The revenge of analog, p.18
The Revenge of Analog, page 18
Over the following year, Doeblin and Hedrick transformed the space from a furniture shop back into a bookstore. It featured brick arches, different sections nestled into little nooks, and a huge basement dedicated to kids, with separate areas for stories, toys, young adult books, a dedicated cashier, and even a diaper-changing room and small kitchen so parents and nannies could comfortably stay for hours.
In addition to more than $250,000 worth of books, half of the shelves were stocked with other items, from greeting cards and paper notebooks, to gifts, kitchenware, and small garments such as hats and gloves. To pay for all this, Doeblin had emptied his retirement account and mortgaged his family’s apartment, basically putting everything he owned into the store. He sent handwritten letters to over a hundred potential investors but only one responded. Rick MacArthur was the publisher of Harper’s magazine, a staunch advocate for independent publishing, and he made a significant investment in the store. Book Culture’s Columbus Avenue location opened a week after Thanksgiving 2014.
To make Book Culture’s new store work, Hedrick and Doeblin had to sell over $3 million worth of books and merchandise a year, just to meet costs. This seemed insanely ambitious in an industry that was still defined by decline and increasingly driven by digital publishing. But there were hopeful signs emerging that consumers were not only returning to brick-and-mortar bookstores, but to printed books as well. In 2014, Nielsen BookScan, the largest tracker of sales data for the publishing industry, saw paper book sales grow 2.4 percent from the year before, the first upswing in growth since eBook sales took off in 2010, which was followed by 2.8 percent growth in 2015. At the same time, sales of eBook devices, such as Kindle, Nook, and Kobo, appeared to have plateaued. A 2015 Pew Research Center survey noted a 32 percent decline in the number of respondents who owned an e-reader from the same period in 2014, and the UK bookstore chain Waterstones noted that book sales were up 11 percent over the Christmas season of 2014 compared to the year before, while sales of Nook e-readers were markedly down. A few months later, struggling Barnes and Noble finally turned back to profit as a company, with Publishers Weekly crediting the shift to a dramatic decline in money-losing eBook, Nook, and online sales, offset by a relative growth in physical book sales, as well as resurgent brick-and-mortar sales. That doesn’t mean that digital books won’t continue to grow. They may well. But the heady predictions that eBooks would do to paper books what the MP3 did to physical music look increasingly unlikely.
Part of this can be attributed to readers returning to print. I was once a bookstore fiend, buying dozens of books a year from every type of bookstore. Then I started ordering from Amazon and I found myself less involved with books and reading than I once did. It’s not that my love of reading vanished. But a part of reading’s charm was lost when the acquisition of books moved online, just as it had for music. Then I bought my first Kindle. Initially, my love returned. Here was the world of reading in the palm of my hand, with anything I wanted two taps away. It weighed nothing, stored infinite libraries of information, connected anywhere, and lit up, so I could read in bed at night. I devoured titles on the Kindle, while my consumption of physical books ground to a halt.
But after a few years, I fell back to print. I’m not sure what drew me to it, but a couple of factors contributed, including many that I discussed in the last chapter. I joined the public library, and because of this I started reading paper books (largely for work). I quickly found how much I actually missed holding a book in my hand and reading from paper. It was a vastly superior experience, for reasons that seemed counterintuitive, when the technology of my Kindle had so many obvious advantages. Yes, a book was heavy, but I knew where I was by the very feeling of the book’s thickness between my fingers, something that I desperately craved on the Kindle. I couldn’t annotate to the cloud as I read in print, but I could underline, write notes, fold down corners, and never get lost by accidentally tapping the page with my finger. With paper, I couldn’t enlarge text or turn up the backlight, but I could read without having to charge a battery. I could accidentally step on a book and not have to pay Amazon $140 for a replacement. Today, I get books at the library and bookstores, borrow them from family and friends, and have a pile on my nightstand. I only use my Kindle when I travel for longer than a week. The rest of the time it sits in a drawer, its empty battery logo pleading for a charge.
