Adaptive Path Blog

In our forthcoming book, Subject to Change, we close with a chapter titled “An Uncertain World,” about how the approaches we suggest will help businesses manage no matter what comes at them. In it, there’s this passage:

One key opportunity driven by this uncertainty is how the old categories will break down. David Weinberger discusses these trends and their implications in his excellent book, Everything Is Miscellaneous. Though the book is ostensibly about the nature of information in a digital world, the forces underlying that miscellany pervade all aspects of society. Google and Yahoo!, once technology companies, are now media players, and their advertising-based business models mean they compete more with Los Angeles and New York than their Silicon Valley brethren. Apple began as a computer company, but has morphed into a consumer electronics company (iPod, iPhone, Apple TV) and the third largest music retailer in the United States, which means its competitors are not only HP, Dell, and Toshiba, but also Sony, Wal-Mart, and Best Buy.

Oh, the perils of book publishing! Word is coming out that Apple is now the premier music retailer in the country, having surpassed Wal-mart and Best Buy.

What industry are you in, again? Who are your competitors, really?

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The shopping experience at clothing stores is much better than it used to be. The layout of the store tends to provide more open space for shoppers than it did just five years ago. Even in department stores, gone are the days of being squeezed in between the sale rack and some soulless sweater display with a half dressed mannequin. It seems there are more boutiques focused on one style or catering to a well thought out target audience than ever before. There are places for people to sit, often with those nice little tables with magazines. I’ve noticed this in nearly every U.S. city I’ve visited this year from Chicago, to DC, to Santa Fe.

Where most of these stores still sadly continue to fail is the real point of sale: the dressing room. It’s a terrible experience. The lighting is enough to compromise anyone’s self esteem. The fluorescent lighting not only makes me look bad, but the shirt or sweater that looked great on the shelf or rack, now looks different. And all too often, there isn’t anyone to help me decide if I’m about to buy something that will make me look like an idiot, stylish, savvy, or smart.

I recently learned that Anthropologie has a service where you can work with a stylist for free. (Sorry guys, no men’s clothes yet.) Having been less than inspired by my wardrobe lately, I signed up for an hour with Maria. First she sat me down and asked me several question: what did I like, what was I looking for, what colors did I hate? Then we walked through the store and she helped pick things out. We picked out probably 20 things — half of which I would never pick out on my own, but I was there to try new things.

The dressing room at Anthropologie isn’t amazing, but it’s better than most. The lighting isn’t enough to make me run, and it’s always well-staffed. This is the experience differentiator that Anthropologie offers: the support of someone that knows my likes and dislikes and how I want to improve my wardrobe. I tried everything on, ventured out and modeled it to her. Maria gave me her opinion and ideas for different things that I could do with the pants, shirts, or dresses, or as Maria referred to them ‘pieces’. While I didn’t quite feel like I was buying art, it was a lovely experience. I felt supported, confident, and even inspired.

Without the time with Maria, I wouldn’t have spent a dime at Anthropologie, but after an hour, I gladly walked up to the counter and spent a couple hundred dollars. I hope to go back a few times a year to meet with Maria. She even said I could bring old clothes from home and she’d help me work them into new outfits.

This experience struck me as an opportunity for a retail clothing store to transform how they think about their business, and specifically, how the business defines the job of the sales people. If a store made everyone that walked in the door feel like they had a stylist, I imagine that point of sale in the dressing room (hopefully with better lighting) would be a whole new opportunity.

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I had the fortune of interviewing Joshua Wesson, CEO of innovative wine merchant Best Cellars. Joshua Wesson will be speaking at MX East, and even leading a wine tasting! Here are some highlights, and you read the full interview here. (Don’t forget, when you register for MX East, use the promotional code BLOG for an additional 10% off).

“It was a grape stand epiphany after many years of suffering under the cruel heel of Manishevitz Concord, my first wine. I worked in restaurants for a number of years as a wine steward, thinking about putting wine and food together and helping people — all sorts of people, people who had broad knowledge of wine and people who had no knowledge of wine — connect to food in delicious ways.

The idea was to take a complex subject, wine, and make it instantly accessible, because when you think about it, ordering wine in a restaurant, you may spend three or four minutes, if that, thinking about what wine you want to drink and how it may or may not connect to the food.”

