I have absolutely no objectivity on this topic, but I think Daily Grommet pretty much covers any gift need. We are fast and furiously assembling 21 different holiday gift guides. Here are the first ones, for your browsing pleasure.
Stocking stuffers for kids and teens
Stocking stuffers for grown-ups
Customized gifts….order these early
I’ll add the others as they come along.
Posted in Design, e-commerce | Tagged Customized gifts, Gifts for kids, Gifts for teenagers, Gifts for women, Stocking stuffers, Teacher gifts | 2 Comments »
I was at the Wellesley Holiday Marketplace today. One unexpectedly exciting takeaway from the outing was not a physical object. It was something a stranger said to me. She was Corina Luther Belle-Isle, a financial advisor recently moved from Vermont to Boston. Corina was helping out my friend Sue Zimmerman at her Sueb.Do booth. In a starkly simple way Corina explained her willingness to support the craft effort:
I believe in buying stories
Wow! I’ve been working on this idea for a couple years but that one straightforward statement blew me away.
Corina is not alone. The Significant Objects project by Joshua Glenn and Rob Walker just finished up. It was a social science experiment in testing whether adding fictional stories to an ordinary flea market object can create commercial value. (Think of J Peterman’s goth cousin as the story author, and you’ll catch the vibe of the little masterpieces.)
This hot dog was auctioned off, accompanied by a short story by Jenny Davidson
Here’s the co-collaborators’ conclusion:
Between July 6 (1st story posted) and November 20 (100th auction ended) of 2009, Significant Objects auctioned off $128.74 worth of insignificant doodads and dinguses, netting $3,612.51 for our contributing authors. Perhaps this makes us (Rob Walker and Josh Glenn) sound like the greatest salesmen alive, but we prefer to think of ourselves as quasi-anthropological researchers….
…Along the way, we combined (according to London’s Independent) “one of the oldest of all media — the near-improvised short story — with the reinvigorated writer-reader relationship afforded by Web 2.0.” Not only that, according to the Techdirt blog, Significant Objects is “one (fun) example … of content creators smartly using infinite goods (the stories) to make a scarce good (the trinket) more valuable, and putting in place a business model to profit from it.” But Fast Company drew another conclusion: “Here’s an interesting and perhaps inadvertent side effect of [Significant Objects]: It could be argued that such exposure actually makes the writers worth more, too.”
So yes, stories sell. Deeply meaningful ones like Corina meant…stories from the heart and soul of the creator of an object. But it’s so fascinating that these blatantly fictional ones work too. I am imagining these 100 eBay-auctioned tchotchkes taking pride of place in the homes of 100 hipsters around the world. I believe half their commercial value was created by their scarcity, their association with Rob and Josh in their own hipster-ness, and also by the cachet of owning the inspiration for a story by a famous or semi-famous author.
The winning bidder was kind enough to send the guys a photo of the hot dog in its swank new environs.
In other words, I don’t think Joe Schmoe could write a story about a piece of crap and get a 2,000% return on his investment.
But I do believe that Joe Schmoe who produces an object of meaning or invention or beauty, and tells its/his story can reap a rewarding, and deserved, return on THAT investment.
At the Wellesley Marketplace with Sue Zimmerman in her Sueb.Do booth. Sue has made a career of selling directly to consumers and her stories and personality are a big part of the value of a purchase, for Sue's customers.
Posted in American culture, Cultural anthropology | Tagged Jenny Davidson, Joshua Glenn, Rob Walker, Significant Objects, Wellesley Holiday Marketplace | 1 Comment »
Nesting on Maine. Concord, Massachusetts
Four years ago, as my boys were getting older and Christmas morning was losing some sparkle, I had a brainstorm. I decided to start two traditions. They both had the goal of extending the season and de-emphasizing the actual day. First, we became Secret Santa to an elderly neighbor. The “we” is mostly “me” but the boys enjoy sneaking the gifts into her mailbox. Second, I surprised the boys by hanging 24 little numbered packages on our kitchen light fixture, to give us a micro minute of festivity every day.
I didn’t want to spend much on the Advent calendar gifts, and I wanted them to be more interesting than the typical Christmas gift. I luckily landed on the idea of giving the boys little pieces of antique ephemera, for some of the calendar days. My source is Nesting on Main, in Concord, Mass. One of the partners in the shop has a brilliant eye for typographic-heavy memorabilia. I like my boys to develop a sensibility for the way things used to be done, produced, and saved. And I am crazy for vintage paper goods and typography.