There are numerous economic factors behind the revival of bookstores—the opportunity Borders created when it closed, the postrecessionary recovery—but something deeper seems to be at play. Elizabeth Bogner, one of the managers at Book Culture, noted this to me as we watched a stream of people steadily enter the store, find the nearest staff member, and express thanks for opening. “I’m seeing a community who, having lost bookstores, now understand their full value,” Bogner said. “The community went through its five stages of grief. They said, ‘Who would be stupid enough to open a bookstore?’ But then, it happened.”
“There’s an in-place premium” to shopping at Book Culture and other bookstores, Doeblin said, as we watched the new nonfiction table swarmed by shoppers scanning, reading, and flipping through new titles. “We can sell a book off the shelf with no regard that it sells for a penny on Amazon. People will pay for books they see.” That is because books are an aspirational consumer product, especially today, when so much reading and time are spent online. “If you spend twenty-six dollars on a book, you’re aspiring to stimulate your intellect, to get involved with literature. You’ve got a lifestyle that affords intellectual curiosity. Only the highest-level consumer is buying and reading books today,” Doeblin said. “We’re talking about the richest, best-educated consumers, the most coveted in retail, and they should be cherished like gold. Books are the apex of the consumption pyramid!”
Shopping transcends our need for consumption. The pursuit of goods is an excuse for social interaction. The conversation that happens in the store is vastly more important than whatever shmata or tchotchke we buy there. This is true at the weekly market in a remote village in New Guinea or on a Saturday afternoon at the massive Apple Store on Fifth Avenue, where tourists from every nation on earth are fondling iPhones. We are hardwired to shop. It is how we entertain ourselves. When we get together with friends on the weekend, we go to the mall, window-shop, browse, peruse, and check out stores. Bob Grayson told me that one and a half days of an average American’s weeklong vacation are spent shopping. None of that social interaction can happen online, regardless of how well you design social media plug-ins, or how many unboxing videos you view on YouTube.
I don’t consider myself a shopper. My wife describes my presence in a clothing store as a wet wool blanket draped over her shoulders. But place me by the window of a record shop, a bookstore, or God forbid a modern furniture boutique, and I start spending like a Rockefeller. This is especially true at markets, whether bazaars in the Middle East, food halls in Europe, or urban American markets such as the Brooklyn Flea, which remains one of my favorite shopping experiences.
The Brooklyn Flea has grown from a small flea market set up in a schoolyard in 2008 to a model of entrepreneurial analog capitalism emulated the world over. Its premise is basic: an urban, young market with a mix of older merchandise (vintage clothing, furniture, trinkets) and new (artisan food, screenprinted T-shirts, art). It is a gathering place for the community both physically and emotionally associated with it.
“Our markets aren’t commerce, they’re hangs,” said Eric Demby, the Brooklyn Flea’s cofounder. “It’s outside, it’s free, you don’t have to buy anything, and you will pretty much run into someone you know.” I have bought some cool things at the Brooklyn Flea, but I always ended up there because it is a fun place to spend a few hours on a weekend. Demby said that while many of the Brooklyn Flea’s vendors also sell on Etsy, the standardized format of the online craft marketplace makes it practically impossible to stand out from the five hundred other people selling typewriter-key jewelry. “The Internet will never have nice locations,” Demby said.
The Internet and its retailers face a far greater challenge earning a customer’s trust than brick-and-mortar retailers. Last winter, I ordered an obscure book on real estate investing from a third-party seller on Amazon, because it wasn’t available anywhere else. A few weeks later, the seller contacted me, told me he’d be in Toronto, and inquired whether he could drop the book off at my house, because it would be “easier” and “cheaper.” Why not?