“I really wanted to make the experience so intuitive and simple that the store became your wine expert and it was your best friend, your reliable insider who would give you information that would connect your palette preference to a specific bottle.”

“It was kind of like Apollo 13, on the ground they threw all the things that they had up in the capsule on a table, and tried to figure out how they could jury rig a device that would allow the astronauts to get enough oxygen to come back to earth. We looked at all the different things that constituted a traditional wine shop experience and we basically threw away anything that was an obstacle and what was left on the table became the basis of Best Cellars. We took away the bad stuff, kept the good stuff, and added our own stuff and that’s how Best Cellars came to be.”

“We really believed that the way people learned and reacted to systems of classification, especially when it came to something as complex as wine, needed to have the option of going with their strongest suit.

And we were creating new categories, these taste-based categories, so it was absolutely critical that all these elements come together to present a common idea: the reinvention of the way that wine was merchandized by taste rather than by anything else.”

“We have become a little bit smarter in the way that we tune the music to the time of day. We actually have day parts and evening parts and the music that we play is markedly different: mellower during the day, a little bit faster at night. We also don’t play Christmas music. We’re very proud of that. In fact, we have signs that go in our windows at Christmas usually with a picture of Bing Crosby with a circle and a slash.”

Again, read the full interview here.

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Photo from here

I believe I first came across wine retailer Best Cellars in 1998 or so, visiting Manhattan. The store had, for that time, a distinct approach, catering to people who might like wine, but are uncomfortable with the price and arcane language. This meant things like no bottles of wine cost over $10 (I think… maybe $15), and that the store staff were friendly and approachable.

But for my information-geek-brain, the thing that most appealed was how Best Cellars totally reclassified wine. Typical wine categories are “region,” “varietal,” “vintage,” utterly meaningless to the bulk of the populace. Best Cellars’ reclassified wines across a spectrum from fizzy and fresh to smooth and big.

I was so struck by how a company’s core brand promise was demonstrated through information classification that I wrote about it… nearly 6 years ago. It was an example of a truly user-centered classification scheme, one that took words that normal people use and developing a system from that.

Best Cellars’ CEO Joshua Wesson explained his classification scheme in an article for Wine & Spirits magazine. I love the genesis of their terms:

You’ve got eight categories set up. In red wine, for example, there are “juicy,” “smooth,” “big,” each modified by several adjectives. Why those adjectives? Why those categories for that matter?

First we started looking at all the adjectives commonly used for wine. We blocked out maybe two hundred and fifty of them on cards, and then aligned the cards in broad sweeps based on attributes we thought would tie to different colors of wine. Then we started to turn over cards that needed a glossary for the average person to comprehend, the words that were understandable only by someone with a substantial knowledge of wine. Then if they were so broad that they were essentially meaningless we got rid of them. In the end we had about thirty words that seemed to work.

In a later interview with BusinessWeek, Wesson explains the retail experience he strives for:

Q: Aesthetics are important to your business model. Why?

A: Wine is a lifestyle-enhancing beverage. It’s only consumed for one reason: To make your life better than it was before and to make the people around you funnier than they were before. And because of that, because it’s so directly associated with pleasure, it seemed ill advised to create a store where the shopping experience was any less pleasurable than the experience [surrounding] the product’s [consumption].

And that means creating an environment that’s fun to shop in, where the information is conveyed as directly and enjoyably as possible. In fact, we look at the stores as exploratoriums, where you can learn a lot about wine just by reading each shelf. It’s no coincidence that the stores have a museum-like quality to them. But the best museums are interactive and engage you. And we try to engage people to think about what they’re reading, tasting, and looking at so they walk out better consumers, smarter consumers, happier consumers.

So everything in the store, from the color palette to the fixture display, to the way that our sales people are dressed, to the music that’s playing — all of those things are thought about in very careful ways to add up to more than the sum of their parts.

For all these reasons, I’m thrilled that Joshua Wesson is speaking at MX East (October 21-23, Philadephia, PA). He’s been able to build a brand, and business, taking a truly experiential approach to shopping for wine, opening a series of successful stores from Boston to Washington, D.C. He’ll share his story of success with our audience, and even lead a wine tasting heading into lunch!

Register with the promotional code BLOG and get 10% off the price.

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At SXSW, David Thomas interviewed me on the subject of what retailers could learn from taking an experiential point of view. Watch the video, or listen to the podcast.

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