1300 girls converged from all corners.  They also organized their own Leadership Institute which was broadly assembled around the theme of Innovation and Leadership.

It’s always hard to tell if a presentation or talk is “landing” with high school kids.  They are yawning and chronically sleep-deprived.  They are distracted by their phones.  They don’t nod and smile like adults often do in a talk. But the sharp questions from these girls afterwards revealed that they hadn’t missed much from our panel.

The girls swarmed afterwards for photos with the speakers.

Zubaida Bai of AYZH, Kim Karlsrud of Commonstudio and GreenAid, a Girl Scout, me

They kept pressing little trinkets into my hand.  I didn’t understand the gifts until they explained their heart-warming tradition of giving each other things to collect and display.   They are called SWAPS:  Special Whatchamacallits Affectionately Pinned Somewhere.

The giant George. R. Brown Convention center was packed with events and inspiring photos of Girl Scouts and their history.

The hundreds of adults on hand were equally engaged, and many dressed in coordinated outfits that helped their regional groups stand out.  This Florida woman explained the little hats her group sported.  They were meant to be a specific reference to the fashions of the times 100 years ago, with symbolic details of daisies (the founder’s nickname), her pearls, and also the navy color to represent the new Girl Scout uniform being released for the next 100 years.

I participate in a lot of tech conferences and competitions.  I typically only see one woman startup founder for every ten men who choose to compete or speak.  I told the girls that they need to change that.  Girls and women have to stop waiting to feel “ready” to create companies.  I can tell you that these girls are ready.  They are perfect.

You can use up to six of these at a time, they don’t expire, and they seem to self-reproduce in my mailbox every other day.  I asked the cashier how many people make a purchase without getting a discount and he said “Hardly anyone.”  He pulled out a 5 inch stack of used coupons and said, “I’ve only been here three hours…look at this.”

It’s easy to see how the store got backed into this corner.  A bright marketing manager tried this coupon once.  It was distinctive in the competitive landscape.  It had amazing conversion.  The sales looked great.  The average basket price went up.  Customers liked it.  So the store tried it again.  Customers were even more enthusiastic.  The numbers were through the roof, so they did it again and again until the program became a drug and customers would no longer purchase anything without a discount.  Margins started to get creamed.  The core business was threatened.   The only thing to do was either cheapen the merchandise with cost-reduced and stripped-down product exclusives from large manufacturers or quietly elevate sticker prices.  So Bed Bath & Beyond did that.  So did the competition. So would anyone.

When I got home from that little retail foray I read an article, Bargain Hunters, Hold That Click,  in the New York Times about the fake discounts presented at many flash sale and discount sites.  The article said,

Those who keep an eye on sales say there are more businesses proffering discount clothing than ever before, which means that no one channel is always tops for bargains. “It’s really hard to get good closeouts nowadays because so many places are fighting for them,” said Hayley Corwick, who writes the designer sales tracking blog Madison Avenue Spy. “Now the Web sites are fighting the discounters, who are fighting the flash sale sites.“

At Grommet we see the flash sale sites often picking up on products we discovered and promoting them at a “discount price” which is really exactly the same price we sell the product for every day.  Here is an example from today from Fab.com  These fantastic Rickshaw bags have been offered at this price for over a year at Daily Grommet, but Fab.com presents an inflated MSRP to calculate a discount:

From a purely rational standpoint, I’d expect the thin cover on all these “discounts”  to have already been blown.  Yet there is some odd psychology about people wanting a discount so badly they will throw out common sense and think they are getting something for less than is really possible.  Everyone is time-starved.  A discount can be a substitute for real price research.  And especially on an impulse purchase, a discount is just plain reassuring.  For evidence, look no further than the top tourist attraction in the US:  outlet malls!  (And the pathetic aspect of that is a post for another day.)  These retailers have promoted fake discounts for years.   But tourists are not demanding.  We are just looking for a fun activity on a rainy day.

But as everyday consumers, we are a bit more discerning.  Discounting is so rampant it is getting really hard to trust any pricing, full or discounted.  Filene’s Basement announced its closing yesterday.  Its legendary (and originally quite real) discount positioning has been grabbed by every store on the block.   The discount environment is becoming a blood bath where only the huge, like TJX, will survive.