So here’s the tour of Nesting on Main, and this year’s upcoming treasures. My boys don’t read my blog or I would have to wait to publish this Road Trip.
Nesting is in a charming old building, up a flight of wooden exterior stairs. Side note: I took the Road Trip photos with my new Droid and have been very frustrated by their blurry quality. Turns out that the phone is shipped with an oily residue over the lens! I expect my next post to have better photo quality, now that I whipped out my E-cloth to clean it.
Wendi, one of the co-owners.
These are 19th century wholesale account grocery registers. I will wrap one up for each boy, with something small to eat.
If you go, and you love total randomness, allow at least an hour. There are four rooms to explore.
Kids like things with their initial. This convex metal disk must have labelled a drawer or cabinet. Alas, I could only find a “C”–no D or G for my other sons.
I had better luck with these old wooden bingo balls. The boys’ birthdates are the 17th, 18th, and 27th. OK I had to compromise a bit.
I’m not sure how Coca Cola distributed these cards. But I picked one to reflect an interest of each boy.
This is not antique, but I bought it for my goddaughter. It has sand and shells, and a little scroll I can remove and use to write her a message. Steal this idea for someone you love.
I kind of remember these so they can’t be all THAT old. I have to take a Road Trip to an old fashioned paper goods and office supply store. I miss the crazy, jumbled one I used to frequent in Dublin. They had stuff on the shelves they didn’t even know they carried.
These are old luggage tickets from a railway that used to travel near our Maine place, thus the reason I brought them home. I love that Wendi gave me a whole bunch of old envelopes to use for gifting these various items. She took time to pick out really good ones with great handwriting and cancelled stamps.
Antique pathology slides from the University of Pennsylvania. I love this photo so much I may blow it up and hang it on my wall.
When people see these admittedly odd things I give my boys, they ask, “What do your sons think of this?” I answer, “One of them totally gets it, one of them eventually will, and the third one just rolls his eyes.” But I am quite sure that these off-beat gifts will make great material for one of the boys in a session with a future therapist, or a blind date, perhaps.
Therapist: “What were holidays like when you were growing up? Like, special traditions? What kind of presents did your parents give you for Christmas?”
Pieri son: “I think my mother did not understand Christmas. She used to wrap up things like old glass slides from some pathology lab. Or discarded pharmacy pill boxes with dusty remnants of tablets.”
This Advent Calendar tradition is guaranteed to elicit a fair share of sympathy. That’s OK. I am a mother. It is all my fault anyway. I might as well have some fun with it.
Thanks to Wendi at Nesting on Main. She encourages my habit. She actually started doing something similar for her nephew!
Posted in American culture, Design | Tagged Droid, Nesting on Main | Leave a Comment »
Photo by Alex Welsh for The Wall Street Journal ---Jason Euren, an anthropology student at the New School University in Manhattan, worked with a soldering kit at the Brooklyn hackerspace Resistor recently.
When we lived in Ireland, the secondary school system had a brilliant sophomore year program called “Transition Year.” Tenth grade was only 50% academic. The rest of the time, students took assessments for interests and aptitudes, did work internships, created philanthropic projects, started micro businesses, learned new skills like sailing, and generally got more broadly exposed to the world. My son Dane discovered (or confirmed?) his academic and career interests. His friend Cillian made a crucial personal discovery via two engineering and banking internships…he learned he absolutely hates office work. He is now studying to be a nurse, and he loves it.
Thus I was happy to learn the stats in this new WSJ article, “Tinkering Makes a Comeback.” Kids are starting to look for “real” professions that require creativity and perhaps some hands-on involvement. Adults are too. The ugly reality is that a lot of software development, financial analysis, consulting, and here-to-fore respected professional jobs are devolving into computer-tethered modern day versions of piecework. Especially at the junior levels.
I’m not against those jobs. Plenty of people have them and love them. But they have been over-emphasized in our society as the most desirable options. I am simply interested in exposing people (kids especially) to a broader definition of success and career ideas. Anyway, here are some of the encouraging facts and statements from the “Tinkering” article:
I find this tinkering trend really encouraging. (I am perhaps biased because I spent all my high school free time either flipping burgers or travelling between the wood shop, ceramics studio, and a giant weaving loom. I think it made my mind fresher for learning iambic pentameter and Fortran.) Kids will choose careers better suited to their interests. The increasing affordability of tools to develop products (CNC machines, 3-D printers, laser cutters, CAD software) will continue to democratize innovation. We see it every day at Grommet. People who could never have been able to develop serious tech and engineered products twenty years ago, are doing it every day. We can expect innovation to keep coming from unexpected corners.
