Accept No Imitations

Tom Guarriello  asks: What do you thin-slice when you walk into a store? (I've already spoken at length that I don't thin-slice...)

So what do I pick up when I walk into a store?

Here's part I of my two-part answer.

Regardless of the category, I'm completely won over by shops that are uncompromising in their conviction to follow the beat of their own drummer. 

While I have my leanings toward a personal style and aesthetics (Anthropologie gives you a clue), I can sense and feel and appreciate any place that embodies their own version of Emerson's dictate: "Insist on yourself; never imitate."

I guess I'm picking up the company's indie spirit. Not my indie spirit, their indie spirit. ("To me, indie means your impetus is a vision, and typically one you cannot shake off. The impetus chose you, grabs you, and not the other way around.")

An example of a store that's faltered in following the beat of their own drummer is San Francisco-headquartered The Gap.

One retail expert attributes their current problems to fact that "the company stopped meeting the needs of its core customers, whom she described as "ageless, classic, all-American.""

Another retail expert notes they swerved from their vision of classic to fast fashion "trying to compete with youth-oriented, flavor-of-the-month brands like Abercrombie & Fitch and American Eagle Outfitters."

"For me, the epitome of Gap cool was a campaign the company rolled out in 1993 featuring a series of unposed, black-and-white photos of cultural icons like Jack Kerouac, Miles Davis and James Dean dressed in chinos." - David Lazarus, "Gap lost its basics instinct", San Francisco Chronicle, January 26, 2007

Hmmmm...Jack Kerouac. Miles Davis. James Dean. None of them imitators.

Sure this isn't a company, but I think the moral works, and it's the first story that came to me when I thought of epitomizing "following the beat of your own drummer":

"For three months he was a dishwasher for $9 a week in a second-rate Harlem restaurant. Sometimes he didn't even have a horn to play on. "I was always on a panic," is one of his best-known quotes. He slept in garages, became completely run down. "Worst of all was that nobody understood my music."

...[Charlie] Parker tells: "I'd been getting bored with the stereotyped changes that were being used all the time at the time, and I kept thinking there's bound it be something else. I could hear it sometimes, but I couldn't play it.

Well, that night I was working over 'Cherokee', and, as I did, I found that by using the higher intervals of a chord as a melody line and backing them with appropriately related changes, I could play the thing I'd been hearing. I came alive."

..Tony Scott relates: "And Bird [Charlie Parker] came in one night and sat in with Don Byas. He blew 'Cherokee' and everybody just flipped... When Bird and Diz [Dizzy Gillespie] hit The Street regularly a couple of years later, everybody was astounded and nobody could get near their way of playing music." - Joachim Berendt, The Jazz Book: From New Orleans to Rock to Free Jazz (newest edition: The Jazz Book: From Ragtime to Fusion and Beyond)

p.s. I recommend these two embodiments of following-their-own-beat marketing blogs: Kathy Sierra and Tara Hunt.

Bonus:  "Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another, you have only an extemporaneous, half possession... Shakspeare will never be made by the study of Shakspeare. Do that which is assigned you, and you cannot hope too much or dare too much... Abide in the simple and noble regions of thy life, obey thy heart, and thou shalt reproduce the Foreworld again." - Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance" (via Brian Johnson's comment over at my friend Siona's blog)

Comments

[Tom Guarriello]

The deep individuality that Kerouac, Davis, Bird et al. revealed to us is undoubtedly what's made them both compelling and enduring. Semantics aside, whether that uniqueness is "thin-sliced" or "quickly picked up," I think we "get it" in short order when we find people like this. Kathy Sierra definitely comes to mind. She's someone who invariably brings a distinctive take on anything she addresses. Oh, and there's this Evelyn girl too...

Best.

t

[nino]

Good post. I found little information on the biographies of Miles Davis. Maybe someone will be interesting.