However, the online environment, with its ease of comparison shopping research and competitive transparency, will do a better job for consumers than the outlet malls and other bricks and mortar discounters and let people really see the truth.   Or at least I hope so.  But you can never overrate simple psychology.  And discounts are as simple as it gets.

Here is the work in progress.

Here is the end result of the purge, headed out the door to Goodwill.  What, you might ask, is in these giant bags?

Plenty of Working Girl-style shoulder pads.

A giant furry scarf.  Perhaps I can use it as a warm rug?

As for the shiny patent leather pumps…I have absolutely no idea what to do with those.

I am finally accepting that I will never, ever fit into these jeans.  I never did. They still have tags on them.  Don’t ask.

How could I possibly ever need FOUR pairs of red tights?  I just kept buying them like some mad obsession.  I did once have a really great red dress and red suede pumps that needed red tights to complete the look.  But a person cannot wear four pair of red tights simultaneously.  What was I thinking?

This mod velour “lounge” ensemble and the Goldie Hawn LaughIn dress were clearly intended for someone with a different. more fabulous, life.

This is the only item that made its way back out of the trash bags and into the closet. I have a thing for polka dots.  They get me every time.

Oh and this little number dodged donation.  It brings back too many good memories.

These ordinary lookin hangers are a fond reminder of Dublin.  When we moved there and had no hangers, and lots of boxes of clothes,our landlady gave me a great tip.  Every night the Jigsaw boutique on Grafton street used to discard huge bags of these nice hangers.  I skulked over there and grabbed a couple sacks.  I really can’t imagine Jigsaw Corporation still fills landfills this way.  I am hanging onto them.

I thought I was pretty good at purging stuff, but today’s haul says otherwise.  Some of this stuff has been hanging around forever.  Here is the dress I wore in my HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL, ladies and gentlemen.  For the record it was Guys and Dolls.  I was in the chorus where I mostly did lip-syncing.  There were people with real genuine  talent in that show–I didn’t want to wreck it.

I kept this vintage number too, by the way. It will survive at least until we have another October snow storm.

November 17 Post Script:  I ended up posting a lot of my better stuff up on Style.ly.  It’s kind of like a fashion-focussed eBay that is easy to use.  Full disclosure:  Someone near and dear to me works there.

I have some new neighbors.  They moved to Massachusetts from DC.  Last weekend,as  I was out in our front garden planting tulips (Eco Tulips!) the new folks stopped by to chat, seeking direction on how much candy to stock up for Halloween.  (They also wanted to know what candy was popular but I couldn’t help them there.  I only buy what I want to eat.  This year it’s Whoppers.)

In the course of the conversation I commented on the marked increase in fantastic Halloween decorations in our town.   There is a flood of cool faux granite tombstones on the lawns of many homes.  Strings of twinkly orange lights abound.  My neighbor has giant Savadore Dali type spiders crawling all over the front of her traditional Colonial.  This Halloween celebration wave started with the giant inflatables that appeared a few years ago but the new decor that I see multiplying like rabbits has gotten pretty interesting.

Thus I devoured an article in the Boston Globe that deliciously confirmed and explained the phenomenon.  It’s not just me.  It’s not just my town.  This explosion of Halloween decor and celebration is a major national trend, to the tune of an 18% increase over 2010 in Halloween spending, at an expected $6.7 Billion!  The article explained:

With more people than ever planning to observe Halloween – 68.6 percent of Americans, compared with 52.5 percent in 2005, according to the National Retail Federation – the question has to be asked: What the devil is going on?

Halloween experts point to a variety of factors working in the holiday’s favor. (The holiday is so big it now has its own specialists.)

For starters, there’s the rise of the “kidult,’’ that is, young adults who still enjoy the trappings of childhood, which has turned a holiday once meant mainly for children into an event for grown-ups. Improved manufacturing and market-research capabilities mean companies can release short-term specialty products without fear of being left with huge numbers of unsold items. Advances in technology also mean more attractive home-fog machines.

All of those explanations make sense to me.

But the last one–the ability to make better products more economically and profitably is one we watch all year long at Daily Grommet.  It’s happening in areas that are much more important/enduring than dressing up your yard for Halloween. This shift in production resources enables viable social enterprises.  It supports domestic manufacture.  It lets ordinary people get products to market better than ever.

So, as much as I enjoy them, when I look at these new improved spooky decorations I see a much deeper advance happening around us.

