Direct To Mediocrity

July 3, 2021 1:03 PM

The Myth of the Millennial Aesthetic
posted by backseatpilot (31 comments total)

I feel like a failed brand nobody's heard of that was started by the daughter of a millionaire and an Instagram influencer is.. pretty on point for millennial aesthetic.
posted by azuresunday at 1:21 PM on July 3, 2021 [19 favorites]

Is this like Away (previously) except with too-heavy cookware?
posted by scruss at 1:22 PM on July 3, 2021

Away is mentioned in TFA.

The myth isn’t that there is a millennial aesthetic. It’s that the promise of the aesthetic (quality, reinvention, superiority) is itself a myth.
posted by Miko at 1:34 PM on July 3, 2021 [13 favorites]

Yeah, I thought this was every aesthetic since… Sumer at the latest.

Sic transit Gloria mundi, as they say on TikTok.
posted by GenjiandProust at 1:40 PM on July 3, 2021 [3 favorites]

https://defector.com/great-jones-drama/

The absolute most generous true description you can apply to Great Jones is that it conducts arbitrage on cheap pastel-colored cookware with flimsy enamel cladding, made by other companies with less robust brands. But the truest thing you can say is that Great Jones, like so many other companies, is a skimming operation: It launders somebody else’s actual manufacture through its own aggressive branding, and takes a cut of the proceeds. The company can have the best quarter of its existence despite having no full-time employees, despite having literally no capacity to do anything other than exist as a legal fiction, because it never actually did anything. Anything! It never did anything.

posted by aneel at 1:44 PM on July 3, 2021 [34 favorites]

https://www.businessinsider.com/great-jones-cookware-founders-tishgart-moelis-falling-out-2021-6 (archive.is)

In December 2019, The Verge published a story about Away, the suitcase brand, alleging that cofounder Steph Korey (also a Great Jones investor) overworked employees and verbally abused them over Slack. On the heels of other similar stories about up and coming female-led companies, the Great Jones team began to quietly draw parallels to their own work situation. They recalled Moelis coming over to them and asking what they thought had gone wrong at these businesses. "We talked a lot about unicorns and the sacrifices other companies made to grow, and how we could avoid that," the employee on the creative team said.

posted by aneel at 1:50 PM on July 3, 2021 [1 favorite]

I own an Away suitcase, too, and I feel a little embarrassed when I cart it around. Its smooth, turquoise-blue shell already feels like a relic, and it seems to implicate me in the startup’s issues, the way buying factory-farmed meat helps to perpetuate an unsustainable system.

Oh, zing!
posted by gimonca at 3:24 PM on July 3, 2021 [2 favorites]

Archive.org link for the FPP's New Yorker article, "Great Jones Cookware and the Illusion of the Millennial Aesthetic": Can a company that loses all of its staff still manufacture a sense of community? So long as the Instagram posts keep coming, the answer seems to be yes.
posted by Iris Gambol at 3:27 PM on July 3, 2021 [3 favorites]

I'm sort of getting tired of startup stories that gloss over quickly the fact they had rich parents. I think startups, even failures, are good for the economy as a whole and help develop ideas that otherwise wouldn't have gotten to market. However, look at millennial "success" stories: Jeff Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and in true millennial fashion Elon Musk being coy about not being rich (though not many of us get $28k loans for highly speculative startups from our parents).

Don't know how to really combat this but the silent wealth inequality is also not being spoken of: it isn't just the loans these people got they never would have got through traditional means, it is the savings and comfort they have in not paying student loans, not worrying about housing and otherwise being able to take risks especially in their formative years where most of us take whatever is available.

Anything! It never did anything.

I mean you can make that case for a lot of things. A lot of traditional stores do nothing but act as a brick and mortar catalog for goods other people made. Branding and marketing are huge parts of selling goods, there's a reason marketing can sometimes be something like 40% of the COGS.
posted by geoff. at 3:44 PM on July 3, 2021 [24 favorites]

I notice that the first Great Jones product mentioned by all 3 articles (New Yorker, Business Insider, defector) is their Dutch oven. Nice.
posted by Saxon Kane at 3:44 PM on July 3, 2021 [1 favorite]

GenjiandProust: "Sic transit Gloria mundi, as they say on TikTok."

Tik transit Gloria mundi, surely
posted by chavenet at 3:51 PM on July 3, 2021 [13 favorites]

Jeff Zuckerberg

Chef's kiss
posted by Carillon at 4:42 PM on July 3, 2021 [11 favorites]

As chavenet said, "Tik [sic] transit Goria mundi"
posted by mono blanco at 4:59 PM on July 3, 2021 [2 favorites]

Can people stop using the word "Millennial" already? It really doesn't mean anything.
posted by Liquidwolf at 5:01 PM on July 3, 2021 [5 favorites]

It definitely doesn't mean anything as evidenced by the fact that this line about "millennial success stories" includes a non-real person and that Musk is firmly Gen X and Bezos is literally the tail-end of the Boomer generation.

