout out to The Sociology of Business reader and its Paid WhatsApp Group member Joe Fattorini for sharing this on our group chat recently. In the catalog, alarming nudity is overlain with sharp cultural commentary. More than 20 years later, the catalog images don’t hold, but the text does. Having a philosopher write for your catalog is the ultimate flex commerce, because what are people really buying?
I had a pleasure of being a guest on Eugene Rabkin’s legendary podcast Style Zeitgeist, and enjoyed our conversation immensely. You can listen to it on Apple podcasts or Spotify.
Equally exciting was for Hitmakers: How Brands Influence Culture to be featured in the window of legendary Casa Magazines in the West Village. We did it for the giggles, but I heard that some copies sold. Ali is a legend.
I took Abercrombie’s (Žižek’s? consumers?) flex - this catalog is a semiotic vortex - as the opportunity to look at the evolution of the new luxury - taste, knowledge, time, membership, access, niches - that I observed in my first book, The Business of Aspiration, published in 2020. I was lucky to make a trip to Japan just before the pandemic, and my experience there was fresh on my mind. The resulting output mixed the shift in our aspirations with what brands should do about
If you want to read the rest, you’ll have to upgrade to paid.