Happy Halloween!

The quake was just last week.  Although other people in Boston felt it, we did not.  That’s probably because one of our office buildings has been under daily physical siege from a massive painting and renovation project.  Power equipment and assauting loud noises have populated our days, making shooting video rather interesting at times.  (And we thought working around normal office noises and small-town church bells was challenging!)
Here is what the building used to look like:

Here is the work in progress:

Unfortunately all the disruption has done nothing to frighten away our increasingly bold mouse tenant.  This is what I (eek!) found when I reached into a box of ordinary granola bars:

He has surgical quality incisors.  I have a friend who runs a lab at Harvard who is going to bring me their fool-proof no-kill mouse removal system.  In the meantime we are handling food samples in the office like you would if you were camping in black bear territory.

Not unique to Grommet, but we start the day with news headlines like this:

But we smile (worried smiles?) anyway.

Our office is located just a short block away from the famous Lexington Battle Green.  I’m glad none of us were crossing it Sunday when this massive tree was uprooted during the hurricane:

Image courtesy of Joe Pato

Finally, even during this crazy period of plague and pestilence, we have been nurturing our usual front porch morning glories.  I can’t believe how they’ve survived, but I guess they really like adverse weather.  They’ve had their best show yet, on the day after Hurricane Irene:

Their resilience is deeply symbolic of our team’s overall summer and long-term ethos.  Wendy Chandor jumped through hoops to try and get back from California before the hurricane.  Our newest team member Chew-Hoong Koh came to the office during the storm to keep up on customer service, as her home power was down.  Video intern Jamie Weliver regularly constructs and deconstructs sets to get “just the right shot” of a Grommet.  And I mean sets in his own home!  June Hsiao recently handled some critical Grommet launch items while on vacation, from the Honolulu airport.  With the longest commute of all of us, Danielle Chapdelaine braved five terrible snowstorms to get to the office last winter.    Leonard Chen’s recent trip to New York contained a tale of business development persistence that is one for the record books (I can’t share it … yet.)  Katherine Klinger fields supplier questions at all times and places from her home base of Minneapolis.

I’d have a story about every person on the team, just from last week.  They make it look easy to do this, even when it is not.

My favorite recent experience happened at home in Lexington, MA.  My son was catching me up on his high school buddies’summer work and told me, “Jeremy’s landscaping business really took off last year, so he’s adding a bunch of new crew members.  He told all of the employees that whoever could bring in the most business will get the best assignments.  He asked if you could post something on your blog about his business.”

This request delighted me.  We’ve successfully employed these guys several times so I have no problem endorsing their work.  (My son already has a full-time job driving a catering truck so this is not some thinly-veiled ploy to get more Pieri income in the door.)  These guys are strong, enthusiastic, reliable and perfectionist.   (And the founder Jeremy Moss is a fellow Wolverine, so I know he is True Blue.)

Of course the “JTK Landscaping” guys are indeed handing our flyers, and getting plenty of old fashioned word-of-mouth.  But beyond co-opting parental blogs, they have their own very fine website with a helpful rotating photo gallery of the crew and past jobs.  I admire these trust-inspiring initiatives.  And I admire Jeremy’s chutzpah in asking about my blog.

I liked these other two initiatives I saw at a neighboring town’s annual street fair yesterday:

A woman is aggregating all the local blogs in her town.  She told me most of them are actually for small businesses, sharing their work.

I’ve been hearing great things about Patch, the hyper-local news vehicle being developed by AOL.  I was surprised to see them manning a booth at the same town fair.  The guy under the tent is a full-time employee–clearly a huge investment is being made in the 1,000 towns being covered by Patch.

It’s really fun to see the fluid interplay between real world (landscaping, town fairs) and creating community through easy online tools and platforms.  Speaking of which, here is Jeremy’s contact information: jeremywmoss@gmail.com, (781) 572 – 7264.  Hire these boys and get them working hard for your yard!

I have to admit that, as I was communing with the design of this bowl,  a whole drama unfolded outside the stall door. Moments earlier, as I’d waited in the bathroom line, a very tall woman of about the age 60 took a terrible, slow-motion fall trying to navigate the slippery tile floor.  It was super slick because an employee was in the middle of washing it.   The customer was OK, and confidently assured everyone that she was fine, while even attempting to smile.  (She going to be in real posterior pain very soon.)   That left the rest of us feeling nervous and somewhat galvanized.  We were ready to help!