Here what Naomi Lamoreaux, an economic historian at UCLA says:
The really dynamic times in our history are times when you have lots of ordinary people who think they have a chance to make a difference.
I have a front seat on that trend every day. I am glad it is reaching college kids and the broader population.
Posted in American culture, Cultural anthropology, Irish culture | Tagged Make magazine SparkFun Electronics, Naomi Lamoreaux, Tinkering | 1 Comment »
Florescu for News took this photo. Experts picked Maria Corti's spruce after an exhaustive search that included examining numerous potential candidates from a helicopter. Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_lo
I’m in New York. Last night I took a little field trip to see the tree in Rockefeller Center. Why? I loved that it came from the Connecticut backyard of a fifth-grade teacher, Maria Corti. She’d called and suggested it last year. When she heard nothing, Maria assumed the offer hit the circular bin. She was surprised and delighted when New York officials called to accept her tree in the place of honor.
(Officials credit the lush perfection of the tree to the fact that it grew up over a septic system. Natural fertilizer, and all that.)
So I had to go see it. Workers were swarming all over it, late at night. It will take until December 2 to get the tree fully installed and decorated. I took a photo that came out way more artsy than I intended.
I’m only on Real Deal No. 2 and I had imagined stories about direct connections with people and places. I’m not from New York. I don’t know Maria. But I loved that she wanted to share her tree with me, and everyone else. I do feel a direct, human connection.
On a side note, my day yesterday began and ended with highly confectionary experiences. Here is the photographic evidence:
9:00 AM yesterday, Boston. Taste testing the most exciting ice cream I have ever encountered. And I know my ice cream. If you think you do too, don't miss this Grommet.
9 PM yesterday. New York. Dylan's Candy Bar. My youngest son asked me to bring him something back.
I hadn’t been to Dylan’s before. I had heard plenty about it. I was underwhelmed. The quantity and variety of choices was impressive. But the prices were stratospheric. Case in point: I saw a lovely holiday lollipop in the window at Henri Bendels for $6. Way too much I thought–not worth the price. Same lollipop at Dylan’s for $7. Made Bendels a bargain.
But I did love the Dylan’s stairways: translucent backlit material littered with embedded real candy:
Posted in American culture, Cultural anthropology | Tagged Dylan's Candy Bar, Maria Corti, Rockefeller Center tree | 2 Comments »
At Grommet we get to give a name and face to businesses that would otherwise likely be depersonalized in a “normal” commerce experience.
As a companion to my day job, I am going to start sharing some of the more local “real deals” I find in my ordinary travels. These are businesses or experiences that humanize life. I’d love for others to share theirs and I will post them. Just send me photos (and a little narrative) about real-world places, businesses, experiences that personalize your own daily travels. Here is my first installment.
Dave’s Fresh Pasta–Somerville, Massachusetts
Dave's Fresh Pasta, Somerville, MA
Dave’s Fresh Pasta is a crowded, cheerful warren of little food-filled rooms. Beyond the homemade pasta, Dave’s sells a lovely cross section of cheeses, wines, dry goods, and produce, plus great deli creations. You can craft a dinner on the spot or just happily order for immediate consumption.
I like watching customers enter. As people cross Dave’s threshold, they magically transform from “blah” to delighted. Couples cuddle up, they smile, people breathe deeply. Their whole affect says, “I am in a good place. These Dave’s people know what they are doing. I can’t go wrong here with the [fresh ravioli, or cheese, or wine, or deli sandwich] I’m about to select.”
Getting my pumpkin and goat cheese ravioli boxed up. As one couple was repeatedly somewhat slow to respond to questions about their order, this employee rolled her eyes and said quietly, knowingly: "Lovebirds."
Sorry about blurry photos…getting use to my new Droid.
Cornucopia of cheese. Charmed to note the value created by the helpful annotations that go with the curated selections. I like when a bookstore or video rental place does that too. "Staff picks" etc.
Dave encourages people to donate CD's that the shop then sells for $1, donating the proceeds.
