I think that what you might be able to effectively do is usher in a new way to buy shoes. I’ve always been a firm believer that while you cannot replicate the offline experience, you can take various steps (however more tedious) to sort of strive for that ultimate goal of providing a similar offline experience… but online. Alas it’s still a light at the end of the tunnel dilemma, you’re never going to reach it but you should still very much strive for it.
We can all lament how the Internet and globalization has taken away from the fact that everything is so accessible, products, information and all that jazz. But I guess you’ve also seen the transformation of product acquisition 2.0 where different factors are now coming into play whereas before, it was a matter of being there at that point in time. If anything it was less heart-breaking, if you weren’t at that particular store, you probably would have never even known about that release!
Kevin and myself have spoken about taking a more retail side of things, but from a product perspective it seems like a double-edged sword. It’s true that you can blast your own product at the click of a mouse button, but even then people can very easily become tired of it. I remember drawing out the Zeitfrei preview process and seeing people bitch about the close-up macro shots haha. So on that note, aside from your own medium, you had better hope you have good connections elsewhere I guess. Fortunately I’ve developed some good relationships along the years but outside of online I really have little correspondence with my print-media counterparts… and we still know that print media is very much still a respected platform.
Acquisition 2.0! I still get a kick out of flicking through old copies of Boon and Relax, and seeing projects that totally went beneath the radar for me. Now you can RSS and Google Read to your heart’s content, but do you ever find it curious that so much stuff pre-Hypebeast, HS or Slam just seems to have vanished from the internet? Lost in site revamps or maybe the good stuff was on Geocities, I find myself wondering if some stuff even existed. Thank god BEINGHUNTED keep an excellent archive… Freshness content seems to have sustained too, but I do forget about the mad Japan-only stuff like the R. Newbold x Slam City collection or Gravis’s shoe with Supreme. Sometimes it’s nice to be surprised, but for all the wistful talk, I’d rather be in the loop.
Print press is a really overrated thing. I’m a total printhead, and I still wonder why I get excited if I see my name in print. I sometimes wonder if it’s just an old PR guard terrified of the digital era, or it’s just tradition to take print seriously. Few newspapers seem to cover anything with any level of reliability, and while I love Wired, The New Yorker and Vanity Fair – I’m a sucker for eight page investigations, just being in print isn’t enough for me. I’m not going to congratulate you just for porting what I could see online into a paper stock. My expectations are vastly higher when I’m shelling over the cash – I expect excellence. I guess that’s why folk take it so seriously. Magazines like Sang Bleu, Paradis, Lurve and Purple will always be superior to the online experience, but honestly, I’m finding it harder and harder to find what I want. I used to buy fifteen or more titles a month and wince at the eighteen Euro ones, now I trust the costly quarterlies or ‘zines from out of nowhere, rather than the monthlies scraping the barrel. But the workings behind the scenes, from experience, are different to the more informal goings on in the blogsphere. It seems like a closed circle – that’s why public relations folk can charge so much, and I guess it needs to keep that mystique to thrive. Folk take certain aspects of it very seriously, to the point of self-parody, but I think that should theoretically keep it ahead of the democracy that online provides.
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