But there was nothing to do.  What are you going to do…barge in the stall with the injured party and make SURE she is OK?  So I slowly teetered into “my” stall to take this photo.  (I’d spotted the handle an hour earlier–but first things first–I had to eat.  I was at Eataly–the red-hot Italian food purveyor.)

As I adjusted my camera angle and tried a few compositions, the knot of New York Eataly patrons turned on the poor employee in the bathroom, declaring that she should be drying the floor.  They loudly warned all newcomers of the dangers of entering.  They roundly complained.  They wholeheartedly agreed about the stupidity of washing a floor with customers coming and going.  They actively tried to help the fallen women as she left her stall.  It was so New York.

What did the employee do? She just kept sudsing the floor and casually tossed up a yellow plastic barrier to prevent further flack.  That is probably a New York response too.

My eyes perked up when I saw this headline “Farm workers to pressure Stop & Shop.” (Stop & Shop is the most prominent Massachusetts grocery chain.)  The thrust of the article is a campaign by the Florida based Coalition of Immokalee Workers to increase the price of tomatoes by $0.01 per pound.

The article explains the brutal conditions of tomato farm workers, their poverty-level incomes, and their efforts to raise awareness and wholesale prices, in creating a workplace rights code of conduct for retailers to adopt.  Apparently a one penny per pound increase would make dramatic improvements in farmworkers’lives.

The Stop & Shop spokeswoman set off my alarm bells in her published statement:

Workers should target growers–not supermarkets–for increased wages.

Yes, that would have been true in 1964, when the customers of Stop & Shop had limited visibility on such matters, and limited ability to respond.  This blog alone demonstrates “game-changing.”  I’m a Stop & Shop customer, and I am pressing “pause” when I pick up a tomato now.  I wonder what kind of house the worker lives in, and whether child labor harvested my perfect Florida tomato.  I can’t name a single commercial tomato grower, but I know Stop & Shop and I can act. Anyone with a computer can, efficiently and easily.

But the bigger point I am mulling is not “Social Media is Powerful.”

It is, rather, “There is no such thing as a free lunch.  Can campaigns like this farmworker one overcome the huge betrayal people feel towards big businesses and Wall Street to really believe that the cost of something is actually a cost, and not just increasing marketing budgets and executive paychecks?” If these Florida farmworkers can successfully get people to connect what they pay for tomatoes to real human beings, living in their own country, with American-size bills to pay, and dreams for their children like their own, that would be a huge victory.

It can roll forward to other common foods.  It can roll forward to textiles.  It can roll forward to electronics.  It can roll forward to all the things we buy that shape our economy, and our world.  If something seems too good to be true (Bananas for 20 cents a pound! 50% off on a meal!  70% off on dry cleaning!), it probably is.  Someone, usually the least powerful person in the supply chain, is paying for it.  With their time, and their undervalued work, and their desperate livelihoods.

That’s the timing shift that can’t come soon enough, in my book.

Let’s start with the reasons for the purchase.  First, below is a picture of me a week ago, at the point when my old cross country boot totally separated from the sole, on the shores of Lake Champlain.  I shouldn’t be smiling as I had no idea how I was going to travel miles back to my car without a functional ski set-up.  (My clever friend Jill figured out how to use her gator and my boot laces to lash my foot to the ski.)

Here are the broken boots:

Here is the reason why I was feeling urgency to get back in gear for the season:

Ski Market closed recently, so I had no known ski store supplier in mind.  I did a quick Google search and was reminded of a cute little local store in the next town, and it looked like they could service my skis.   So I called to confirm.

Here is the conversation:

(Me) “I have a really old pair of skis.  The boot upper separated from the sole.  They have that three peg style.  I know that type is  ancient and probably not available anymore, but can you replace my whole set-up?”

(Guy on phone) “No.”

(Me) “Hold on. I know I can’t get these kind of boots.  I mean that I want to replace the boots and bindings all together.”

(Guy, sounding rushed on a probably busy Sunday) “I dunno. 50/50 chance I can fit you.”  (Silence.)

(Me, thinking, “Are you not at least a little interested in my business?”) “Well I would really like to buy from a local store.  Can you get me set up and then order my size if you don’t have it?”