I guess, in the end, we're all millennials.
posted by deadaluspark at 5:15 PM on July 3, 2021 [19 favorites]

It definitely doesn't mean anything as evidenced by the fact that this line about "millennial success stories" includes a non-real person and that Musk is firmly Gen X and Bezos is literally the tail-end of the Boomer generation.

The article was about millennial aesthetic and I was grabbing that definition when defining millennial startup fairy tales. I wouldn't necessarily constrain it to those born in the time range but rather the generation they influenced. Much like many hippies or those we'd associate with the boomers were not technically boomers... Hunter S Thompson, Jim Morrison and the list goes on.
posted by geoff. at 5:57 PM on July 3, 2021 [5 favorites]

I'm confused. "Direct to consumer" marketing has been a thing since the days of the Sears mail-order catalog, and people have been falling for shitty products in a nice wrapper since the dawn of trade.

As noted, the term millennial is also doing some weird work here. Jeff Bezos was born in 1964; Elon Musk in 1971. Their influence is definitely not aimed at or limited to actual millennials. Meanwhile, amongst me and my Elder Millennial cohort, none of us own any of the products mentioned in the article. Maybe I run in a particularly anti-consumerist crowd; I've certainly been served ads for Joybird sofas and something called the Always pan, but I've never thought "Hm I should buy that." Whereas the upcycling and handicrafts trends, which do strike me as something that has been pretty common in my 20s and 30s, don't even get a mention.
posted by basalganglia at 6:17 PM on July 3, 2021 [2 favorites]

Upcycling and handicrafts articles don't sell ads, I assume. Lots of narrowly-focused shopping articles serving as filler in the rest of the press currently, maybe always.

The inability of Pinterest to advertise sewing tools to me is startling. I suppose sewing is sufficiently covered, from advertisers' perspectives, in Threads and its sibs and in the flyers from my local sewing machine store. (I don't know where Threads advertises itself, though.)
posted by clew at 6:51 PM on July 3, 2021

I more associate these Instagram-driven companies with people who are like 25-30 now but I think what's actually happening is that "millennial" has started to mean "people who are 25-30 now" no matter when they were born.
posted by bleep at 7:17 PM on July 3, 2021 [18 favorites]

Also a reason why these companies may be so visible is that the traditional places to buy these kinds of housewares & underwear & whatnot used to be department stores but we don't have those anymore except Target. So people are naturally going to pay attention when someone says "hey this is where you can buy a cool looking pan/suitcase/bra/whatever" because people still want these things even though in person retail collapsed.
posted by bleep at 10:26 PM on July 3, 2021 [3 favorites]

The real millennial was the friends we made along the way.
posted by biogeo at 11:57 PM on July 3, 2021 [11 favorites]

If the reason the millennial aesthetic is a myth has anything to do with a businessinsider article I think that means the millennial aesthetic won.
posted by 7segment at 1:06 AM on July 4, 2021 [3 favorites]

The line where the author says they finally bought such and such towels once they had been served the ads for them enough times blew my mind. Is that how advertising works? Do people know and admit to themselves that they want something cause they were shown an advertisement enough times and just go along with it?
posted by starfishprime at 1:09 AM on July 4, 2021 [2 favorites]

Thank you biogeo.

That was the comment I was hoping for.
posted by Hicksu at 1:36 AM on July 4, 2021 [2 favorites]

The line where the author says they finally bought such and such towels once they had been served the ads for them enough times blew my mind. 

I've got a bridge they might be interested in.
posted by Cardinal Fang at 2:17 AM on July 4, 2021

This ... misses the mechanism by which the globalised supply chain gets this done wherein you can buy designs from Original Design Manufacturers and specify a logo and then have them sold via a web site and delivered directly to customers from overseas places with overseas cost of production and marketed as artesanal near-home production. It doesn't say "drop-shipping" but this is that mechanism.

The "Millennial Aesthetic" takes the gains of globalisation and externalises the costs to be 'cute' as in 'looks good but is disempowered' while ultimately becoming impoverished. If it takes seed money -- family or dotcom bubble 2.0 speculation -- there's that joke about running a professional soccer team: How do you get rich running a sports team? Start out very rich.
posted by k3ninho at 6:18 AM on July 4, 2021 [5 favorites]

Best exploration I have read on the topic

https://thebaffler.com/latest/barons-of-crap-kaiser-schatzlein
posted by Barbara Spitzer at 11:58 PM on July 4, 2021 [3 favorites]

Things like Great Jones really show the tragedy, if you will of millennials / older zoomers having tastes that exceed their budgets, or perhaps better put financial class having failed to track with cultural class. They know that high quality cookware, luggage and other consumer durables exists, and they want it ... but no way can they afford the real thing.