I’ve only been to Dave’s twice and I already trust the place. Everything I’ve tried is worth the effort of getting there, and I want to support their emphasis on careful curating of quality. You don’t need vast choices when it comes to wine, or cheese, or olive oil, or pasta. You just need good ones.
P.S. I liked this short Globe essay by Christopher Muther, about faux town center malls. It came out a few days after I wrote this post. It’s called “He’s Authentically Disappointed.” New lifestyle center is a mall of confusion – The Boston Globe
Posted in American culture, Cultural anthropology | Tagged Christoher Muther, Dave's Fresh Pasta | 3 Comments »
(AP Photo/David Zalubowski)
Everyone loves a good deal, right? What’s wrong with that? Alas, if you care about fostering real product innovation, if you care about building vibrant American enterprises which pay a true living wage to their workers, and if you care about preserving true consumer choice and competition–there’s a whole lot wrong with the American obsession with getting a “great deal.”
I’ve been walking around, feeling somewhat like a Lorax-like “Save the Trees” person, worrying about this idea. I didn’t even have words for my concerns. After all, cheap prices are an American birthright, no? And then I tripped on the great book Cheap, by Ellen Ruppel Shell. I started reading it yesterday. Her messages are so important that I won’t wait to finish the book to begin sharing them. She needs to be heard and understood by anyone who buys anything. Consumer purchases drive 65% of our economy. I consider the discussion of discount culture to be as important as fixing health care, in our economic recovery. And the discussion goes way beyond economics, to the very quality of life.
Here are some excerpts straight from the first chapters of Cheap:
I know, I know. About now you are thinking, free markets prevail. The strong survive. They are the ones who deserve to prosper. This notion is as old as the hills, and the “haggling rug merchants of Istanbul or the teeming bazaars of Marrakesh.” Are these venerable institutions so different from the big box retailers and online discounters?
Well, yes, the author maintains. “The ancient marketplace was built on a balance of power between buyer and seller that is all but gone today. A cascade of corporate scandals and screwups from Enron to Haliburton to Citibank to Bernie Madoff’s audacious Ponzi scheme has shaken whatever faith we once held in corporate responsibility, and this mistrust has dripped down to the retail level.” As consumers we exact our “revenge” or get “our due” by seeking the maximum possible discounts on….everything.
But in the world of food production, or technological innovation, or furniture building, it is rarely the truly inventive, or quality-concerned, or creatively entrepreneurial company that can fuel massive discounts. It’s the big guys with dominant scale who can, temporarily, sustain such pressure. It’s only temporary. They too lose their R and D budgets, and their staff, and their basic viability too.
Ruppel Shell neatly illustrates her basic premise with this example from George Akerlof, a Nobel Prize winner in economics:
She concludes, “In American today, Gresham’s law rules, with sweeping consequences, both obvious and subtle. The way we shop, the way we do business, and the way we think about money all reflect this new reality.”
This, in a nutshell, is why discount culture terrifies me. And this is one reason I am devoting my professional life to creating a connection between products, their stories, and consumers.
How can you willingly pay “full price” if you don’t really understand what you are buying? I truly believe that if people appreciate how special it is to make a an all-natural caramel sauce, or the benefits of an innovative travel accessory from a tiny startup company, or the sustainable practices of a wood turner, they will prefer those choices. But in the sanitized vacuum of most online and bricks and mortar retailers, no one is telling any story but the most obvious one…that of price. A shallow and dangerous story, indeed.
Posted in American culture, Cultural anthropology, Design | Tagged Cheap, Ellen Ruppel Shell, George Akerlof, Grhesham's law, The High Cost of Discount Culture | 8 Comments »
This is me and Joanne, sometime in 2008, a couple months before our Daily Grommet launch.
Notice the empty shelves....just a few scattered possible Grommets.
This is the two of us, last week, a little over a year later.
You can hardly see us, for all the Grommets crowded on the shelves!
(We really did not plan to dress like Bobbsey Twins in both pictures, BTW. Just happened. I do like that we actually look happier now than then!)
Here is what I learned in the intervening year between these photos:
Surely, most of these lessons were shared by anyone who started a company in the last 18 months. I’ve seen a bunch of experienced entrepreneurs pull the plug quickly in 2009, planning to “wait this one out.”
I realized lately that I take a lot of Daily Grommet pictures because I know these early days tend to turn out to be some of the best ones. I want to remember them vividly, for both their pain and glory. I am sure I will learn a bunch of new lessons next year. I may not get smarter, but getting wiser is inevitable.