A few days later, he wrote back, and told me it would be better if, in fact, we could meet somewhere downtown, because it would be “safer.” Safer? What was he talking about? This was a book, not heroin. I told him to drop the book in my mailbox, and when he didn’t respond to me, I contacted Amazon customer service, sure that I was being scammed. The shipping cost for the book was now listed as $38, and the seller had no other sales in his record. My paranoia took over, and I imagined a gang of bookselling thugs staking out my house, stealing my identity, and possibly mugging me in some downtown alley, in a book deal gone bad. After an hour attempting to explain my concerns to the Amazon customer service representative in Manila, the company filed some sort of complaint with the vendor. The next day, the book appeared in my mailbox, and I received a nasty e-mail from the vendor, calling me rude, ungrateful, and stupid, because he went out of his way on a business trip to deliver this book, and I should now pay for his extra taxi costs. Because all our correspondence was filtered through Amazon’s system, and the vendor and I remained anonymous, our thin veneer of trust eroded when our communication broke down. If we could have spoken directly, or conversed face-to-face in a store, the whole thing could have been sorted out from the start. Instead, mis-communication led to misunderstanding and we both felt ripped off.
An e-commerce merchant cannot engage deeply with you as a person, let you taste a sample, share an honest opinion, or flirt with you. E-commerce is a platform for delivering goods and services, no more. While online such retail platforms as eBay, Etsy, Craigslist, Amazon, and others refer to themselves as communities, with conversations and interactions between buyers, vendors, and creators happening around the world, the strength of those retail communities pales when compared to that of a brick-and-mortar retailer. When Lexi Beach opened the Astoria Bookshop in Queens, New York, in 2013, local residents provided her with funding, painted walls, installed shelving, and unpacked boxes without asking for a penny. “Strangers showed up in their own spare time to make the bookstore open faster than it would have otherwise,” she said. “It felt to me like this was the universe rolling out the red carpet in front of me, saying, ‘This is the thing that needed to be done.’”
At Book Culture, when a knitting club asked Doeblin whether it could meet there regularly, he not only said yes, but offered to supply the knitters with tea and cookies. When a young customer told his mother he wanted to have his bar mitzvah reception at the store, Doeblin wished him mazel tov and helped the family plan the party at no cost. Sure, these acts of goodwill might pay back in sales from these customers, but most likely they wouldn’t. They had a deeper purpose.
“When small stores are replaced by chains and Amazon, what do we lose?” asked Antonin Baudry, France’s cultural counselor in New York and the author of several graphic novels. “We lose something specific. It’s called a city.” A few months before Book Culture’s own opening, Baudry had opened Albertine, the most lavish, beautiful gem of a bookstore in New York, located in the Cultural Services division of the French Embassy, across from Central Park. A city, in Baudry’s definition, was a collection of businesses, such as bookstores, which paid taxes, allowed citizens to meet, and ultimately contributed to the cultural and physical landscape around it. “If all that goes away, it’s not a city anymore.”
On my last night in New York, I attended Book Culture’s store-opening party. For five hours you could barely move amid the shelves, as nearby residents, publishing industry figures, friends and family, an old golden retriever, and eager book lovers packed the place. There was wine and cheese and cake. Best-selling young adult author Tim Federle mixed cocktails and signed copies of his alcoholic nursery rhyme book Hickory Daiquiri Dock. At one point, Doeblin stood behind a lectern at the rear of the store and addressed the crowd. He spoke about the worth of books, culturally and as assets, and the need for the publishing industry to wake up and support those advocating on their behalf, including such stores as Book Culture.
“We need profitability in a space like this,” Doeblin said, beseeching the crowd to return often and vote with their wallets to create the store, the neighborhood, and the city they wanted. “We’ll be here as long as you guys come.”
Over the next months, they answered his call. Book Culture had a great opening season, growing its sales even more than expected throughout the spring of 2015. Its contemporaries continued to grow as well. Greenlight and McNally Jackson have both expanded to second locations they opened in the past year, while WORD, Astoria Books, Albertine, and other resurgent independent bookstores nationwide continued steadily to sell more books, without an end in sight. When I last spoke with Doeblin, he was already busy looking for a location where he could open his fourth store.
7
The Revenge of Work
West Canfield Street, located in Detroit’s Midtown neighborhood, is a standing refutation of the much rumored death of the old ways. The gentrified strip boasts a craft beer pub, an espresso bar, a cold-pressed juice counter, a clothing boutique, and two adorable gift and home stores that carry “Smile, You’re in Detroit” mugs, T-shirts, and tea towels. At the center of this is the grandest store of them all, the flagship retail location for Shinola. Here, the exposed steel rafters, artfully faded brick walls, and polished concrete floor lend an airy atmosphere of industrial hipster elegance, meant to evoke the look and feel of Shinola’s products.