Although I will say I'm sort of a fan of many of the millennial aesthetic DTC brands. They aren't curing cancer but they are using global supply chain, the thin tail both of online retail and online marketing to get people interesting niche products and product-service hybrids at a good price. That's your Harry's, and Warby Parker, your so-stupid-it's-clever things like Untuck'd shirts, heck, most things advertised on podcasts.

That said a cruel person -- not me -- could embrace Great Jones for suckering stupid hipsters with the most uncool consumer ploy - sexing up shoddy cookware with advertising, as seen on infinite infomercials and 90 second ads on non-sports basic cable going back decades. (Compare this 2021 ad with the Mr. Show 1996 parody of the thing, even down to the British accented presenter.)
posted by MattD at 2:40 PM on July 5, 2021 [2 favorites]

(Much of Mr. Show's satire has ended up like The Onion's: too prescient to remain satire.)
posted by LooseFilter at 11:56 AM on July 6, 2021 [1 favorite]

Maybe I'm just feeling a wee bit defensive because I own the Great Jones baking sheets (they seem fine?), but there is a weird amount of blame on consumers in this thread that I don't really understand. If I needed baking sheets anyway (as one likely does at some point in one's life), and I don't have time to physically go to a store to physically inspect all all the baking sheets or to do a ton of research on the absolute best baking sheets (and they are, after all, just baking sheets, not a big purchase like a car that would merit reading all the Consumer Reports or whatever), and I get an ad for some baking sheets that look cute, so I buy them...I don't think I did anything particularly wrong or stupid here. People generally need some amount of stuff, and determining which stuff is good quality, ethically produced, etc. can be extremely difficult. Is my conception of what is a "cute" baking sheet influenced by trends and advertising? I mean, yeah, duh, I'll admit that I'm not immune to the cerulean sweater effect. If every single one of your preferences comes from some deeply idiosyncratic well of taste within yourself, completely devoid of any outside influences, congratulations on being superior to most other humans, I guess.
posted by naoko at 10:53 AM on July 7, 2021 [4 favorites]

From the Baffler article Barbara Spitzer links, which is itself a review of a business-fluff book:

The only actual inventors in Billion Dollar Brand Club, the people behind Eargo (founder Raphael Michel: “I knew nothing about the hearing aid industry”), run into serious problems with their technology and by the end of the chapter have failed to break into the market. Surely, if this book was written two years earlier, it would have featured Theranos, another company that tried and failed to upend its market with faulty tech. The founders profiled in the book don’t need to know anything about their businesses because all they are doing is making minor changes that retool their sectors for the internet age.
[...]
almost every single brand sells itself to a gigantic globe-swaddling corporation over the course of the book
[...]
Corporations––who today plow record-breaking sums into stock-buybacks instead of research and development––have outsourced innovation to the wealthy or wealthy-adjacent who have the time and resources to get the ideas off the ground on their own: a squad of elite MBAs who come up with the ideas, and the venture capitalists who choose which of these ideas get funded. The businesses that Ingrassia profiles are, by the end of the book, essentially the same as the ones they were fighting for market share in the beginning. The founders, of course, have gotten fabulously wealthy, but the book never convincingly establishes the “seismic shift” it promises to document.

That's kind of interesting in a twilight-of-the-system way, shifting "risk for the poors, profit for capital" up another socioeconomic notch. A couple of the "founders" had a lot of failed merch in their parent's garage before they found one that hit. I bet the real failures never get interviewed. It's MLM for the UMC!

Why aren't they just, you know, companies making and selling stuff? An article on Marker (Medium), "Why All the Warby Parker Clones Are Now Imploding", pretty much says that VC money requires growth rates that are very very unlikely in most markets. Warby Parker had fat nigh-monopolistic Luxottica to undercut. Mattresses were also a soft target, but it's easier to get into mail-order mattresses and now there's lots of competition undercutting. But lots of enterprises lost money per customer because they spent more on "customer acquisition" than they made per customer because VC wanted it. And then they ... owe the money back? Have spent it on the wrong things? I don't get that bit.

There must be some actual inventions or redesigns that keep a company alive... well, Robert Wang's Instant Pot. But he's an engineer and AI researcher, used that to invent something he wanted to use, and didn't take VC. (The Instant company has now been sold to a conglomerate.) Anything else? Chico bags? It seems hard to do this with design that isn't invention, you're likely to need patent protection or a factory to start with.
posted by clew at 8:18 PM on July 8, 2021