Posted in Start-ups | Tagged Joanne Domeniconi | 7 Comments »
This is the first slide from the talk I gave at Savannah College of Art and Design. It was fun. Only one guy fell asleep, from what I could tell. So that must mean I am ready for prime time.
But I’m not exactly on the speaker circuit. I’d love help from my blog readers. Feel free to suggest me to event organizers. I’d particularly enjoy:
A word of warning… A subset of this topic is vaguely Socialist. I envision a world where “The People” get to decide which products get discovered, shared, discussed, and supported. With Daily Grommet as the platform. See Slide 2, below.
Thanks in advance for your help!
Posted in Entrepreneurs | Leave a Comment »
I’m just back from a short stay at the Savannah College of Art and Design–I attended industrial design studios, met with possible Grommet creators, and gave a talk to the students and faculty. It’s an impressive place. Only 30 years old and yet it has almost 10,000 students across a variety of programs. The energy is palpable. The vision is too. I met a bunch of dynamic design professors and students. It’s really a privilege to be in such an entrepreneurial academic institution. Here’s a little photo essay.
This building houses both Admissions and the Graphic Design Program...one of the gracious old brick reclamations. SCAD has a policy of buying and renovating historic properties in Savannah. As such the school has been the main preservation force in the city. It creates a very distributed urban campus, which the administration pulls together by holding magnet events in a wide variety of buildings.
Just inside those doors.
The school has a very sophisticated and controlled visual identity in most communications, but it breaks all the rules when it comes to exterior building signage--using whatever signage style is appropriate to the period of the building.
Savannah College of Art and Design, Gulfstream Centre for Design. The furniture and industrial design programs are housed in this reclaimed warehouse.
Student work
Student work....Philippe Starck...look out!
Professor Peter Fossick's Senior Studio
One of many model shops
I couldn't believe the students have access to the normal complement of shop space and equipment (albeit tons of it) but also a laser cutter, a CNC machine and five (count 'em) Fuse Deposition Modelling machines (3-D Printer). When I was an ID student we made nearly everything totally manually. A vacu-form machine was high tech to us. These students can, hopefully, spend more time on their ideas, and less time on hand crafting models.
Tom Gattis, head of the Industrial Design Department. He's an expert wood turning craftsman in his spare time. The vase in front is made from the local palm trees.
Professor David Ringholz, in front of a student project, sponsored by Hobie.
I was put up at the immense SCAD private guest mansion, Magnolia House. After years of rough startup budget travel, I could not have been more appreciative. This beats sleeping on couches in the apartment of a friend of a friend, for sure.
The view from the front porch of Magnolia House, towards Forsyth Park. It's where the author of "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil" stayed while writing the book.
Magnolia House
Each room has a sophisticated theme, and is appointed with interesting art from SCAD alum and staff.
No detail is left unattended at Magnolia House.
I loved the texture of Savannah...the mix of the really old and new. And this...a lot of "kinda old" but familiar too. In a movie set kind of way. Robert Redford was, in fact, shooting "The Conspirator" there during my visit.
Savannah is a real food town. I had shrimp and grits at "Uncle Bubbas" and two fine dinners at Sapphire Grill and Local 11 Ten . This is a photo of The Back in the Day Bakery, where journalist Rob Walker normally gets the imported Mexican Coca Cola he favors, and wrote about a couple weeks back, in the NYT magazine. This photo is from the very fun Little Pink Studio blog.
It's really fun to visit shops in such an art-inspired town.
People dress better too. I'm sometimes intimidated by the aggressive femininity of Southern women. The Savannah version tends more towards inspiring and witty, not intimidating.
Display inside Paris Market
The charming Savannah Bee Company
With equally charming people inside, sampling honey for visitors.
I mainly scouted for Grommets, but I did come home with one personal find....this pair of earrings made of watch parts. They are the creation of a SCAD student, Cassie Warnat, and I found them at ShopSCAD--a place to buy pieces from SCAD students, alum, faculty and staff.
I am grateful to Julia Kemp, a SCAD alum and our former summer intern who suggested this trip, and to Tom Gattis and Sheila Magness, who made it happen. I would be delighted to return to SCAD anytime!
Posted in Design | Tagged Cassie Warnat, David Ringholz, Peter Fossick, Rob Walker, Savannah College of Art and Design, Sheila Magness, Tom Gattis | 8 Comments »