When I visited, these included hand-stitched leather baseballs, basketballs, and footballs ($40–$225), a wooden screwdriver set ($65), linen-covered journals ($12–$20), and beach towels ($160). There was a wall of pet accessories, ranging from dog-shaped cushions to leather leashes and collars, and another display of leather wallets, smartphone cases, and handbags. Behind the cash registers, bearded men assembled bicycles with steel frames handmade by members of the Schwinn family ($1,000–$2,995). The store had cool music, friendly, attentive staff, and a coffee bar where you could sip a cold brew on distressed leather couches under a framed American flag stitched by military veterans ($15,000) and read a copy of the independent dog magazine Chewed.
The main attraction was Shinola watches ($450–$1,200), assembled in a factory just a mile away. They were displayed around the store, laid out on leather-wrapped trays and in glass cases. Shinola watches have a classic, utilitarian look, like something out of a railway station or the golden age of Detroit’s auto business: heavy, elegant, masculine hunks of chrome and glass. They come in six different models and dozens of styles, from the minimal Arabic numerals on the women’s Birdy to the beefy Black Blizzard chronograph. Shinola watches are all completely analog. They don’t connect to a phone or count your steps. They just tell time.
I was visiting Detroit a year and a half after Shinola had sold its first watch, and less than two since they began to assemble them nearby. When the company’s founder and owner, Tom Kartsotis, opened this retail store, he figured it would sell maybe $180,000 worth of watches over six months. Instead, Shinola’s Detroit store sold more than $3 million in goods during the second half of 2013, and more than $9 million in 2014, mostly in watches. The company now has other boutiques open in New York, Minneapolis, Chicago, DC, Los Angeles, and London, with more coming soon, and its products are sold at more than a hundred other retailers, from small men’s clothing stores to Nordstrom and Saks Fifth Avenue, and online. Shinola watches are everywhere. Bill Clinton apparently owns a dozen.
Although Shinola products have the heritage look of a decades-old brand, the company is brand new, and no scrappy startup. Kartsotis is the founder and former chairman of Fossil, the watch and apparel company that dominated shopping malls in the 1990s, which is worth roughly $3.5 billion today. Kartsotis’s personal wealth is conservatively estimated at hundreds of millions of dollars, and Shinola has been his largest project since he formally left Fossil in 2010.
Shinola initially began as Kartsotis’s plan to build a domestic private-label watch factory that could make watches for such customers as Tiffany and Movado. When Kartsotis, who resides in Texas, was looking for a location, Detroit was an obvious option for the factory, thanks to the city’s affordable factory space and a workforce with manual skills. But Kartsotis wasn’t sure whether people would purchase a luxury brand made in Detroit, so he commissioned a survey that asked consumers whether they preferred to buy $5 pens made in China, $10 pens made in America, or $15 pens made in Detroit. Respondents overwhelmingly chose the most expensive pen, simply because it was made in Detroit.
Kartsotis realized that Detroit had untapped luxury potential, and a “Made in Detroit” watch brand had much more upside than a factory making watches for other companies. When Kartsotis told a friend in the watch industry he planned to make high-end watches in Detroit, the friend reportedly said, “Tom, you don’t know shit from Shinola,” a popular phrase among soldiers in World War II, who were referencing a brand of shoe polish. The name stuck.
Shinola’s entire brand rests on its location in Detroit. Its motto is “Where American is made” and the company touts the domestic provenance of all its goods, whether they have been created and assembled at the Detroit factory or by suppliers in other states. The Shinola marketing material is relentless in pushing this narrative of American artisan craftsmanship and ingenuity. Photographs and stories of proud Shinola workers decorate its stores and anchor the company’s advertisements. The Shinola website features a glossy video of workers assembling watches, as sunlight pours in through the windows and the rugged voice of a worker intones: “This is the city that made this country. With its steel, with its skill, with its labor. It’s why we’re here. Reestablishing trades that haven’t been seen in this country in a generation. Knocking rust off the American supply chain wherever we can.”