(Guy) “No.”

So I get off the phone and Googled:

Five minutes before I was all righteous and eager to avoid a chain store, and then I remembered the good old Bean.  How they once let me return a set of luggage I’d used many times because I just didn’t like the weight of it.  How they always hire knowledgeable and friendly people. And I vaguely remembered a service and repair area in the basement.  However I also thought, “But are they really SKILLED at X-country skis? Or is this just the I-don’t-know-where-else-go choice of a rushed and ignorant consumer?

So I called.  The store phone was tied up so I got bounced to a call center person, who could not address my ski service question.  But the telephone woman persisted, and dialed on an internal company line to try and raise the local store staff.  She got me directly to a store specialist who explained their whole ski service process, and that I might have to leave the skis because their main mechanic had just gone home, but that they could give me a good steer if I wanted to come in.

So I set out to the Bean, but on the way I saw:

It was newly situated in a former Tweeter store, halfway on my route to L.L. Bean.  I sharply cut into the parking lot and signed off from what I thought was going to be a longish call to my mom, promising to call her in an hour or so after I fixed up my skis.  But I couldn’t go in the place.

Why? It was a vague discomfort with the faux German spelling of the name, an ugly logo on a cheap sign on an ugly building, a woman entering the store who looked unhappy and stressed, a sense that this was a “tweener” retailer:  not local, not a trusted chain, and I had never heard of them.    Basically all really thin and “bad” reasons, but I could not get comfortable with the Ski Haus.  Being short on time, this was a somewhat painful decision for me.  But I just didn’t want to risk the pending disappointment I sensed.  (And I still don’t know if it is THE place to buy skis in Boston–not being on that circuit myself.)

I surprised my mom by calling her right back, having gotten back on the road to L.L. Bean.

At the Bean doors, I remembered all my positive associations with the brand.  Old Leon himself.  A design school assignment to redesign their catalog cover template. The concerts they sponsor at their Freeport, Maine HQ every summer.  The spacious aisles and the climbing wall in the store.  My very effective waterproof Bean jacket I wore for a 96 mile hike in the Scottish Highlands.  I really had no previous sense of being some die-hard L.L. Bean fan, so why did this all this good vibe stuff come flooding at me?  It was one simple thing: the sight of the door handles made of miniature canoe paddles:

It’s probably a pain to maintain those unusual door handles.  I bet they need regular replacement.  But getting me to put my hands right on  the most romantic “On Golden Pond” aspects of the brand is pure genius.  I am so “there,” before I even get in the place.

Fast forward to the end.  I got swift help from a knowledgable guy who set me up with some futuristic looking boots. He shocked me when he said, “OK give me five to fifteen minutes to do the job.  These old skis can be tricky to balance, but they are worth it.”  Me: “What?  On the phone they told me that the mechanic went home.”  Turns out this sales associate has been servicing skiis for seven years.  He said he reckoned the guy on the phone did not want to risk disappointing me, so thus did not promise immediate service if I showed up.

Talk about surprise and delight.  L.L. Bean turned a bad start (the call center transfer) into a big purchase, (and a blog post), on a number of consistent points of great execution.  I always say brands are built brick by brick but they can fall apart and tumble down with just a few blows or weak cracks.  It’s refreshing to rediscover L.L. Bean, a brand that knows how to maintain its “mortar.”

And, voila: my shiny new boots!

Make Magazine (and parent O’Reilly Media) are in beautiful Sebastopol, California.  The field trip there was a real treat last week when I was in San Francisco. Such passionate people on that team–I love working with them and want to keep doing it.

Within a few days later, on my East Coast Flying Pumpkins trip, I also tripped on Yankee Publishing in charming Dublin, New Hampshire.

World HQ for Yankee Magazine and The Old Farmer's Almanac

Look at that picture-perfect New England Fall day!    On the other side of this building is this great (albeit apparently retired) community message board:

You can practically see Hester Pryne putting a notice up there.

I get so jazzed up being at places like this.  Where it all happens.  Things that matter.  I’d take this, over the impressive Time Life building in Manhattan, any day.  It has a great “Devil in Prada” vibe (serious security set up!), but I have such a stronger connection to the human scale of these buildings.  I project passion, caring, warmth just from standing in the parking lot.